Diary & Evaluation of My Render Animation

Week 1

Animation Progress: Before the even the module had started, I spent over the holiday do various tasks I gave myself to work on my skill on Maya. At this point I’ve been working on making a model to practice my animation on and work on my rigging skills which is one of my weaknesses. My progression so far was just half of the chest and arm and hands. At this point it the most changeling part was trying to make the hands which were realistic enough but well design to do finger animation. By finding a better reference image for my model this time around I was able to understand where I went wrong with the body proportion during my last assignment. Even though I was slightly ahead with this assignment I still had to pick what was my animation was about and which emotion would express it best. At first I thought it was going to be simple but over a few days of day dreaming, my mind was still blanked. So I decide just to make the model and leave it for the following week to come.

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Week 2

Animation Progress: During the week before the next lecture/lab class, I was able to focus my attention to the model leg and shoe. There was one thing on my mind though; with my leg I wasn’t sure whether the knees from the model leg were correct. It seems to appear fine on smoothness one but when put on smoothness 3 it didn’t feel right in my mind. My opinion on this would have to wait as half way of the week I set my commitment on making the three animations. Reviewing the example video of the arrow, bouncing ball and pendulum, I felt I wanted to more to my version. However with the large number of student in the class I knew their always was a chance to for someone to do the exact idea so I brained stormed different twists and plots until I was happy with my idea. The making the of animations wasn’t too hard thanks to everything was well made and set up for example the arrow could bend and the setting to bounce the ball.

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Week 3

Animation Progress: At this point with the model I’ve been working on creating the head of the model. During this week I decided to make my animation to be about a person attempting to grab people attention but fails at it. I really wanted the person to be dress in a costume from a comic book series called Deadpool . From that I turned the head into a mask as seen below. This week work was just practicing our skills using maya graph by doing group tasks with people beside me. During this week we had to hand in our story boards and a calendar explaining how we would spend our time making this animation. I felt slightly unhappy with my storyboard because from seeing other student storyboard I was jealous at the drawing skill levels of some people was astonishing.

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Week 4

Animation Progress: During last week power point i never really knew how much our body shows the expression we feel. From this I mean how our shoulders, fingers chest and eye etc. It justify how we are feeling. It was really interesting after knowing this and then watching a dozen cartoon scene and I was picking up on how his body showed his emotion. I don’t really think how much effort animator put into their models to show this and distribute the weight. On the weekend I work on my model trying to connect my head to the body.

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Week 5

Animation Progress: At week 5 I had finally made a complete model. To be fair I really should have been at this point at week 3 but because of other assignment and sometimes due to socializing it set me back 2 weeks. But with this delay I was able to re-construct the hands, arms shoulders and hips to make them more natural. Within the lectures and lab we were assigned another scene to create about a rocket setting off. This rocket had a twist compared to the last rocket we did. It was intended to wait until it was signal to do so by a green light. Looking at example from previous student at university from Bradford it gave me a good idea how I use my creativity.

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Week 6

Animation Progress: With the rocket storyboard being work on I spent my spare time after keeping up with my other modules to mess about with the uv textures . At this moment of time I still need to practice my skill with uv texturing to a point it at a professional standard never the less If it did the job right now then why change it. My mind wonder after watching a few miming video for movement idea on Youtube something just hit me. Rather a comic book character I would change it into a mime. I did this because mime just use it body to create it surroundings weather if it picking up a box or pretending to be against a wall or pulling a rope. They over act their movement but just enough to make people around them know what their implying.

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Week 7

Animation Progress: During this week I took a break from working on the model and work on my background. I spent the week looking around the street thinking about does have a street have around it? Buildings, tree, people , lamps, bins and roads. I started to narrow down this and then progress to make the objects. I don’t know why I made it so well detailed maybe I got carried away or maybe because I didn’t really want to limit myself just to have a single street. After this module I really want to work on this street and transform it into a city with people moving about who knows it might be my final year project if I work hard enough.

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Week 8

Animation Progress: During the lecture we were asked to make a walk cycle. This isn’t interesting but what was that got my attention was a pdf about a person called Richard Whilliams. This pdf was from a book called animator a survival guide. Within this book had a full description of how to animate a character and make sure you think about things like weight disruption, hips positions etc. After the lecture, I worked again on my street and making sure it just about perfect so I could just concentrate on my model. As well as the street I made a sky background which slowly moves in the background.

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Week 9

Animation Progress: With the street background just about complete, I went back onto working on my model. Making finally adjustment to the head chest and arms I was glad it just about finish. All that was left was to was to add a mouth into my model because i was wanted to wait until getting closer to the end so i could work on it more and mess about with the lips to create blends shapes representing his emotion. After 1-2 hours working on this i focus my attention on the texturing of the mime. This is a note to my self i need to practice my uv texturing after this modules is done. I can't fully grasp this yet but i know it will be something very useful in the future should i have to work with maya later on in my career. Only having done half of my module texture all that was left was to rig my character and paint weight it.

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Week 10

Animation Progress: I Didn't do much in this week because i was be hide with our assignments so i had to focus my time on them. Because my last modules gave me so much problems because of the rig i decided to use a rig from a free model the link before is the site from where i got it from.

 

www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/ban...

 

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Week 11

Animation Progress: After finally texturing, rigging my character and paint weighting I could finally start my animations. It was annoying that I couldn’t move my hand/fingers more than I could, otherwise I could animate my hands better and show the weight being applied on to the hands. For the duration of lab time in this week Jason was able to give me a few pointers he was glad I was moving around in the class to try and understand how to animate my mime but at the same time he said you’re not showing the weights of his arms and shoulders snapping because of the invisible and we can’t tell when the end of the box ends. So I decided to create a poly square and place it around my rig to help me visualize how and where the hand should stop. The section which I found most difficult was the walk cycle. Maybe I was trying to be too technical and key frame unnecessary movement over long spaces between keying and when I try to scale it down, it caused more problem with the execute of the walk.

 

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Week 12

Animation Progress: Finally once all of the mime animation was complete I was happy to import it into my scene. It only came to my attention from when I import the model into my street I found out i didn’t take something into consideration. The proportion of the model and street and model wasn’t exactly in fact the model was three times bigger than the street. This cause a massive set back of time grouping all the objects from the street and rescaling and move them into the right place. I couldn’t move/scale the mime because of the skin- rig which meant I would need to delete the fix sets key that controlled the mime position on the scene. After overcoming this small problem I set my attention on making the second person to walk pass the mime and ignore him causing him to be sad this was the aim of my project. If I had to be honest I had forget to make another model for my scene and with time and my moral slowly being drained I thought to use the same model but a different texture. After retexturing the model and create a new walk cycle, I imported him into the street and in sync him to walk in at the right time. The camera itself was meant to be dead front of him but instead I change this to get a better angle. Once I was happy with the light and the render setting I set it to render I just sat back and though about everything I’ve done in the last 12 weeks.

 

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What ive learn most about this module is that as an animator/game designer we can’t just create an animation/ cinematic without able to show the emotion be hide the character. We are not making this just to show we have a good understanding of the body anatomy but that these motion show a mood and that the people seeing this can understand this if not relate to them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Evaluation of My Render Animation

 

The animation that I chose to use is that of a Mime doing an act on the streets. The emotion I chose for my animation to show is sadness. In the animation the mime carries out several different actions like touching an imaginary wall and opening and walking through a door. A passer-by then walks past but ignores his act which makes the mime sad. Looking at the final animation I can see several good and bad points about my rendered animation.

 

 

 

Good Points:

First of all the model has rendered quite smoothly not showing that many mistakes or at least they are not too noticeable. Secondly the character is easily recognised as a mime doing an act in the street. Also I have even added a second character model as a passer-by which is extra effort. Furthermore my character is doing quite a lot of movements using his whole body and they are done without any major mistakes and are easy enough to see as actions used by a mime. Additionally the background of the animation is quite detailed too and is easily recognisable as a town centre in a city. The texture of the walls and buildings are quite realistic too and even has a feel of being winter. Finally the texture of the glass is realistic showing a reflection of light at different angles.

 

 

 

 

Bad Points:

First of all the there is a slight mistake in the background in which the lighting near the furthest lamppost is reflecting at two different angles. This means there is a mistake with the lighting. Really the lighting should be coming from the lamps because it is night but instead it is coming from all over as if the sun is out. Also the actual movement of the model is not that smooth so it is sometimes hard to recognise what he is doing. This is made worse by the movement being so fast. On top of this only one camera angle was used from a distance so it is difficult to see the facial expression of the mime. Instead we see the emotion in his body language and gestures. Another bad point is that there is no movement from the fingers of the hands models. They stay in the same position so it is not very realistic. Additionally the bucket he is using for money is slightly wrong as the dollar sign stuck on it is too low and almost looks like it is slightly on the pavement. Moreover the passer-by looks like another mime and walks like my mime model. This can be slightly confusing for watchers. Finally the pavement that the mime is on should be elevated like the pavement on the other side. This makes it harder to see where the road is in the animation.

In conclusion I think my animation is quite good for its purpose which is to show an emotion. Although the movement is not smooth and has some minor mistakes you can clearly see that my model and his act is that of a mime. Also you can see by the last gesture and expression that he is clearly saddened by the passer-by ignoring him. Therefore my finished animation fits its purpose.

Done