Character and Narrative: Strike a Pose... Let's Take it Further!

After completing my 5 poses for the Strike a Pose study task - along with an additional one I did for fun - I was feeling quite ambitious and curious to see how well I'd be able to animate the rig. So before I changed my mind, I opened up one of the videos I had had recorded for me for one of my original poses and got to work at animating it.

Video Reference of Jump

It took me a long time to get my bearings back in terms of animating and how to do it. After a while of pressing buttons and changing settings, I remembered how to set key frames but I was still unsure on how they worked on a rig. I had a few attempts where I had tried animating the jump, but something had gone wrong along the way and the limbs seemed to collapse on themselves due to either positioning them incorrectly or missing out key frames. In the end I decided to start with the hips. I positioned them accordingly and made sure I was happy with the timing for the sequence before I then moved onto the limbs, then going back at the end to add finishing touches such as the hand positioning, chest rotations and facial expressions. 

First Attempt at Animating Model

For a first attempt - and to say I came in knowing next to nothing about animating this thing - I don't think I've done a bad job. There are somethings that definitely need tweaking, for instance making the heels push up more so there is a greater illusion of force and adding ease in/out for some of the key frames, but on the whole I think the sequence looks okay. I'm definitely happy that I gave it a go, as now I have a bit more experience for when it comes to animating my own models and I also know what things I could be capable of. I also know what things to avoid and to check. For instance, I only realised at the end of animating that the playback speed wasn't set at "real time" so my key frames have been set up as if it was playing at around 60FPS. 

Character and Narrative: Strike Some More Poses!

Considering I was having fun with the Strike a Pose task, I decided to recreate an additional pose. I went for another happy emotion, and worked from a still from a video of me striking a pose to top all other poses. 

Video Reference

Additional Happy Pose

I've found that now I have experimented with lighting further in this project, that I find the tool easier to use. Also, the recap session we had previously for Maya helped me massively as it pointed out shortcuts that I had forgotten about or was not aware of, for instance pressing the 7 key allows you to preview where the light is going to shine. This meant that I could know for sure what the render preview was going to look like, rather than having to guess like I had in the past.

Character and Narrative: Strike a Pose!

In today's seminar we learnt about the importance of acting in animation. Even if there is no dialogue or sound, you can still understand a character's emotions through the portrayal of their body language and expressions. These factors can also tell you a lot about that character's personality, and Disney did an especially good job of this in Big Hero 6. In this particular character test, you can see just how much the personalities differ from how they walk into the room.

Big Hero 6 Character Test

For the Strike a Pose study task, we were asked to select 5 emotions from a provided list and consider how we could make our practice model depict these emotions. The ones I decided to go for are happiness, fear, timidity, pain and confusion, and here are my results:

(Please excuse my face)

Happiness

Fear

Shy

Pain

Confusion

I'm really happy with how this task has gone, even if I did feel a bit uncomfortable performing my poses at University (hence why I resorted to taking photographs in the privacy of my room at home, please ignore the mess). Despite this, I really enjoyed recreating the poses, and think I have done a good job at portraying the emotions well considering it is a first attempt. After the success of this task, I'm looking forward to finding out if and how I can take this further.

Telling Tales: Considering the Narrative

Me and Emma thought it would be best to narrow down an idea on the narrative before we designed our characters. This way we would be able to design suitable characters to slot into the story. We knew we may want to create two characters that are opposites of each other to tie in with the "Opposites Attract" title, so we bared that in mind when we considered the story.

Brainstorming

After discussing different ideas and complications for a while, we found ourselves coming up with two ideas that we find aren't overly ambitious yet have the potential to produce good animation. We got there by discussing how two different characters could interact with each other and what it is they could be doing. There weren't that many things we could think of for this that would be suitable for our brief, despite having good visions in our heads. This meant that we had to move on to consider the other titles we had not yet thought of.

In the end the two ideas that we are considering are:

- Road to Nowhere: A small energetic character that tries to get a taller, less enthusiastic character to go on a journey to "Nowhere" with them.

- Leap of Faith/Happy Days: A parent teaching their child how to walk.


We feel that both of these ideas are eventful enough to last for a whole minute, and present the opportunity to focus on the movement of the models that we shall make, without being overly ambitious.

Telling Tales: Initial Ideas

When delivered with the brief and title choices to base our narrative on, I immediately had a few ideas that I think could have potential if they were explored further. I liked the idea of the "Opposites Attract" title, and I think this could be a good way to focus on the characters we produce. We could have two very different characters and base the animation on how they interact with one another, which would mean would be focusing on their movements and personality. 

We think that the Opposites Attract title could also open up potential for the characters to be quite quirky and comedic depending on what it is they are doing or how they are interacting with one another.

After having the Maya session where we worked with the pre-made models, we have also decided that it would be a good idea if the characters were relatively simplistic to make our lives easier when it comes to actually making them. We would also like to avoid making them too realistic/human-like for this same reason as well as we would like to avoid the "Uncanny Valley" phenomenon, instead we would like to keep the characters simple yet give them few human characteristics. This will be explored further once we have a better idea of narrative. 

Character and Narrative: Playing With Models

In today's tutorial we recapped how to use Maya as a large majority of us had been out of practice over the summer holidays. Once we had got to grips with the basics, we set up a new project featuring a pre-made rigged model that we could play around with. We did this to get a general idea of how the model was going to work and how they could be positioned. 

I found that the model was fairly easy to move, but the character could easily be warped if some of the positions were pushed to the extreme. An example of what I mean is when you push the hips down, because of how the joints and limbs were connected, the legs would bend as they naturally would if you were squatting. However, if you were to continue to push the hips down, the legs would warp and collapse on themselves creating an unnatural stance. This is something that I shall have to look out for when it comes to making my own model, as I will want to avoid these faults in order to make a fluid, natural looking animation. 

Positioning the Model

Once we had discovered how the model was going to work we briefly looked at UV mapping, and how we could use the map to colour our characters. Here I coloured over a copy of the map in Photoshop and used the JPEG as a material for the object.

Assigning a Material to the Model

I thoroughly enjoyed the session today. It has made me excited to get started on my own characters, but at the same time really nervous as I have the feeling it's going to be really complicated to recreate. 

Bring it on. 

I'm Back Baby!

Well, it's been a long four months but I'm finally back and ready to start work for my second year of animation.

I'm not sure what to think about my first brief; We are required to work in pairs to create two 3D characters on Maya and create a narrative for them based on a selection of title choices. On paper this seems like a good opportunity to be creative without being constraint too much, but in reality we're going to be working with Maya and I already know it's going to be a massive challenge, a challenge I am willing to accept none the less. I do like the idea of working with 3D programs so I'm happy that we get the opportunity to explore it in more detail, but let's see how it goes.

I'm also unsure of how well I'm going to be able to work as a pair. It's not something I have ever done before so I'm interested to see how well it will go. I am quite optimistic that it will be a success as I have managed to pair up with someone who has a similar work ethic to myself, so I can't imagine there is going to be many clashes in opinion when it comes to this brief.

Again, let's see how it goes.