Task 3: Two Character Dialogue Piece

For Task 3, the assignment we were given was to animate a two character dialogue piece to a provided audio.

We received this piece at the start of April and the Task was to produce the piece as part of this months 11 Second Club competition using the audio they provided, as it was an audio for two characters.

You can preview the audio on their site: 

www.11secondclub.com

Even though I only properly began working on the piece today, we did have a filming session in the green room at the start of the month where we filmed some footage in groups after discussing our individual ideas.

My idea for the task was to have my two characters in a bar, with one guy feeling the need to talk about himself decides to strike up a conversation with a guy sitting on his own just trying to have a quiet drink. An alternative idea was to have the guy talking to the barman, but I decided to go with my original plan.

After setting up a basic bar scene yesterday I filmed some extra reference for both characters and then began blocking it out today. 

For this piece I also decided to use a different rig to previous animations just for a change and to see what other rigs have to offer.

The rig I'm using is the Dee rig, produced by Manuel Sierra and modified by my classmate Remi to look like the new version for Maya by Victor Hugo.

So far I really like the rig, probably more than the Max rig. The controls it offers are great, especially for the feet and face... I have yet to try any facial animation with it though. The only thing I do miss from the Max rig is the hands. 

As I haven't my initial block yet, here is a screenshot of my scene:

The picture in the background can be found HERE. 

I'm not sure who produced it in order to provide credit but I have contacted someone to try and find out so we shall see. IF necessary I shall remove it.

Mime In Progress

Now that the fear animation is done and dusted I've been spending more time on the Mime animation.

Since I posted my block I made another pass over the animation adding in the breakdowns and adding the audio:

After getting feedback on this I made another pass over it to refine the timing and make it faster and snappier. Luckily I have the audio broken down into separate sound bytes and added in separately using Max's ProSound which makes adjusting it to suit the animation a lot easier!

I'm now working on the Facial animation, focusing on 500 frames at a time and going over each bit continuously for the mouth, eyebrows and eyes until I'm happy before moving onto the next set. As the animation is now at 1500 frames, I'm around 2/3 of the way through.

The only part I haven't worked on yet is the pupils aka where his eyes are focusing. I intend to do a separate pass of this when I'm done with the body animation as if i alter the head then I'll only have to make to alter it again anyway.

So here's where I'm at after the last pass:

I plan to finish the rest of the face off tomorrow before work and then Friday I'll be moving onto the spline animation for the body.

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I've also noticed that it's been awhile since I posted an animated short on here, so here's one I watched recently:

I really enjoyed this, it has a really attractive visual style. I loved the tree!! Actually I generally like trees.... I find them interesting O_o The character designs are great too. I also watched some additional videos on the making of this film looking at how they composited the shots, so many different passes for the various lighting aspects. Makes me want to learn so much more! I'm also intrigued about animating animals...

Fear Final & Thoughts

As I'm calling this animation done now I though I'd make a post of the final version for this module and also talk a bit about what I learnt while making it.

After finishing the last module, I made a list of things I'd like to learn more about in order to develop my skills further, which can be seen in this post here. The main issue I really wanted to get to grips with was the curve editor in order to understand more about 'splining' so I could really enhance my animation further.

I decided to while doing this animation that I was going to play around with the curve editor more in order to get a much better understanding of exactly how it works and how I could really exploit it to make my animation look a lot better.

Whereas I really haven't reached the peak of where I want to be with my animating I can definately say that through the process of this task I have definately achieved my goal of understanding how the curve editor and splining works and I no longer feel wary and overwhelmed when opening up the graph editor and seeing loads of curves for all the body parts. I actually found it really enjoyable and got engrossed when i started playing around with the curves for each part of the body and watching the effects it had on the animation.

I also played around with it by experimenting with simple animation on a basic box shape which really emphasised much more clearly what altering the various curves has on the animation eg. eases in from point a to b etc. 

I still think more experimentation is needed and if I had more time I would like to have made a few more passes over this piece to polish some parts of it further, but as there's now only around 2 weeks left for the other 2 tasks then I don't think it would be wise.

While looking at this list, I can also say I understand more about FK and IK and prefer animating with IK after my experiences with the Dance animation. I've found that I don't seem to have problems with gimbal errors when using IK.

So yes, I'm definately pleased with this piece. I reckon it's one of, in not my best piece of work so far! I'm hoping the next two animations for this module with be just as good or even better!

Fear Development

During last week, I focused on this piece to bring it up to a pretty finished state. I went through a few passes tightening up and inbetweens and adding any extras, putting in the needed sound effects, adding some eye animation and fixing up my curves in the curve editor and adding in any needed overlapping/follow through actions.

I took the latest version into class yesterday to get some feedback, which I'm pleased to say was all positive! The only comments were to remove one sound and maybe speed up the run across the landing to the door. Taking the comments on board I've sped up the run as much as I can and removed the unnecessary sound from the last version. I'm currently rendering this version to see what I think. I may attempt tweaking the curves for more speed too if it's still not looking as I'd like.

Anyway, here are the various stages of the piece's progress up to this point.

Fixed up the run and creep, still blocked,no audio yet.

Added audio, sped up the run, focused in on the first half of the animation to improved it.

Focused in on the end of the animation and worked on the curves for all sections of the body. (Still haven't finished the eye animation in this version).

Next post I make for this one will likely be the final version! Most of my attention is now being directed at getting Task 2 done so I can move onto Task 3.