Mixamo

http://www.mixamo.com/editor/new/1896

Mixamo is a website I found which let's you view free and paid 3D animations. Although you can download them and edit them, my main use for the website is looking up specific animations (such as a running jump) and then using it as reference for my own character's running jump. On most of the animations you can change different aspects of them, such as the speed, arm/leg positions, framerates, and many more (see the link above for example).

After doing a few searching on it, I've found useful animations for walking, running, jumping, falling, and just about anything that I might get stuck on with my own project.

Using free rigs

Over the last few days I've been trying out two different rigs and also been overcoming many problems with Autodesk Maya. I've started to realise how difficult it is to learn a whole new piece of software, and that I'm now very much against learning to rig as well as animate.

The main thing I've learnt is how important it is to set up the software correctly before starting. Although there are different ways to key in frames in Maya, I found that using stepped tangents works best for me. It allows you to block in key poses at the start, and then animate the transitions between them afterwards using the graph editor, instead of  going through constantly to check the animation; this also makes it easier to work from a storyboard.

Here are a couple of the rigs I've tried out, both of which were recommended by 11 Second Club (http://www.11secondclub.com/resources), a website which hosts monthly character animation competitions.

Rig 1 - Moom

Moom was the first rig I tried, as I read some good reviews online and I like the art style of it. He's basically a cartoony character who you can squash and stretch into many different forms, making him versatile for comedic animations. It comes with a custom GUI which is used to select each point of the rig, rather than having controls in the main view.

Setting up a few poses with Moom

The two downsides I found with Moom was that the custom GUI wasn't fully compatible with Maya 2014 (which is what I'm using), and that it was difficult to move his limbs in realistic ways because they stretched out and never retained their original proportions.


Rig 2 - Max

Max is an improvement over Moom for me, as he is easier to move around and his proportions always stay in check. The controls all work in the main view which allows for easier movement, and he also has good, simple facial animation tools so that if I did decide to put some focus on the face, this model would make that easy enough.

Making Max jump a bit

The only concern I could think of with Max is that he doesn't fit into my current story idea, but that doesn't seem too important as my story is not the focus for marking.


Rig 3 - Eleven

Eleven is a rig made by a group of contributors to 11SecondClub, and I feel that it is a perfect balance between the two rigs above. It's not extremely cartoony and un-realistic like the Moom rig, but it also has a good style and isn't as boring as the Max rig. The controls are very easy to use, and within minutes of editing it I was creating a variety of different emotions.

Making a scared run

Refining my job search

After getting feedback from my first proposal draft, I realised that I need to do more work on job searching. The problem was that my jobs weren't very relevant to what I want to achieve, and that I was focusing too much on what I can't do, rather than what I can do.

SAIC
http://jobs.saic.com/job/Huntsville-3D-Character-Animator-Job-AL-35801/15560600/?feedId=4&utm_source=Indeed

Blizzard Entertainment
https://blizzard.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?job=47480

Ubisoft
http://jobsearch.naukri.com/job-listings-Ubisoft-3D-Animator-UBISOFT-Entertainment-India-Pvt-Ltd--Pune-3-to-6-270513001307?xz=1_0_69&xo=&xp=3&xid=138296099781190400&qjt=&qp=3d+character+animator&id=&f=-270513001307


Some of the key requirements include:

• Skills in animating human figures

This is the main skill I set out the learn, as I want to be able to create realistic human movement.

• Understanding of human anatomy, skeletal structure and musculature

Something I should research and learn more about, as it could be useful for understanding the limits of human movements.

• Self-motivation

Although I feel I'm already quite self-motivated, the dissertation should be a huge test of that.

• Knowledge of the principles of animation

This is something which I've already been resaerching, and will continue to do so (see 3D Art Essentials post)

• Able to work in team-based environment

Although not something I can easily learn from a solo dissertation, I feel that the negotiations between me and lecturers is a good example of a team-based environment, as I'm discussing and working based on others' feedback.

3D Art Essentials: Chapter 8 "Animation - It's alive!"

These are my notes from reading chapter 8 of 3D Art Essentials by Ami Chopine. I have included notes from nearly all of the subjects she talks about, but have only included bullet points that are useful to / interest me. I have also highlighted important parts which I will need to remember especially for my animation.

There is a practical task at the end of the chapter which I will do in another blog post later this week.


The Twelve Basic Principles of Animation

• 'The purpose of animation is to serve the story - to capture images of life, and in the process communicate to others, even if it just means giving them a thrill ride'.
• Animators at Walt Disney Studio wanted animation to feel real and allow audience to respond to character and story.
• They developed a set of animation guidelines which are still used to this day, though modified for computer animation.

Squash and stretch

• This is the most important principle.
• Bouncing ball is an example: as it hits ground it squashes, but its volume must stay the same, and it therefore stretches.
• Squashing and stretching give weight to objects.
• Isn't limited to balls and tummies, and collision with floors or objects is not required.
• These movements happen in facial expressions, and any other kind of motion.
• Bodies have weight and respond to gravity, they must retain their volume.

Anticipation

• Iron Man crouches and places hand on ground, and you know he's about to spring into action; this is an example of anticipation.
• It helps audience clue in that something will happen next.
• Anything which invites audience to watch what happens next is anticipation.
• If there's no anticipation, it can surprise the audience, if nothing happens, it's an anticlimax.
• Understanding this can help move story forward, set up comedic effects, or startle audience.

Staging

• Art of communcating idea clearly through imagery, be it personality, a clue, a mood, foreshadowing, etc.
• Is done with how character, objects and surroundings are presentated.
• Don't have anything unnecessary in scenes, or it will lose focus.
• Not real life, it's life through a filter; it is emotion, conflict, resolution.
• With computer animation, you have control over everything in scene and character, expressions, gestures; use this to your advantage.
• Staging can also be set in postproduction, with lighting and colour adjustments. 

Straight-Ahead Action and Pose to Pose

• Styles of drawing your animation
• Straight-Ahead is animating frame by frame, it's good for dynamic action and spontaneity
• It can be bad because when hand-drawn, proportions and volume are lost, and you may end up at a dead end.
• Pose to pose let's animator carefully plan animation, draw key poses, then fill in movement between.
• Computer animation makes pose to pose natural, computer fills in movement between key poses.
• Motion capture and dynamic simulations are straight-ahead action.

Follow through and Overlapping Action

• When things like hair, clothing and loose flesh continue moving after character stops, it's called follow through.
• Could also be when characters move and things must catch up, or the expressive reaction of character to their action.
• Overlapping action is when things move at different rates, ie head turning whilst arm is moving

Slow In and Slow Out

• Action never stops instantly, or it's too robotic.
• Action starts slowly, speeds up, then ends slowly.
• Leave out slow in and slow out for surprise or comedy gags.
• Graph editor is good for creating this motion.

Arcs

• People, creatures and sometimes objects move in an arc.
• Try waving arm / hand, you can trace the arc it moves in.

Secondary Action

• Hair, clothes and background leaves are secondary actions to main character.
• They can be good for setting the stage.
• Can also show personality, such as how a character moving their arms while walking.
• If it distracts from main action, you need to eliminate or rethink it.

Timing

• Physical action is making sure the right actions occur at the right pace, in consistence to laws of physics.
• Cruise ship going to take longer to get under way than small yacht.
• Story timing is each shot, scene, and act; a part of both acting and storytelling.

Exaggeration

• Taking reality and making it more extreme.
• Realistic action and visuals fall flat when illustrated.
• Can be used for comedy, superheores, portraying mood, etc.
• Body, head shape, expressions, action, aspects of setting, storyline, anything can be exaggerated.

Solid Drawing

• Important to know where each muscle is placed before can be bulged out.
• Reference real life.
• Even if just interested in 3D art, take drawing classes and learn proportion, composition, perspective.

Appeal

• Characters need to appeal to audience.
• If not sympathetic, villains can look cool.
• Has to do with features you give them, clothing, facial expressions, the way they act towards others.
• Symmetry is considered beutiful by people.
• Features that parallel the young (large head to body, large eyes, get more sympathy).
• For less sympathy, go opposite, with small beady eyes and narrow head.
• Must be believable, must be clear, audience must care about characters.

Keyframing

• Images that make up motion picture when sequenced are called frames.
• Typical framerates are 24 to 30 fps
• In 3D animation, computer renders each frame based on models, lighting, background etc and how you direct their movement.
• With keyframing, you define start, middle and ending positions and attributes of objects.
• Example of Susuan throwing a ball: start frame is when ball is in cocked hand, ending keyframe is when arm is stretched forward.
• Computer figures out frames that go between the key poses.
• New keyframes would need to be added to show the balls arc.

Animating with Graphs

• When you place keyframe, this will become a point on an animation graph.
• For the x axis of the graph you have the timeline, for y axis, the numeric value of object's attributes and position are shown.
• Computer interpolates between frames, and animation graph is where you see the values of the interpolation,  drawn as lines of curves.
• There are three main types of interpolation.
• Stepped interpolation don't change until next keyframe, resulting in instant change from one to next.
• Linear interpolation connects keyframes by lines, giving smoother but still jerky movement.
• Curved interpolation connects points by curves, movement can be eased in and out to change speed.
• Manipulating curves on graphs is good for more exact animation, but should be used in conjunction with 3D view animation.

Motion Capture

• Motion capture lets a performer drive the animation of a character.
• Actor wears suit covered in lots of markers, sometimes on face for facial animation.
• Multiple cameras film them acting, then translate it into 3D space using markers.
• Rig must match up with actor well enough to give accurate data.
• Problems such as interacting limbs, body and face different from actors, and plain errors in capture.
• Animators must clean this up as well as exaggerate or enhance some poses, making it a collaboration between actors and animators.

Facial Animation

• There are six universal expressions: happiness, surprise, disgust, fear, sadness, and anger.
• Study expressions and get them right to avoid the uncanny valley, where expressions are close but not quite realistic, making the audience feel revulsion.
• Rig should involve deformation, skeleton rig with the jaw, good underlying topology.
• Use facial rig to create expressions called morph targets, which use sliders to move between two morphs.
• For talking, the sound of speech can be broken into phonemes.
• The shapes of jaw, tongue and mouth must make for phonemes can be called visemes.
• Problem with visemes is that they blend together during speech.
• Using sliders for morph targets and keying blended viseme in, can achieve more realistic speech.
• Important for mouth animation to sync to recorded speech.
• As well as speech track, you will have each sound plotted out to each frame.

Automation

• Lots of motion in animation can be automated.
• You can link any kinds of characteristics of objects to each other.
• The position of a switch can determine if light in the scene is on.
• As a cart moves forward, the wheels can turn at a rate which matches distance travelled to circumference of the wheel, making the wheel turn in time.
• Can also add animation without keyframing with dynamics and scripting.

Fence-Post Errors

• When filming at 24fps, a frame is captured over 1/24th of a second.
• In computer animation a rendered image only represents a point in time with 1/24th of a second between each frame.
• Can create fence-post errors, like when time is no longer moving forward so computer does not add motion blur where it needs to.
• Usually up to animator to correct such problems.
• Frames should be thought of as periods of time, not points in time.

Animation Workflow

• First few steps of a good workflow happen away from the computer.
• Should have a script by this point, may have a storyboard.
• During brainstorming, gather reference videos and pictures.
• Act out the motions yourself and get a feel for how it should go.
• A good animator is an actor who uses computer for their performance.
• Draw quick thumbnail sketches of ideas for poses, emphasis on quick as they are disposable.
• Brainstorming means quantity, not quality.
• Draw a pose, if it doesn't work, throw it out.
• These are key poses, and you need to consider timing of poses.
• Can arrange poses on exposure sheet (or 'dope sheet').
• Exposure sheet is used to write instructions for each frame, which gives a rough idea of timing.
• Once complete, get back to computer, take rigged model, and keyframe all poses.
• Work with heavy things first: legs, torso
• Work your way from main parts and big motions to tiny motions and facial expressions.
• Once all key poses are present, do a preview render whilst in stepped mode.
• Look at the timing and refine the pose positions.
• Character moves into poses at the same time, looking robotic.
• Could create more poses, the traditional method, gives more visual control and may save time with organization.
• Other method is modify poses using animation graph, to offset parts of the model.
• Don't render each section as you progress, refine whole shot then do another test render.
• Though most work is on refinement, if others can't see what's wrong, then it's fine.
• Some production houses have high quantity output, not quality; though something isn't good enough for you, it can be good enough for them.
• Most animating will be done with low poly versions of characters, as 3D modellers aren't finished; tweaks could be deleted and redone when final version is imported.
• Don't lose sight of the art, even if computers can do stuff for you, you may want to do it yourself; the computer has no heart or even a brain.

Rethinking dissertation idea

Aero

I'm considering changing my idea so that it uses a humanoid figure instead of the original phone-character. There are multiple reasons for this:

. Having a humanoid would be more useful when it comes to getting employed, as it's a more versatile skill which can be applied to a lot more applications.

. It would be easier to find a good model/rig online to use for the animation, which is one of the concerns I've had from the start.

. There are more resources offline and online which could help me animate a humanoid, which as tutorials and books.

My main concern about doing this is that it would be a lot harder than an imaginary character. Not only are there more body parts to move around with each block in the animation, but it also means that I have to be a lot more precise with the realism of my animation; nobody could look at an animated phone character and say with certainty that "If phones had arms and legs, they wouldn't move like that!", whereas it's very easy to tell when a humanoid figure looks unnatural in its movement.

I might also look into the rigging of characters and include a secondary focus on the rigging of a simple character, as there are a lot of unrigged which are free to use online. I've done some rigging before, but I'm not sure if I actually want to be marked on it or not.

Using the Graph Editor to make a bouncing ball

After watching a couple of videos on YouTube which explain the Graph Editor in Maya and what it does, I've managed to make a short animation which shows off my understanding. At first I thought it looked extremely easy, but I soon found that tinkering with the timing of each frame takes a long time to perfect.

How to Create a Ball Bounce Animation Part 1 and 2 by 'AnimationTuts'

Bouncing Ball Animation Tutorial with Maya Parts 1 to 8 by Nash Lin

Here is a screenshot I took of the graph editor in my own animation (click to enlarge), which shows the 3 axis which were modified in order to move and rotate my ball.

X Rotation, Y and Z Translate

The video below is a playblast from my animation, which has my bouncing ball with a basic checker pattern applied to it to show rotation.

Getting accustomed to the Maya UI

I've been using Autodesk Maya for a while, trying to get used to the UI and learning how it's different from 3DS Max. I've read through a few pages on the official Maya tutorial on the Autodesk website (which is extremely useful, and I will be going back to it a lot throughout the year).

I've found that although Maya has a lot of the same functionality as 3DS Max, the placement of all the side tools are different, as well as the toolbar layout at the top. It also features a lot more functionality for animation than 3DS Max, in that the animation toolbar setting allows for a greater range of control as well as making most of the tools easier to find.

There are always a set of menus to the left that are available at all times, and then there are the menus which are subjective to whatever area you have selected.

Job research

I've been looking for job postings which relate to 3D animation (and in particular, character animation). After browsing the web for a while, I've found a few which would interest me; it seems, though, that they usually require other skills alongside the actual animation (such as After Effects, Motion Graphics). The main requirement they have are 'experience', which is the main thing I'm planning on gaining this year.

A lot of the jobs I'm finding seem to be part-time or freelance projects, which could be good for my first few jobs, as it would give lots of experience in short bursts of time. 

I'm fairly certain that I won't gain enough skills to get my ideal job directly after uni, but with an extra year or two of expanding my portfolio by myself, I should be comfortable enough with my skillset to get a good job.

I may update the blog later on with even more relevant jobs as I find them, and discuss the requirements they look for.

Character Animator - London

http://www.productionbase.co.uk/film-tv-jobs/animator-10.13.0051145?utm_source=Indeed&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Indeed

This job looks very relevant to my skills, as they ask for characters 'in a charming cartoon style', which is precisely the kind of character animation I'm interested in. From the looks of it, they also require the design of the cartoon, though I'm not sure if this includes the actual modelling / rigging of it.


Lockwood Publishing Ltd - Nottingham

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/jobs/lockwood-publishing-ltd/uk-and-europe/animator-id64612

From researching the company, I have found out that they mainly create content for Playstation Home. A lot of the work appears to be around character animations and modelling for virtual products. They ask for a lot of qualities I'm not currently focusing on, such as rigging, the weighting of assets, and 3D motion capture. They do, however, ask for relevant skills which I want to learn, such as an understanding of posing, spacing and timing.


3D Rigger / Animator for Game Studio

https://www.odesk.com/o/jobs/job/Rigger-Animator-for-Game-Studio-3DS-MAX_~01848f74674c16dfd7/

Although this company is looking for 3DS Max users instead of Maya, I believe my learnt skills would be easily adaptable. They use an interesting system in which everything is taken care of online through Dropbox.

Refining my dissertation idea further

Over the last week I've been thinking about not only the vague idea of what I want to show with my dissertation, but the specific elements of animation that I want to learn and be marked on.

I want to show a series of very expressive emotions through a limited model / rig. The perfect example of this is the Pixar lamp; specifically speaking, the animation 'Luxo Jr' produced by Pixar in 1986. It's a two-minute short film with two lamps as the protagonists, one big and one small. The animation clearly shows different emotions, or what the lamps are "thinking", without having any spoken dialogue. 



My favourite part in the animation is when the small lamp accidentally deflates the ball he was playing with, and his movements suddenly slow down as he jumps away in a sad sulk, only to be back to his energetic self moments later as he quickly jumps back with a much larger ball.

I want to take it one step further, and show a a few different emotions in short bursts throughout my animation (say, 10 seconds each.)  As my story isn't going to be marked, I can arrange it in a way which is practical to my animation; I will write a list of emotions I want to show, and then plan the story around them.

My current emotion list is as follows:
1. Panic / Desperation
2. Fear
3. Relief / Hope
4. Excited / Panic
5. Joy

I will expand on these 5 emotional states once I've got a better plan for my storyboard, and I plan to have a rough draft up this week.

Academic readings for dissertation

Although I haven't looked very far into 3D animation in the past, I understand the basics from my knowledge of 2D animation. I have decided to read a few books which will hopefully help me learn some more advanced techniqures for 3D animation, as well as the specific knowledge of character animations. I also want to learn how to express emotions through the animation without having to use sound. 

 '3D Art Essentials : The Fundamentals of 3D Modeling and Animation' by Ami Chopine

This book was recommended to me by Daniel Leaf on my course, and is apparently very useful for teaching the basic fundamentals of animation. I will primarily focus on the chapters about animation as opposed to the ones about modeling and animations.

'Character Emotion in 2D and 3D Animation' by Les Pardew
I don't know a lot about this book, but the subject sounds interesting and it should hopefully be useful for my dissertation.

These are the two books I will start with reading, but I plan to do more research into different areas soon.