CAGD 493 sem2

Final Post and Reflection

Goals of Semester

My main goal of this semester was to try hard to make quality animations that I can be proud to add to my portfolio. I was thinking to make over the course of two weeks one or two animations that mainly focused on demonstrating action animation. While looking into what made a portfolio for animation look nice, I found that simple parkour animations and expressive action animations looked pleasing enough to add to a portfolio. Another focus was to make the animations look as clean as possible. This would be achieved through making simple and quick movement animations, and not clouding up my time with something too difficult or too many projects.

My Work Based on Goals
The two animations that I created were based on my original goals, and I think I met them fairly. I really wanted to practice animation and movement action more than visually pleasing effects. I like how they turned out, I put a lot of effort into making the animation look clean.

What Worked and What Didn’t

What worked was keeping it simple and following references closely. I think I succeeded at observing body movement from references and the way that the chest and legs were positioned in relation to a reference that I either made or found online. Critiques were also very helpful in spotting things that I would not have noticed from looking at the animation for so long. Examples of this may have been timing on the parkour animation, the end of the parkour animation where the head moved but not the body, how the arms of the parkour animation would react differently from how I originally placed them, the problems having to do with floating from when I added a floor to the jumping animation, and how convincing a trip or slip would have been from the jumping animation.
These animations are not perfect. I think I could have of course cleaned up the animations more and pushed more of the poses. Especially for the jumping animation, not everything in that animation could have been possibly referenced so I had to stray from any reference material at some point, mainly the part where she uses her magical arms to recover from a fall. This also hurt the animation in the way that I did not really know what to do most of the time with the big arms, so I mainly used them for inertia looking purposes.   

Do Differently

Next time, I would make a more clear animation intention for both of the animations.
For the parkour animation, I should have looked at more reference of people running to deal with problems from the beginning run and tweaked the timing more for the running part.
For the jumping animation, I think it could have used more polishing and more control over where the hair might end up. The hair was always difficult to get right. I also would have added more anticipation to the falling over part of the animation, like spacing out waving her arms a bit more to emphasize the fact that she lost her balance.

Post 14: Jump Spline5

This week, I focused on making the jumping animation look its best. Firstly, I cleaned up any keys that had any parts of the body such as hands or feet in awkward positions. In the beginning, I didn't worry about this because I was just concerned with their translation, not so much their correct orientation.

Next, I decided to push her hair towards her body, not away from it on the area where she falls backwards. I think that makes a lot more sense.

 

I also decided on a trip over a slip for the means of how she looses balance, because I understand the concept of a trip more than a slip. With a trip for this animation, the foot can be planted in a natural way where someone might place their secondary foot when landing. With a slip on top of the rock, I could not think of a way that someone would place their foot on top of the object that they are jumping over. It would work maybe if there were too rocks, but I want to make it as simple as possible. In other words, the foot cannot be placed on top of the object without an awkward upward and backward placement. It makes a little more sense if the secondary landing foot is placed at the exact edge of the object.

Another change I made was timing, having more keys between her second landing pose and that of turning around. On the hold key that I placed after it, I made some tiny adjustments in the COG, the hands, and the hair so that it is a secondary movement after hitting the ground. This makes it look more natural, and has a little breathing room from this to the end of the animation.

I still need to work on some cleaning up and adding some more little movements where I can, in the hat and the fingers of the big hands. 

Post 13: Jump Spline4

This week I worked on critiques to improve my jumping animation. 

First, people noticed that the character's foot appears to slip on the ground. I found out that this was because even though I had a ground plane, I did not adjust the world space control accordingly. Someone said that instead of the character tripping on the rock, I could have her slip on the rock, so I attempted to make it look as though her back foot missteps. Now that I replay the animation, I think that the way she misplaces her foot looks a little unnatural. I will try again with a more obvious trajectory, but if I cannot make it look natural, I will make it appear instead to the way I intended previously.

Next, someone noticed that she looks off-balanced at the end of the animation. I kind of fixed this with changing the placement of the hair to be more on the right side of her body, but I realized that I completely off balanced it again with the changes that I made with the emoting arm, which I will explain later. Darn! To try to fix that, I sort of work with the other arm more to make it hopefully look more balanced.

Someone gave me the good idea to have the hands emote, and I was down to try it. I did this by making it produce a thumbs-up at the end. At first, because of rig reaching limitations, the silhouette was not good and you couldn't tell what it was doing. But I found the control that stretches the geometry and it produced something that looked nicer. I gotta hand it to you, I think it adds a lot of personality to the end, and I like it.

 
Another person commented on the inertia issues of the tripping/slipping, and I am working on that still.
Someone also noticed that there is a "popping" in the knees at the end of the animation that I didn't notice before, and I fixed that by adjusting the world editor (from grounding issues before) and the COG.

Finally, from teacher's critique, I created another frame that fully extends her legs on the lift off of the first jump.

Going Forward
One of my friends that I shared this animation with also commented on the falling backwards and springing up portion of the animation, saying that it does not have enough anticipation. I know the character goes downwards, but on second playthrough I know that the issue is that I had placed an extra holding key at the lowest part of the bending downwards, which can make it look like it unnaturally stalls for a second before springing up. I will fix this next week, because I noticed it too late, but what I need to do is delete the holding key on the COG to make it look like she is still going downwards right before she springs back up.

I also have to work more on the clipping geometry from the hat when she goes down. It is kind of difficult to figure around where to put all that geo. I made the hair go back, but then I need to move the hat, so maybe I will make her hair go inwards towards her body.

Post 12: Jump Spline3 

This week I mostly worked on adding more defined hair and clothing movement to the jumping animation. I also added an obstacle for the character to jump over. I thought that the character could be jumping over a pitfall, but the jump that I animated is too narrow. The object I chose was one of the rocks that I 3D scanned.

The hair, hat, and cloak appeared stiff during the animation because I had only moved those controls once, so on the appropriate keys such as the anticipation to jump, the time in the air, and the landing, I tried to add some more movement. The hair took a long time to try and figure out how to move and react with every head nod and turn that the character made. It is also easy to get lost in the many handles that the hair has. 

I also fixed the timing of the jumping in areas that needed more time such as the rebound bounce from the ghost arms and the ending reaction. When moving the keys to change the timing, the face controls didn't seem to come along, so kept it so that character's eyes open before they close at the end segment by having the eye controls always activated so that they do not get pushed back when I adjust the timing. 

I am trying to push the idea more that the extra arms off-balanced the landing, so I hope that through some more subtle hat movements that that message comes across. 

Since this animation was so short and I don't have a lot more to work on with it, I may create another action sequence using this rig. I found out that you can hide the extra arms of this rig, so I intend to just animate with the girl, or beginning without the extra arms and they appear later. 

Post 11: Polishing Final and Spline2 

This week for the Parkour animation I fixed the issue with alternating arm movements to leg movements from the teacher's critique. Now the running animation looks more correct I think.  

I also fixed some movements with the feet when they lift off the box. For some reason, it looked really uneven when the character lifts their left planted foot for the second bounce. I thought it was an issue with one of the foreword moving controls such as the COG or the world space editor, since I moved both for the character to move within space, but it was more of the foot not in the correct position from where it launched off of. When I moved the left foot closer to the area it was in from the frame previously, it looked smoother. 

I thought it looked a little awkward when the character lands on the block, so I outstretched and shortened the leg in better places, improving the way that one might act when jumping onto a higher surface. I think there are still some problem areas with the COG control around these areas because that jump still looks a bit awkward to me.

I did some adjustments to the knee control because I noticed some strange positions of the left leg folding underneath the character, creating an unsmooth animation. 

 

For the jumping animation, last week someone commented that the tripping over did not look accidental. I fixed this by rotating and translating the right foot so that when it lifts off the ground it will be less flat and look more like a slip hopefully. 

I also made the hat bend more as for the teacher's recommendation when the hands begin to push her weight on the ground.

More fixes were in the place of the clipping that I had ignored at the beginning creating this animation from last week. 

I will work on the hair controls and any other issues with the jumping animation next week because I was busy with the other animation class this week. I think the parkour animation is pretty much finished.

Post 10: Polishing 4 and blocking jump

 This week I polished more of the parkour animation. I was working more with the timing and made the run and scale up the wall a lot faster. It may need to be slower. I also added some more subtle movements at the end of the animation, and tried my best to get rid of the jumpy looking tweaks at the end, but there are still some.

For the jumping animation, I blocked out the beginning of the animation using my reference. I have put it in spline in this playblast to test the timing. Since I am having so much trouble with timing lately, I thought that it would be important to work on that more by splining early. I felt like I could spline also because this animation is only about 90 frames. I really like this rig! Some aspects are confusing like the COG is on the back of the model and the waist controllers don't exactly move how you would expect, but otherwise it is really easy and has a lot of useful controls.

Next week, I will take critiques to finish polishing my parkour animation and continue working on the spline of the jump animation. 

Post 9: Polishing 3 and Reference

 This week I didn't do a lot for the parkour animation because I was trying to come up with a second action project that I could animate. For the parkour animation, I added some more movement at the end of the animation to add some rest to her last head turn. 

I filmed a reference for a rig specific kind of jump and balance animation with this rig:

Rig specific meaning that the balance part will use the two additional arms that comes with the rig. 

Here is the reference I filmed:

We'll see if I can finish both animations in the remaining weeks. I think I can because the jump should be a little more simple than my first project. 

Post 8: Polishing 2

This week I worked on editing based on critiques. I worked on as much as I could, but my mouse died so I have to wait for new batteries. I also added an ambient light and some directional lights to give a better look to the animation. 

A critique I received was for the hands reaching up to the roof, where they flayed out instead of directly going to the place they want to go. I fixed this through a keyframe leading up to the roof, and it does look a lot better. 

Another fix I implemented from critiques is that I made the rendering camera higher so that the scene looks better. and not as claustrophobic. 

I haven't had a lot of time to fix the timing for the beginning part and the jump from the box to the roof, except for the changes I made from Mark's suggestions while in class which were to delete some keys in the beginning run. I also need to make some more changes to the ending when the character moves just their head, to incorporate more torso movement. Otherwise, I think it looks good so far.
 

Post 7: Polishing 

Last week was spring break, so I focused on beginning the frame by frame polishing and doing some finger adjusting. Frame by frame polishing is mostly making sure the model does not collide with the surroundings, especially when they pull themselves up something. I had trouble with colliding feet on the rooftop, so I had to tweak the COG a lot at that point.

It still needs pushing a bit, but I can only do so much without actually adding keys to every single frame and without the model colliding with itself.

I also made the hands look a bit nicer, an annoying but necessary thing I have been putting off for a while. I wish there was an option for the rig to just have an inset fist position, but I doubt that this rig has a slider for one. I am pretty bad at posing a hand rig into a fist just because of how tedious it is, but this pose will due, and it probably wont make that much difference from afar.

As well as finger fixing, I also worked on some visible overlap for the hair to add smoother transitions.

I was looking for places to add overlap in the animation because I know that it looks really nice, but can be a bit confusing to achieve in 3D animation because I never know if it really made that much of a difference in a complicated sequence. 

Hair is a really visible body part for creating an overlap effect, hands on the other hand (pun unintended), maybe not so visible when the animation is being played. 

Post 6: Spline 3

This week I worked on polishing the spline and working on the timing for the whole animation. There are still parts that I think need a different timing, but I think it is almost done. I am planning to finish polishing before break. 

Based on critiques I of course altered the timing, tried to fix any sliding of the feet and hands, and tried to make the run portion look less floaty. There was a comment about having it look more like it was "pushing" up on the roof to get onto it, so I also worked anchoring the hands so that the body would move to go up and the hands will follow after.

 This is tricky because moving just the body's COG will sometimes pull the anchored hands to moving up slightly too early. This is also very hard to get right because I still need to find a way that the legs do not clip into the model. 

Someone suggested that I tried flipping the legs over to one side during the pullup, but when I tried doing that, it did not look correct and I got confused. Maybe I'll try again, or finally give in and look at a reference of someone pulling themselves up from a front and side view.

 There is something strange looking entirely about the frames of the character pulling themselves onto the roof, so I'll keep working on it. I also realized and recently fixed the anchor of the hands all of way through this pullup, which isn't in my playblast this week because I fixed it really quick while writing this. I also just fixed the COG during the run because someone said to pull it more forward. 

Post 5: Spline 2

This week I worked on polishing the spline and finishing the last parts of the general animation, where the character pulls themself up onto the roof. It playblasted pretty slow because of timing issues with the running part and also because I focused mostly on creating the last hoisting up part. It gets difficult at some point to keep track of all of the many keys.

I changed the hand controls from FK to IK, so I had to re-animate a lot of the parts with hand movement. The camera will also have to be changed because of my different timing, so my playblast is in perspective. 

There was also a glitch in my maya file that happened whenever I wanted to move keys to change the timing by moving a bunch of keys in the graph editor, it would jump the character unexpectedly throughout the timeline without any keys. This could strangely be fixed when selecting the control that appeared to be jumping and in the graph editor kind of "remind" the key as to where it was supposed to be by slightly moving any of the translation channel's keys and hitting undo and the character would snap back into the correct spline. Maya is weird. Edit: sometimes the issues would be fixed if you bring the timeslider down to be more condensed? I'm still working on that. I also figured out that changed the cached playback to Max Real-Time will play what you see in the playblast.

There still needs to be a lot more polishing and timing fixes done on this project and the animation turned out to be longer than expected if I want it to be perfect polishing the animation key by key. My goal for fixing the timing will go though next week and final polishing will be at least in the process by the following week. I think the general animation is looking good minus the timing issues and jumpy keys.

Post 4: Spline 

This week I splined my animation and created an action movement for the camera. I think this camera animation may be too fast and too complicated. The camera may look better if I have its keys set to linear instead of spline. I also think that the scene should end with the character pulling themselves completely onto the roof because the camera goes to a whole new position only for the animation to end. 

From critiques from class, I was sure to make the jump portion have less frames so that it appears smoother. I also forgot to do this, but I need to make sure that the character's COG is not too close to the ground during the running portion. I will look at it when I am polishing the animation. Another critique mentioned "jittery" action against the wall and what I had done besides deleting that one frame during the jump was move the COG more outward and upward on the frame after this tiny collision with the wall to help sell the action to look more like a boost kick type thing; I hope it looks better now. 

Next I will begin to polish the animation by looking closely at all of the keys and adding any necessary changes to the overall animations.  

When I am satisfied with polishing this animation, for my next side project I really wanted to learn how to animate 2D animation using puppetry in Adobe Animate. I don't know yet what I want to animate, but to learn the program, it might just be a walk animation.

 Post 3: Blocking 

This is what I have done for this week. I would have finished the blocking of my first animation, but I visited family for the weekend.  I was figuring out the best timing for beginning running sequence since I have never moved a rig in the world before. I began the animating by making the character run in place first and then moving the world editor. The scene should be completely blocked out by Monday. The only part left for the scene to be blocked out is the contact with the roof and pulling the body up.

 Post 2: Setting up scene 

This week I have decided to use the Azri rig, created my first maya project and decided on what kind of action I want this animation to be. The action that I chose is running and then pulling themselves up to a rooftop. I have the timestamp of the reference of the same video as last week's post below, the action is a couple seconds long.

Reference Video (0:04-0:09)

Azri from www.gameanim.com/product/azri-rig/

I am now ready to begin the blocking phase for this project. I still need to figure out the hand mechanisms of this rig. I have started on the first pose but my project keeps crashing so I will need to restart my computer before going through with blocking.

 Post 1: Planning

In the following weeks, I plan to create at least two animations based on references from youtube videos, focusing on action. I plan to use human or two-legged rigs.

Video Reference 

Timeline:

• Weeks 1 and 2:
• Intro to project
• find and study video references
• Research Rigs
• Weeks 3 and 4
• Decide on a rig and pick a couple scenes from the reference
• Create project and put rig into scene
• begin blocking
• Weeks 5 and 6
• blocking 
• camera placements
• Weeks 7 and 8
• start another scene from the references
• spline first animation 
• Weeks 9 and 10
• blocking second animation, 
• polishing 
• Weeks 13 and 14
• spline second animation
• polishing 
• Weeks 15 and 16
• finalizing polishing and playblasting