Animation unit Evaluation

For this unit I had to create a short animation using 3D software (3D studio max) showing various animation principles and good movement flow. I separate my modelling and animation unit, even though the choice to combine them was open to me. By doing this I felt I could focus on each unit independently and better hit the specifications of the brief for each unit.

For this unit I decided to model and animate a band playing live on stage in front of a crowd.  I decided to do this because I am very passionate about music, and wanted to try and bring a song to life by giving it an accompanying animation. Also last year I had modelled several musical instruments for a previous unit so I knew I could reuse them in this unit to save on modelling (as I am not marked for that in this unit). I chose to animate along to the song “turn me on Mr.Deadman” by  the union underground. I chose this song as it fit into the 30 second mark quite nicely (ending just before the first chorus kicks in) and because I like it as a song (something I thought would be quite important if I was going to be scrubbing through it and listening to individual parts of it for 3 weeks straight).

I used box modelling on the majority of the modelling process but also used the cloth modifier on some parts, like the canvas on the top and sides of the stage.  As for the animation I used auto key for the majority of the character and camera animation, along with the move, rotate and scale tools in order to reposition my characters/cameras between frames. For some parts of my animation I used different animation tools, for example I used the cloth simulate tool (with a wind sprite) in order to animate the canvases blowing in the wind, and I used the particle super spray tool to make the fire for the pyrotechnics.

If I were to try animating this again, I probably wouldn’t change much as I didn’t encounter any major problems whilst modelling or animating this scene. There were a couple of times where I moved things with auto key on when I didn’t want to and vice versa meaning I animation things that I didn’t want to animation or spent 10 minutes “animating” something, only to realise the frames weren’t being saved. Also sometimes where I moved the wrist and wasn’t happy with the result, I moved the frames forward or backwards, only to realise there were also frames generated on the elbow and shoulder joints as I moving the wrist (as they had to move with it) that I was unaware of and had left behind. I would also try using some plug-ins for the fire, and it’s nearly impossible to get good looking fire in max.

While working on this animation I have learnt a lot of new techniques and tools in max.  I learnt how to use the skin morph tool properly while skinning my character models (I had just used the standard human mesh from Mudbox which isn’t optimised for animation) because the shoulder and hip joints weren’t looking good through envelope editing alone. I also learnt through online tutorial how to make some very simple low poly fire in 3Dmax using particle super spray.

I am extremely pleased with how my animation turned out after all the work I put into it. The animation looks fluent and realistic and the final render is something I am proud of and enjoy watching, which was my intended result when I set out to begin with.

Animation!!

Now I move onto my animation. I used as many of the animation principles I could think of such as anticpation, secondary motion, weight and exaggeration.
I animated using auto key and the scale,rotate move tools, using my knowledge of how people move and applying the animation principles to try and make the movements as realistic as possible.

This videos shows the bass player gentle bobbing his torso along to the music (as most bass players do) in the last scene of my animation. if you watch his head closly you can notice I animated it so it continues to follow the torso's direction even after the torso has stopped and began moving the other way. This is secondary motion and compensates for momentum.

 This video is of an animation sequence quite early in my animation. Anticipation is the movement someone makes, before making the movement they set out to make, the most commonly used example of this is when a baseball players is throwing a ball, he first need to move his arm back. This video show me using anticipation of a movement (the movement being him move the microphone to his mouth) through arm and head movements.

THis video shows the bass drum on the drumkit. Whenever a bass drum is hit the outter skin vibrates slightly, this is usually the best was to tell its been hit (minus the sound). However seeing as most of my shots are from quite far out I had to exaggerate this effect, but mocing the skin fowarsd almost an entire inch to make this effect visable at all camera angles.

Rigging my character

Today I rigged my character models to prepare them for my animation. I started off by generating a standard CAT rig and resizing/positioning it to fit my character (The bass player in this example)































After this I apply the skin modifier to the charcater mesh which basically tell the verts of the dodel to stick to the cat rig, meaning if you move the cat rig, the character moves too. Applying the skin modifier on its own rarely works 100% to give realistic movement, sometimes verts overlap and limbs get squashed on the defualt setting, so to solve this I go into the envelope editor.

In this I can select individual verts and fine tune how they move with the rig to aloow more fluid movement, even after this the effects arnt perfect, so I used the skin morph modifier to model the joints that werent bending correctly. This finishes the riggin process meaning I can pose and move my character, allowing me to start animating.

Here he is, very confused at his own hand.