Category: Animation III

11/16/20 turkey pilgrim thing

Over the past few days I have worked on getting the modeling and rigging aspects of the project done, and for the most part they are completed. There are minor things I need to add to the character rigs, such as locators for making plate/gun movements easier, but for the most part they are done. There are also materials I still need to add, but for the most part I am getting to the point of animating.

facial animation project

Made a facial animation thing for a project. I edited the body I had been in the process of making into a girl and also made a robot that used the same clothes as that original character. I rigged both of their faces and then animated them to basically just generally sync up with the audio from a clip I was given. Most of this process was just getting the character models ready and rigged, though even that was not finished as I was rushing to do the facial animation for the past few days, and did not have/spend enough time on it to make it look as good as I wanted. If I were to spend more time on the animation aspect of the faces, I would basically just make the movements much less exaggerated and try to get them to flow a lot nicer, with a lot of the facial movements I tried to animate each syllable based on how my face felt when I sounded out the word, rather than actually using a reference, so obviously the movements are very weird looking. In future projects I will use references, I just wanted to test out if I could get an accurate speaking animation out of essentially guessing how it would look, which definitely just made things harder than they needed to be.

9/24/20 Skills Project

I made some progress relating to the clothing of this character so far, and have gone through multiple changes and versions of each part of the outfit. Currently I plan to make some small changes to the shirt sleeves, make sure the left side is copied over to the right for the shirt and possibly pants, and then I will move on to making gun holsters and an overcoat. I may end up using a hood rather than a hat since that would seem to make more sense with some of the bigger movements he will be making, though I will be making a hat if I decide to do the Duel animation. I plan to wait on adding hair until I have both characters clothing generally done with and am sure on their faces.

Currently I am at school so redshift is covering the render with a watermark, but most of the model can be seen. Also I have not touched the back of his pants and shirt for a while, so that looks extremely odd currently. Finally, the pants have both an outside and an inside version, because I was debating which looks better/would be most sensible. Currently I am leaning towards the pants being on the outside for the look and being on the inside for functionality.

I plan on making some adjustments to the boots, but I will likely be using a normal map for the boots later down the line to make them look more like cowboy boots. I may end up making a separate model for spurs to be attached to them on the outside anyways, something that would go around the entire circumference of the boot.

My next models that I am planning on making are going to be holsters and possibly starting on the overcoat, though I may put the overcoat off due to the fact that I am not very good with nCloth and do not want to waste too much time with it, so I want to avoid focusing on it too much. If I do make the coat soon I will be making a much shorter version than I may end up with in the future, one the size of a normal jacket, to avoid too many flowing parts. As for the holsters, I will want 3 handgun holsters for the Fighting animation but will only need one for the Duel animation, so I will likely have the two holsters around the waist be separate. The third would be around the chest area, though if that does not look good I may limit it down to two holsters.

9/24/20 facial rigging project

current progress on a facial rigging project using this tutorial: https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/maya-facial-rigging-fundamentals/exercise-files

I have been working along with the tutorial lady to first of all rig the eyebrows with three joints and a head joint, and also made blend shapes on the other eyebrow. Up until we started working on weightpainting the joints, it was mostly review, but with the joint weight painting I learned how to use the selection and paint mode much better. After that we moved onto making the controllers, and while the driven key aspect was refresher the actual making of the controller and concepts such as limiting the x and y translation from -10 and 10 were new concepts. Overall so far, I learned quite a bit about rigging faces and I learned a new control system for animating a rigged face.

9/18/20 Skills Project

I finished building all of the parts of the characters body over the past few days, focusing on the legs, then face, then head over each day until now. Currently I would like to give him a younger, less creepy face, but would rather currently start working on his clothing. For one of my animation ideas I am going to have two cowboys facing off against each other, and for the other I have a cowboy styled character fighting a more martial artist styled character, so I would like to first focus on getting the cowboy style of clothes done. Once the clothing is done I will likely be deleting a lot of the geometry that would be underneath the clothes, but I want it there for now to give me an idea of the size and shape of different areas on the clothing, and if I make a martial artist character he will have some amount of skin exposed.

The topology is not the best for multiple areas on the body, but it serves the purposes it needs to for now. I may test a rig before moving on just to make sure the body is not too poorly modeled to animate.

9/18/20 Bag Boi Animation

Small animation project I made that needed to involve a flour sack both kicking something and falling off of something. The deforms were done with 2 blend shapes and the animation was done with a skeleton rig. The only thing I did not already show in previous posts are the ball animation, which I did with grouping the ball into three groups, one for translation, one for scale, and one for rotation. I used that to scale it properly for each moment in the kick. Sorry for not having detailed blog posts about this project, I was working on modeling a base for a character in my SkillsUSA project.

9/15/20 Skills Project

I have been working on multiple ideas for my skills animation, and have narrowed it down to two ideas.

One would be a fighting scene that would require me to work with more particle effects, liquids, bifrost, etc. It would also force me to learn more about choreography since there would be a lot of movement for the two characters fighting.

The second would be a story based animation that would involve two people, an outlaw and a sheriff, having a duel in a small desert town. It would end with it turning out to be two kids in their backyard imagining the duel, hopefully giving it a cute ending.

I will post a final plan for both animations later on, but currently I am leaning towards the fight animation.

Currently I have started modeling a base character who would work in either animation, though since I started yesterday I only have the torso and arm currently. The geometry on the hand is currently not the best but I have a duplicated original hand that I can edit to fix later on, or I can work on the current hand. Right now I want to see if this hand will rig fine despite the geometry not being set up the best way possible, which I have hope for.

Since both animations involve two adults fighting, I plan on making one model then editing its face for a second character, then simply changing their clothes.

Over the next few days I will try to mainly decide which animation I will go with, work on planning out one or both animations, and possibly work on this model over my free time.

9/15/20 Flour Sack

Yesterday we were assigned a flour sack animation, specifically one that included the flour sack falling off of something and kicking something. I decided to keep it simple and just have him kick a ball into a wall, have the ball bounce once or twice, then hit him and knock him off of the table. I have to make the animation 15 to 20 seconds, so he will spend some time before kicking the ball hyping himself up and will fall off the table relatively slowly.

Above is the storyboard I made yesterday, and below are the base scene that I also made yesterday and the sack as is. I may fix up its weights but I am hoping that I can avoid replacing his current rig with a more complex one. As of right now I seem to be able to pose it easily, but I am worried about keeping the legs where I want them.

Body w/ ctrls
Body w/ grid and blend shapes
Body w/ Lattice for future adjustments
Body w/ rig
Table in room