Character Animation 2 explores character development much more than CAN1. In this class, the focus is on the character’s personality and backstory, and how these influence the character’s movement.
Our first project was a pantomime animation. We were required to animate how a character feels when faced with an obstacle or dilemma.
Pantomime Project:
For our second project, we were required to select a sound clip of dialog and use the character to act it out. Lip sync and strong supporting poses were especially important for this assignment.
This course goes further into detail about surface and texture replication creation within Maya. Light and surface interaction, like reflections and refractions, are looked at with a critical eye. Render passes using the mia material x shader were explored, as well as render pass compositing using Nuke.
For the course assignment we had to replicate a certain shot. All of the models were provided as .objs, and we had to scale and position them accordingly. After the 3D model positioning was finished, lights and shadows had to be replicated. Model UVs were laid out and digital photos were taken into Photoshop for texture creation. Individual render passes were then manipulated within Nuke using the .exr file format.
Instructor Jared Edwards’ Renders:
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My replicated renders with slight creative freedom on the texture creation for the back wall and the bottle:
This month, Software Technology, consisted of learning two new pieces of 3D software. They were XSI’s Softimage, and Side FX’s Houdini. Although fewer and fewer production house’s are using Softimage, it was good to learn a new tool to see how quickly one could adapt to a new pipeline and workflow. Houdini was great for doing simulations and quickly achieving results that would normally take much more time. Below are several examples of some of the projects we were required to do for this course.
One assignment was to pick a vehicle with orthographic images and model it in Softimage. I ended up choosing an old 1972 BMW 2002 due to the boxiness and relatively easy way it can be broken down into individual parts.
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Here is a video of our team’s rigid body dynamic simulation, as well as a wall fracture solo assignment -both were created with Houdini. Please excuse the quality; they are screen captures.
Visual Effects 1 concentrated on legacy particle creation, rigid and soft-body simulation.
For lesson 1, we were required to create a simulation involving a pinball that progressed through a rube-goldberg machine. The project called for use of Maya’s dynamic fields such as, gravity and uniform. Using these in combination with dynamic constrains and collision solvers made it possible.
Lesson 1 – Rigid body simulation in Maya:
Lesson 2 consisted of particle simulation using Maya’s legacy particles. Although my shading and lighting need some work, my particle simulation isn’t half-bad. For the coffee (ick, needs to be re-rendered) I used Maya software’s blobby particles. The steam was Maya software’s tube particles, and the sugar pouring from shaker was hardware multi-points. I also included nParticles for the sugar sliding around inside the glass shaker. This simulation took more time to cache and render that I estimated, therefore some of my shading suffered.
Lesson 2 – Particles simulation:
Finally we had to do a simple soft body simulation. I decided on an ice cream cone falling to the ground and then melting slightly. This involved animating between 5 goals. The most challenging thing was transitioning the animation between the goals for the ice cream melting effect. The cone has some slight deformation to it as well, and involves a soft body with springs attached.
Character Animation 1 piggy-back’s off FOA and is a more in-depth instruction of character walk cycles and key poses. This includes things like the foot roll, blinks, breaking the wrist when swinging the arms, etc.
Our first assignment was to give a character without arms a walk that concluded with a turn and a jump. The reasoning for omitting the arms is to give students more focus on the lower half of the body.
Assignment 1:
Our second assignment involved taking the rig we would be using for the walk cycle and posing it reflecting several different emotions. The poses required were: relaxed, fear, anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, and balance (on one foot).
Assignment 2:
For our final assignment, we needed to complete a walk across a platform, turn the character and press a specifically placed button.
This month, in Character Rigging 2, I was given a troll rig and several choices for motion capture animation. I then had to attach the mocap data to the troll rig. This involved doing animation cleanup and skin weighting. If there were any additional issues with the rig deformation I was required to fix them with corrective blend shapes for that specific frame. Facial blend shapes for the expressions were also created in Mudbox and then attached to the troll rig. These could then be animated to give the character’s face emotion and life. Then the assignment required character jiggle effects using nCloth. For my project I gave the belly, lower right leg and several other areas a jiggle. Finally I added cloth and hair to the troll also using Maya’s nCloth simulation.
Another great class by another great instructor. We were assigned three major projects in this class; a proxy rig, a layout rig, and then wrap it up at the end into a python script. Each project was broken into individual pieces, and before I knew it, I had something to be proud of. Below is a link to a video of the layout rig assignment, and a few screenshots of some rigs I posed. The rabbit character in the demo below was provided by Full Sail, I am only responsible for the rig.
Rigid bind rig demo:
We downloaded various rigged characters from online 3D sites and were tasked with having to pose and critique their rigs. I’m looking forward to animating Bonnie and Mery.
Animation is something I would love to do. There is no greater feeling to me than to make an audience connect personally with a character. To me, it is the ultimate magic trick! Since I am striving to become a character animator, I put in an extra effort to earn a grade that would reflect this.
FOA made us focus on applying the fundamentals of 2D animation into 3D. We were provided several basic rigged characters to animate doing certain tasks. Our final was to animate just the lower half of a character kicking a ball. The ball also would need to be keyframed bouncing along through a specific course. For this, we had to give the character and the ball a sense of weight. Our instructor required us to film ourselves acting out the motion, and then to go through and designate specific key poses and breakdowns. We were then asked to draw out these actions as individual thumbnail sketches to use as our animation reference. Both of the linked projects below were given grades of 100%.
Here is one of my projects which involved animating the top-half of a character – the torso, arms and head:
This traditional animation course was great. It was taught by two passionate instructors from the industry with some impressive credentials. The 12 principals of animation were driven into us for eight hours every class. The concept of timing is everything in animation, as an animator with poor timing is not an animator. Before this class I had never taken a 2D animation course, but now I am very convinced that in order to become a successful animator in 3D, one must learn 2D.
Here are a couple warm-up sketches we had to do based upon a certain subject. The sketch must tell a story.
In CDC, we went through resurfacing geometry and proper edge flow in Maya when dealing with organics. We had to replicate character models, and learn how to also model an ear in Maya. This class was also my first introduction to ZBrush. For our final project we had to create an anatomically-correct, muscular arm based off a real-world reference. It was difficult having to do it with no prior ZBrush knowledge, but I got it done! Below are some examples of models like male and female torsos, cartoon character heads, and the arm.
the pied pixel 