Demo Reel Clip #3 - Attack/Knockdown

During my second class of portfolio creation, I worked on three different assets for my demo reel, one was the walk I talked about before, the second one was an attack and knockdown animation, the reason for including this in the demo reel was to show off my ability to do shorter game friendly assets. Usually these scenes have two characters in them, one attacking and one getting hit, but I wanted to make the same guy do both in a way I thought was kind of unique and humorous. This is what I came up with after about a week and a half.

I started with a few key poses, but then I added a few more in-betweens for some faster motions to make sure I had the timing right, and to see if it looked alright in the camera angle. I also wanted to have a short idle at the beginning that was reminiscent of Street Fighter. When it comes to attacks and knockdowns, they are some of the masters. Even this early on I wanted to animate the sandbag, even if it was some simple stepped keys, because I wanted to get an idea of where the bag was headed, and how I can adjust the timing, because I didn't want too much time in between the attack and knockdown, so this was a good way to measure it early on.

For the next milestone I went into mostly auto-tangent, and tried to experiment with some other poses while the sandbag was still in the air. I was considering having the character hunch over and heavily pant while out of breath, but in the end this didn't really suit the tough guy personality I was trying to go for, also there wasn't enough time before the sandbag came coming down to get a good read on the action, and I didn't want to keep it in the air forever, because that wasn't the point of the animation.

The next milestone is when I really started to get the motions you see in the final shot. A lot of it was carefully in-betweening the very fast motions that the character goes through, especially around the impact of the punching bag and making the fall a little less symmetrical, strengthening the appeal. I also added a quick 1 - 2 - punch while the bag is in the air, to keep the character aggressive, and so it gives him a reason to take his eyes off the bag and get hit in the first place.

By the end it was all subtleties and fixes. The biggest change was that I added facial animation, which added another layer of believability into this characters emotion. I also took the time to substitute in a sandbag with I simple little rig I created to give it a bit more motion and follow through on the way up and down. Lets take another look at how the final shot turned out.

This shot certainly had its unique challenges, and was fun one to work on. See you all next time when I will be covering the creature run cycle I created for my reel.

Demo Reel Clip #2 - Walk Cycle

For my second demo reel asset I wanted to do a walk cycle, but not just any cycle, one that made the character look happy and confident. I felt like the double bounce walk was perfect for this. I got a chance to get some nice big swing in the arms, and keep the chest out for that overwhelming confidence effect. This was the final result.

This animation took me about four days to polish it to its final state. I think having a strong base really established made my job a lot easier in the long run, and made tweaking things very enjoyable. In cycles I like to start by making sure all my number in Maya are nice and rounded, as well as symmetrical on both sides. I'm very left brain in that regard, and if I need to go back and make changes to slit up the symmetry later, I still can. This was my first milestone, this is going to auto-tangent right after establishing the contacts, downs, passings, and ups.

From here, because of the strong base poses, much of the changes were more subtle and mechanical ones, like adding movement in the hair, swing the feet to look more like actual walks, and messing around with the timing of the arm swings. Alone, these changes don't always sound like much, but when all layered together, that's when you start to see the changes.

I really enjoyed this asset because I love creating cycles. Its amazing to see how they can be repurposed to many different situations in film and in games. I'm also amazed by how much personality you can fit into a couple loopable frames of animation. Now let's take another look at the final shot, with all this background information in mind. See you next time!

Demo Reel Clip #1 Baseball Pantomime

Hello all! I've been hard at work on my demo reel and am happy to be making some progress. For you today I have the first clip with a start to finish breakdown of my workflow. Let's first take a look at the final product to see what we're getting into.

Much of the movement started out very differently but with critique from my art directors and some general idea shifts, I believe it became something much better. Now let's take a look at where it all began.

The first step I did was block out some key storytelling poses. Normally these are the poses that you only need to covey the message the biggest actions (large anticipations, impacts, etc.) In my scene I put a few more though, because I like to put in extra poses for things like swings and falls. Because of the nature of these motions they generally need a lot of poses to come out right anyway, so I just like to do them as soon as possible, and maybe even test them out in auto.

This is probably the biggest transition from one iteration to the next. Going from stepped to auto can greatly affect an animation, and mine was no  exception. It took some tweaking to in-between the right hand, because the way I have the file set up, the bat is parented to the left hand and the right hand is hand keyed to follow the bat. There are ways to set up the bat too follow one hand and the other hand to follow the bat, but those methods weren't yielding me any results, plus for such a short animation, it wasn't too much trouble to hand key that extra hand.

If you noticed I also switched up the fall at the end. I felt that the spinning fall from before just wasn't that interesting, at least not the way I was doing it. It was very evenly spaced and just looked like he was levitating in the air as he spun, which is not the look I was going for.

This iteration was highly critique based with the two biggest changes being the arms in the shrug motion, and the ball deforming and being retimed. The shrug was something I was a bit iffy on from the start. Though the silhouette was there, it wasn't necessarily the best pose. In real life using the W pose to shrug is a common thing that we do almost without thinking, but in animation, it adds to the symmetry of the character, which can do more harm than good. The speeding ball was a nice suggestion by my art director to help sell the impact of the ball. Less frames to make it faster and stretch it out to make it even faster, while also leading the eye.

The spin motion was also changed a bit. I now have him more balanced on his left leg while the right one is in the air. My reasoning behind having him more tipped over at first was to exaggerate the swing and sell the motion with a large arc. But it turns out that keeping him balanced can still give a similar effect.

A smaller but still necessary change is that I added more motion to the ball and bat, after they hit the ground, just giving them more life with bounces and rolls.

For this next iteration, I decided to render it, because if something potentially went looked wrong in the render, this would be the time to fix it, before it gets to late. Much of the render setup came from another rig created by Josh Sobel, which really gives a nice cartoony feel, while also being very fast when it comes to render time.

In terms of animation, this whole milestone was more dedicated to subtile changes. For instance, I lowered the hands a little bit more for the shrug this time around. Other than that just curve tweaking in the graph editor for better motions.

Now let's look at the final again with all this background information.

One change that came up pretty close to the end was the removal of the dusting off of the hand. With each iteration it seemed to get shorter and shorter. With a suggestion from my art director, I decided to just take it out entirely. It was probably the weakest part of the shot because it seemed to clutter up that section of animation when the real focus should be on the ball hitting the character. The section benefited much from a hold that just keeps the viewer in anticipation until the impact, making it even more intense because of the huge shift from slow to very fast.

Overall I'm very proud of my scene, and am glad that I put in all the effort I did in iterations and critique. But animation is never truly done and can always be improved. So I'll be revisiting this scene again sometime before I put out the final reel, and make any tweaks with a fresh eye. Any changes I make, I'll report back here in an update, and remember, the fastest way to see my new work is through my website www.raresgruian.com. I post it there first and then I talk about it here in more detail when I have some extra time. In fact there is some more new demo reel stuff up there now!

Thanks for sticking to the end and I hope you found this at least somewhat entertaining, if not informative. See you next time.

Animation Boot Camp - Week 3 - Peels

The last week of Animation Boot Camp is peels. Peels are not having all the parts of your body arrive at the same spot at the same time, like when you grab a cup, each finger wraps around the cup at a different frame, not all at the same time. This way you don't get a claw effect whenever you grab something. Lets look at some peels I did during the boot camp exercises.

For this first one, I had a hand come up to a wall and flick a light switch. The peel happens when the hand touches the wall, not each finger arrives at the same time. This is especially important when looking at a shot this close because the fingers are the main focus of the shot.

In addition to the peel here, it's also important to lead with the wrist to create a nice arc for the motion, as well as following through with the pointer finger to emphasize the motion of flicking the switch.

In this second clip I was thinking of ways to use peels to anticipate movement. Especially during the hold when the hand its at it's highest point, getting ready to grab the bat. Doing the finger moves at this point draws the eye there, no matter where you were looking before, because aside from a light moving hold, those fingers are the only things moving. You then get to follow the hand as it goes in for the bat. When talking to my animation director, he mentioned this second peel to be slightly repetitive, because it is exactly the same as the first, in terms of timing. If I were to do it again, I would change up the timing to be a bit more varied.

It's important to remember that peels not only apply to fingers, feet have them too. They are very prominent in walk cycles because when we pick up our feet, it's heel first then toe last, and then when we place them down again its heel first then toe last (on most occasions, some walks have different rules.) This quick shot is of one step where the peel really brings some life to the shot, as opposed to having robot feet, where the whole foot leaves the ground at the same time.

Using peels in conjunction with other animation techniques (like takes), will further add to the realism of your animations.

This concludes my animation boot camp posts, while I worked on these exercises, I also got to block out the scenes I plan to use in my demo reel. Stay tuned because I will be covering demo reel stuff in the near future. I also encourage you to check out my website raresgruian.com because I will be posting updates and works in progress there more frequently.

Animation Boot Camp - Week 2 - Takes

Week 2 of Animation Boot Camp was takes. Takes are a way of reacting with an emotion shift, that includes an anticipation, overshoot, and then a settle. An important thing to remember is that not all emotion changes are takes. Since I talked a lot about the rigs in last weeks work, this week I'll skip a lot of that and jump straight into the takes.

Here I was going for a smooth confident guy, possibly looking at a girl he likes. He then takes a closer look only to be surprised by what he sees, what he sees is up to the viewer, but the fun part is making the audience guess. Here is a breakdown of the 4 main steps of the take.

On the last day I really wanted to have some fun with the take so I tried to push the Norman rig to its limits to try and emulate a Tex Avery style. This time our character really sees something he likes but at first he's not quite sure. So the emotion shift here would be curiosity to very surprised.

Sometimes you can add appeal to your animation takes by giving a bit of story to your scene. This may be adding some sort of antic to the beginning or end of the animation. Its also incredibly important to treat the eyes with a lot of care (especially when the camera is more zoomed in.) Keeping in mind the mechanics of the eyes will add more life to your animations. Some include leading with the eyes (having them look at something before the head turns all the way), blinking to anticipate turns, and including eye darts. All these factors together will add to the animation. Here are the key poses for the second take.

Next time we're taking a look at peels, a way to add some secondary motion when moving hands and feet around.

Animation Boot Camp - Week 1 - Speed Poses

As part of the finals curriculum here at Full Sail (at least for animators) for three weeks we do a couple of tests to get the animation juices pumping alongside working on our demo reels. The first week is speed poses, or strong poses, I may alternate between the two, though they mean the same thing here. Though there is no direct animation here, we do these to help us develop a key eye for silhouette, to see which poses can be most interesting, and to understand a broader spectrum of emotions. I covered strong poses a long time ago in this post so I won't repeat myself too much. But since I used different rigs this time, I'll discuss some of what made each one unique.

Day one, I used the Ben rig. This is a simple rig with easy to navigate controls. The facial controls are their on GUI which I really love seeing in a rig. Though with its ease of use there are some problems I had. Some of the facial expressions can not be pushed as far as desired due to the fact that the jaw can't open very much. Also scaling the head causes the tongue to no longer be in the proper spot. This is a minor nitpick, but I did run into it when trying to scale him similarly to another character in one of my other scenes.

Day two, I used the Bonnie rig. For being a pretty old rig, it is very robust. I has a optional hair dynamics and a full picker for ease of navigation. I chose to use neither of these features though. I prefer to go straight into the rig and create my own mel buttons, and since there was no movement, the hair dynamics weren't necessary at this time. I guess my biggest struggle with this rig was pushing some of the stronger poses like the ones sitting down. I had to sometimes cheat the camera because the arms and legs wouldn't go that far.

On day three I used a variation of the Norman rig called red. There are many customizations of this rig out there so finding one you like shouldn't be that hard. This is one of my favorite rigs because of its simple design allowing for ease of use while also being open ended enough to really let you push the poses and emotions. The Norman rig though, doesn't have the facial GUI's that other rigs may have, but if you can tell, that's not that big of an issue for me. Many of Norman's more advanced blends are done through custom transform attributes on the controls (like where you would find translate, rotate, and scale).

For day four, I used the Mery rig. This is a relatively new rig and has become quite popular. Because of its young age, it is still being updated so be sure to let the team know any feedback you may have if you've tried it. As for me, I have had issues loading the picker, which isn't so bad because I had just mentioned that I don't use pickers that much, but the problem here is that Mery's facial controls are far off in the viewport, so every time you use her, you have to make a separate camera to see those controls.

I encourage you to go out and try each of these rigs and see which one works best for you (maybe they all do). This isn't the end of these rigs for me either because I use all of them more in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

It's been a while...

So I haven't posted here in a while (sorry about that by the way). I am currently in finals at Full Sail, which means I'm super close to graduating and finishing my demo reel! Aside from working on my reel, I'm also doing short animation boot camp tests and developing my personal brand (business card, website, etc.) My website is live now so go check it out at raresgruian.com. I've also just placed an order on my cards so if you run into me in person, chances are you'll get one.

I'll be talking about some of those boot camp activities soon. And who knows maybe I'll even discuss some early stage demo reel stuff like key poses (still debating on weather or not to hold off until I put out the final product).