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.
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.
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.
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).
Check out part 1 if you missed it because I may be referencing points from that post.
So my second shot was shot 10, which had our character Bugsy interacting with Miss Bugsy before he is about to untie her. The focus here is on Miss Bugsy because she is the character most visable in the shot, and the one who's whole face is visible. Before getting into these later shots, as a group we had to develop Miss Bugsy's personality just like we did for Bugsy. We decided to go for a damsel who is in love head over heals and can look past Bugsy's faults like his overconfidence or clumsiness.
Shot 10 went through a lot of changes at the beginning because I had a certain idea of how Bugsy would move his hand. I was going for a sensual finger drag across the top of the head, but after receiving a critique from the teacher, he suggested trying under the chin instead. At first this idea felt weird to me, but the more time I spent with it, acting it out, adjusting poses, and getting more feedback, it started looking a lot better.
(hand above the head)
(hand below the chin)
I guess I'll take this time to mention why I made the acting choices I did when it comes to the touching of Miss Bugsy's face. When animating a character, you have to get in their head and feel what they feel. In this case Bugsy is rescuing a trapped friend, he's glad to see her and wants to show her this. A simple touch can build such a large connection. Imagine if Bugsy had just done a standard walk across the scene, he would almost seem out of place without doing anything. Same goes for Miss Bugsy, this is a character that is in love, and as the milestones progress I made an effort to put as much life and love into Miss Bugsy. This applies to everything, the way she slowly leans back, the way she blinks her eyes, the way her smile slightly grows as time goes on around Bugsy. Animation is acting, and you have to feel these emotions, and thats one of my favorite parts about the discipline.
I tried a little someting special for the next critique. I added in some motion in the antennas of Miss Bugsy to make them take the form of a heart (Think 2d characters like Bugs Bunny who can bend and manipulate their ears to take many shapes). This proved to be a unique challenge because I was somewhat limited by the rig, but it wasn't to big of a deal, the heart just came out smaller than I thought it would. Another thing that was important to keep in mind here was the silhouette of the antennas, they had to look right in the camera view, this was more important than actually being perfectly positioned on the head. I put a lot of thought into this little antic so I'm glad it went over well during critiques.
Now in the final wrapping up stages of the animation, the things I focused on most was enhancing the principals of animation like the secondary action and follow through. This mostly applies to things like the hair, ear rings, and antennas on Miss Bugsy. But even Busy has some in his hands, since they flow offset to the arms. I also adjusted Miss Bugsy's eyes a bit more to not always have them 100% wide open. The more wide the eyes are, the blanker the stare looks in most cases. I also looked into adding some subtle eye darts because that's how eyes work in the real world. This was my first time trying this so I do need more practice on this front.
After everyone finished their shots, it was time to put them all together and get some sound in there to further enhance the animation. Everyone was responsible for putting adding sound to their particular shots and we agreed on a song that can play throughout the whole thing. I put all the shots together that everyone finished in After Effects. This didn't take too long, and we set some time aside on the final day to make sure we would finish.
I'm really happy with the final result, and I had a good time collaborating with my group. Here is the final product one more time, now that you know the process that went into it (or at least my portion of it), you can have a new point of view.
Over the month of December I've been in a class called Animation Production. The format of the class was a bit different than what we've had in the past because it all revolved around one big project, and every lecture period was time to get critique from the teacher and other students. I really like this format because critiques are invaluable to creating good content and it brought new ideas to the table that I otherwise may have never considered.
The project was an animation with 12 shots, where each group member was responsible for 2 shots. I had the 4th and 10th shots of this spy genre short, and I had a lot of fun with it. A big part of this project was communicating with one another, not just for critiques, but to be able to match our scenes to one another. For example, being shot 4, I had to look at shot 3 and follow that up appropriately, while also talking to the person with shot 5 and matching our beginnings and endings. There is some room for variation because every shot is a camera change, so the eye won't catch some of the smaller differences, though our group was pretty diligent about communicating and clearly planing out what to do.
Speaking of planning out, drawing out some breakdowns is very helpful before actually doing any animation on the computer. It's a good way of seeing what poses you might encounter and give you a good idea of how to tackle them.
Now its time to jump into Maya and start putting in the key poses. Here I tried to include the biggest anticipation and pull at the beginning and the contacts of each step while the box is pulled. This is still not every key pose and the timing is not done at this point, but it's a good place to discuss with group members and directors, because if the key poses aren't as they should be, the'll be harder to change later.
After each of these videos there has been at least one critique, which comes with it valuable feedback to apply to the next milestone. From the last video, I put in more breakdowns to make the motion more clear and included some moving holds to pace the animation a bit better (Having constant motion isn't always necessary, sometimes you need a break from the action). I also added more to the end because when discussing with the animator of shot 5, they wanted the head to pop up from the bottom of the window. Towards the beginning of my animation I also added a part where the hands slide off the box. This was critique feedback that was based off of our characters personality, which was a smooth cool dude who is sometimes clumsy and messes up.
In the next milestone we went out of stepped mode and into auto tangent, this came with its own necessary retimings, one of these included removing the slip off the box. I should mention that we all had set frame counts we had to stick to. Just like in a production you don't get an infinite amount of frames to enhance your animation, and more often then not, things need to get cut. As a group we decided that not every scene needed to show off the character's clumsiness, because that would get a little repetitive.
At this point you can probably tell that the box doesn't feel as heavy as it should. I noticed it too, and it was one of the biggest things I wrestled with for this shot. Like I mentioned before the frame count was set in stone, so I only had so many fames to make slow down the dragging of the box. This led to me removing much of any extra antics at the beginning, just to make the box pull look its best, because that was the most important part. That and getting the character up onto the box for the smooth transition into shot 5.
From this milestone onward I mainly focused on getting that box to actually feel heavy and adding in secondary actions (antenna and glasses movement) and facial expressions. By the final result, with the help of numerous critiques and much experimentation with the timing, I think I achieved my goal in giving the box weight. A big part of it was actually letting the elbows lock out when fully extended, and bringing the character very close to the box when pulling it towards him. After all the edits, this is what my shot 4 looked like.
Towards the second half of the class, we began working on the second shot. That came with its own set of challenges and and excitement. Check that out here.
We learned a lot in our Compositing and Scene Finishing class, the first two weeks was learning the basics of tracking in SynthEyes and Nuke, for better CG integration. Because SynthEyes was new to us, the assignments were pretty basic. But in week three, we got to go back to Nuke and have a lot of fun with assets that, when put together, make an awesome result.
The assets given to us were like a bunch of puzzle pieces that create this shot of a women in a spacesuit turning her head. We had some technical requirements we had to meet, but we also had a fair amount of creative freedom, so long as it felt realistic. Lets see what I was working with.
Many of these assets were provided to us but I decided to use some of my own in a few instances, like the suit textures. I used a metallic red to get the look of Samus's suit from the Metroid series. She also has orange on the shoulders, but I didn't need to find another texture, I just had to isolate the particular areas in nuke with a roto and apply a hue shift. This theme came up later when I made some changes to the HUD sequence.
This was probably my favorite part of the project because I made the HUD adjustments in After Effects and Photoshop and it was really fun to try and match the style of the original HUD, from the font of the numbers to the pulsing of the icons. Even getting all the adjustments in the right place was a challenge because you have to take into account some of the distortion of the UVs. Something I chose to do that really helped get me close was overlaying the UVs on the HUD and then seeing how they all line up in the render, I also drew them out flat on a piece of paper to get an idea of how much room I have to work with (this is a very quick and dirty way but I found it to be quite helpful). After all the new additions were in place I took it back to Nuke to see if they lined up. It took about two tries until I got all the pieces to line up but now it all looked good, and in not too much time.
All the things I've mentioned above don't necessarily have to happen at the beginning of the project, in fact I didn't do them until the near end, because of Nukes node based workflow, you can just replace assets and the result will update on the fly. You can work on the comp with proxy assets while others might still be working on different textures and HUDs, say for a shot where you have multiple factions of soldiers with different camos. This does have a limit though, because when it comes time to do color correction and getting everything to match a certain tone, you need the final color in there.
So let's see some of the parts of my Nuke node tree on this project:
On the left I have the original image sequence of the girl in the suit getting shuffled out into four different passes, Diffuse, Reflection, Refraction, and Specular (the main comp backdrop node extends pretty far down). To the right of that is the indirect illumination, a lighting effect that can be done in Maya, but would add a lot to render times. It can be faked in Nuke so long as you have the proper passes to work with.
Next to those I have the diffuse color which is the camo and carbon fiber that is directly visible by the eye. Remember earlier I mentioned changing the shoulder pads without needing a new texture, this is where I did it (I boxed the two nodes that helped do that).
The scratches that are visible around the suit are created using the same method as the textures but they are used as masks for the spec because in real life scratches would disrupt the specular highlights. In CG not doing this would give a "too perfect" look that could break the immersion of the film.
After the four main passes the visor finally gets merged in. Adjusting the mix in the merge node can give the effect of the visor switching on, which adds more life to the scene. Using Hue Shift nodes here can change the overall color of the visor, this is how I changed the reference from blue to green. You can choose to take this even further by rotoing certain areas to add more colors to the visor, exactly like I did with the shoulders.
Once you add in the background you can then get into the finalizing process. This is where you add color correction, white balancing, clamping values, lens dirt, lens distortion, chromatic aberrations, and other finalizing steps. This section will be different for everyone and it's a lot of tweaking until you find what's right for you, or the production you're working on. In this step I made the footage a bit too blurry somewhere, this is the main thing that stands out to me. When working on this step you want to get a variety of eyes looking at it and on a variety of monitors, because this is the final result people see.
I learned so much with this project and in this class, and I'm still learning, because even though compositing is not my main focus, I see the importance of it in all disciplines, and value of having a good understanding of these skills.
I'll see you all next time with some animations I've been working on the past few weeks.
