This page is all the posts and week-by-week updates of the Computer Animation Fundamentals module within the first term. Both Serra and George's posts will be separated into two sections. Weeks for each section are colour coded as below.
Immersion M1.1 – Computer Animation Fundamentals Section
Animation M1.1 – Computer Animation Fundamentals Section
M1.1 Computer Animation Fundamentals Section: IMMERSION
Week 1 – Introduction
I began by searching for inspiration, things I had seen, done or experienced recently. At the beginning of term, I went to see ABBA Voyage before the course started and in the show, They played two short films created for the songs Eagle and Voulez-Vous. They were amazing and I would love to go back to watch it all again. These animations inspired me to create this adventure for this fantastical creature, a mixture of this fairy-like creature and futuristic Egyptian architecture. In my artistic past, I've been drawn to historical time periods as a means for inspiration. Greek/Roman architecture is usually my favourite time period, as shown in images of some collaborative work below. This time however, I was inspired by Shynola's on this particular project that I thought of changnig that up and going with Egyptian. As this film is part of the Abba Voyage show in London, there is very little footage other than what is released by the studio and director behind its making.
The simplicity of most of the eniviroments allowed the Nexus team to create a visually stunning film based on ABBA's music. The textures of the rendering and the lighting and colours of all the scenes of both shorts are incredible. Although I wanted to keep mine to more of a 3D look rather than a painterly style, I think the the idea formulated from the inspiration I have gathered will give me a good motive to push myself to learn more about unreal's film techniques which I haven't used before.
These were the first itterations of the storyboard based on the short films from ABBA Voyage. I wanted the character to have a lare part in the story however, as time went on, I knew realisticly it would take too long to learn Unreal in the new way and
Week 2 – Research and Unreal Engine
Creating a collage helped to solidify my visual ideas down to a small collection of key points. I slowely moved away from the futurism of the original ideas to more magical/fantastical instead. Keeping the oasis was something I had always wanted to create. In past projects, these scenes tended to get scrapped for different reasons so it was a part of the project I wanted to make the focus. In addition, I loved the coloumns in old Egyptican architecture, as well as the iconic pyramids and wanted to find a way to incorperate both. By keeping the theme Egptian but having that fantasy element brings a whimsicle side to the architecture of Egypt.
Storyboard:
Having changed my idea from having this Egyptian, futuristic theme to being fantasy-themed, I feel I have created the best iteration of the storyboard for this small project. The video would average about 40 seconds, possibly more but for now, I am very, very pleased with how the storyboard looks. I made it achievable but also did not go too easy with its planning. I very much intend to use my pre-existing skills in ZBrush and Maya and bring them into Unreal Engine.
Week 3 – Cinematography in Unreal & Development
Over the last 4 years, I would try and collect all the 'Free of the Month' assets, materials, effects, blueprints and rigs for Unreal Engine. I had used Unreal a few times for different projects, including my VR story for my 3D FMP. Having access to these gave me a good idea on how much modelling I would have to do later on. Thankfully, lots of the items and materials I had access to helped bring my vision to life.
As I had not used Unreal Engine much, I decided to import all the assets that I had in my library. Only choosing the ones I felt would be useful for building the world I create. These were just some of the general foliage and building meshes and materials I would be using. About 60% of the unreal assets were from AleksandrIvanov and his Stylized Egypt pack that I got as part of the Free for the Month assets at some point.
I used my concept art to try and capture the look of the environment. Each shot needed to look similarly to the storyboard, so I layed out the general shape and carved into the ground to create the pond using the landscaping tool in UE. Furthermore, I added animated water into the lake and used some of the assets available to carve and create the scene. Overall, I am very happy with how accurate it looked to the storyboard.
Week 4: Materials and Character Modelling
Before starting the course, I was practicing my anatomy and stylized bodies. I created this base with the intention of finding an interesting character to create. Fast forward to September and first term had begun and I knew I had to use this model base for my character. The body was adaptable and was already ready for the changes made for the elf character I had in mind.
This is the iteration I created based off of the storyboard. The character is going to have effects covering her body so she won’t have much texturing which is coming from the model itself. I’m very happy with how well she came out looking.
As I wanted to keep the body simple, I decided to finish her model is Maya. That was I could block out each of the clothing items I wanted and keep them as low poly as possible it minimises errors with rigging and weightpainting.
The intention also was to not add any textures apart from different sections of mesh so they could be textured in Unreal Engine. I wanted to have the character come off as a figment of the mind but also an actual being that has interactions with the world. A fairy without the wings. Therefore she was left alone texture-wise.
Once the mesh was ready and retopologised using quad draw in Maya, I used the advanced skeleton plugin to create the IK and FK rigs.
As I had decided to add a ponytail to this character, I also decided to give it bones, this would allow the hair to be animated, either by hand or dynamically. I would have preferred to have it be dynamic as I was baking the animation in Maya, the hair would have had to have reacted to the shaking of the environment in some scenes so we left it as hand-animated.
I also had several issues with weightpainting. When I tried to add the hair bones to the hierarchy root the weights would change on the chest, meaning I had to go in and re-paint them several times. Overall, I’m very happy with how this model turned out.
Week 5: Cinematography and Effects
After having the character finished, I could then move on to placing all the camera in the correct position in the sequencer. Total cameras came to 12 although some are reused for diferent shots. By placing in all the camera, I could then see how long each shot was in frames. Knowing how many frames a shot is means I can animate the character in Maya and set its animation length to match the shot that particular animation is going in. As well as knowing the animation time lenght, I can also see how the whole footage is feeling in general. If there was something that needed changing or tweeking, it was now. For effects, I tried dabbling into Niagara systems to play about with the particle systems. Niagara is very powerful for what it can produce in UE. Thankfully I had another FOTM bundle that I could lean on and look into to learn more about the system. The ring Niagara instance I used, as well as the glowing dust in the air to create more life. In the background as the earth quake is happening due to the pyramid, there is some smoke also coming out from behind the rocks. It isn't very noticable and something that I might either enhance and embrace more for my next UE project or simply remove them to save computing power.
The two images display the enviromental fog and its imapct on the scene. Without the fog in the scene, the atmostphere feels oversaturated, quite unnatural. Even though the scene is stylized, that doesn't mean that I want the scene to feel something that couldn't feel real. As well as that, the fog aslo helps lower the field of view more in the low lighting, allowing for the spotlights to really shine when the light passes through.
Week 6: Animating
Each Animation was constructed, baked and exported in Maya. This step actually took the longest as I had many issues exporting into Unreal Engine, many due to my lack of knowledge of exporting baked rigs and meshes.
I wanted to animate in Maya just out of familiarity. I knew how to rig and weight paint if anything went wrong wit the model and so I would have more control. Therefore I had no issues when creating the rig, only exporting it into Unreal.
The issues I was having was mainly due to the two different import locations in Unreal Engine. I had used the main import button that’s in the engine to add to the content launcher, however, for some reason, I kept using File > Import from FBX, which is not the same thing. I was struggling so hard to figure out why I was having this issue, and I couldn’t find an answer. After re-rigging the model several times thinking it was the rig’s issue, then animating several times, only to have the same result. I knew it was something I was doing in UE. I figured it out after so much time had passed. A wonderful learning experience.
In the end, all the animations were imported in. I however wish that I had used a different version of the base mesh as the one in the final had the eyes exported as the same material, meaning I couldn’t add my glowing eyes to the final render without re-adding all the animations back into the sequencer. Overall, I am very pleased with all the animations.
Week 7 & 8: Lighting & FX
The scene overall doesn’t have lots of crazy VFX. I dipped into Niagra for a short while to add the little glowing orbs to add to the atmosphere, as well as the glowing ring around the base of the pond. The glowing been of light was created using a cylinder with an emissive material that was keyframes at different sizes. I use this effect a lot when it came to adding FX to the environments.
As said in the effects week, the fog was also used in conjunction with blue spotlights. I wanted the lighting to be minimal and have the glowing objects and the character take the stage. The overall aura came off very nicely with this combination, making the scene feel magical.
Week 9: Rendering and Editing
All the audio I collected was using a royal free sound website called Pixabay.com. They have a large library of sounds, foli and music that can be used with no copyright. I made sure to pick my sound carefully as audio plays a large part in how we experience a location, get its atmosphere. I have given two examples that I spent a while choosing. One is the chimes for the orb at the beginning and the other is the earthquake sound I used for when the pyramid is emerging from the ground.
When editing all the footage down together, I knew I really wanted to layer the earthquake scene with audio to make is feel as authentic as possible. In the end there were 6 audio tracks layered over the image sequence visuals, which is a lot. I also changed the levels in volume on all the audios so that some sounds were more prominant at different parts, as well as adding fade outs onto each audio bit to give a smoother transition between some shots.
Week 10: Final Video
M1.1 – Computer Animation Fundamentals Section: Animation
Week 1 – Bouncing Ball
This week, we got straight into using Maya 2024. My main 3D program is Maya (other than ZBrush) and was the primary tool I used at UAL before. However, just because I used maya doesn't mean I was good at animating in the software. The only real animation experience I had going into this year was one module from 2nd Year (see video below) and motion capture clean-up from my BA Animation FMP. This module was one I was very much looking forward to learning and expanding my 2D knowledge and theory into practice.
After introductions with the class, using the bouncing ball wig George linked us, he gave us a brief tutorial on how to animate in Maya utilizing the animation graph and gave us the task of creating our own bouncing ball project in Maya.
To begin, I started by drawing a reference using a video from YouTube. Once I completed this, I animated it to get the correct timing for the squash and stretch. I chose to do a 2D version as it can help understand what is happening frame by frame.
I animated the ball bounce in Procreate and used it as a reference for each point the ball touched the ground. From there I went into maya and began animating. Starting each arc making sure each extreme pose is in the correct frame.
Thankfully George didn't have much feedback to give for the bouncing ball, which I'll take as a good thing. Some minor tweeks for when the ball landed could be made and making sure the ball always landed on the base line.
Week 2: Pendulum
This week we began by talking about the 12 principles of animation: 1. Timing and Spacing 2. Squash and Stretch 3. Anticipation 4. Ease In and Ease Out 5. Exaggeration 6. Arcs 7. Follow Through and Overlapping Action 8.Solid Drawing 9. Appeal 10. Secondary Action 11. Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose 12. Staging Having known most of these fundamentals of animation, I was good to have a refresher, especially since I learned these principles in the context of 2D, which is similar obviously, but I felt a struggle when it came to visualising how they looked in terms of the graph editior.
Once again, thankfully, no major comments. Small tweeks:
When starting, the bottom of the pendulum needs to stay stationary as the kenetic energy being transfered from the base down the tail hasn't kicked in. He also mentioned about the drag once the base is in full motion. It needed to rise higher to depict the speed of the pendulum moving across the screen.
The end swinging motions of the tip of the pendulum goes stiff rather quickly, and so just to add some more swinging to allow the energy to disapate, coming to a slow conclusion.
Week 3: Tail Blocking:
Following on from the ball a coupe weeks ago, we were tasked with animating a ball with a tale.
The blade of grass was something george mentioned about drawing to get a better understanding of the C & S shapes made by different things. I try and remember it all as waves. Cause and reaction. Imagine a mexican wave, that is how I remember the arcs and curves in animating. I drew mine in procrate but also used my arms to immitate the movement of the tail. I have decided to keep the theme of adding a spin in most of my work to keep a small theme cosistant with most of the animations I've produced for this module.
Week 4: Tail Spline:
This is a good example of the waves I was trying to recreate. I constantly used references of squirals as well as my own arm to remind myself thow the movement will flow through the tail.
This week, there was tweeks needing to be made for the tail on the jump landing and the final tale wiggle. Although there was changes there could have been, George also said that if the animatio makes sense or looks right, not to worry.
Week 5: Weight Change:
This week was the first week I started doing 2D and 3D pose/reference studies. I made a few different poses, drawing and in Maya.
The drawing is of one of my original characters that I've had for a few years Valorie. I chose poses that represented her character, a don't care about no-one attitude, bad-ass, misunderstood antagonist.
I believe the three 3D poses displayed good lines of action. George did comment on these and told me to push the poses further and make them more defined than the reference images. To make the poses more interesting.
This week was a weight shift. At first, I wanted to do a cute spin on one foot but thought that would be too complicated, but then instead I accidently done animation. After thinking about it and getting George's feedback, I decided to do add to it to make it more of a weight change. To make it a weight change, the full weight of the character needs to be on one leg, to the other. This will show the ball moving its weight onto the opposite side of the characters line of balance. To begin with I wanted to have the ball with legs do a jump into a balance. In my mind I thought it would be a good was to show off the weight change with balance. However by adding a jump, there wasn't much of a shift in the weight's direction. Although it wasn't exactly a weight change, I still like how the stepped animation came out, as well as the first spline itteration.
The final itteration of this week's task was the best version by far. To make the character apply it's weight to the other side, I made the character strike a pose at the end of the animation to get the weight change in. The ball will stick the landing and then move its body to the direction it just travelled.
This was the final outcome. I wouldn't say I was the most pleased with it, I would go back and edit the final second to drag out the movement a lot more, to show that the ball body would be heavier than what is shown in the video. In addition, I feel the movement between changing legs was very stiff and so I would slow it down to be able to see the animation more clearly.
Week 6: Walk Cycle Stepped:
I'm on the internet quite a lot. Memes are a big inspiration when it comes to my humour and lingo. This week's pose is no different. I decided to do several poses all overlaped. These are all in ones scene together and took me a while, with George commenting to push the expressions even more, especially with hte one in the front leaning back.
After having watched George's tutorial on the walk cycle, I began working on it almost immedietly. I had only ever attempted to do a walk cycle, back in 2019 while applying for universities. The program back then was MikuMikuDance (MMD) so it will be much nicer to have IK's to help with movement. The feedback I got from George was good but to make the ball's movement less gittery. The stepped looked more like a diamond than a figure of 8, as well as from the side view making sure the feet dont look like their sliding, they need to stay in the exact same stop to be realistic and not like they're walking on ice.
Week 7: Walk Cycle Spline:
More Memes! This week I was inspired by the UAL memes instagram page. I decided to do this scene as it allowed me to use a combination of different models, such as bony and ball with legs. I also did include the chair for the bottom pose as I thought it would have looked weird if I hadn't. Very pleased with this one. My favourite is the mum and daughter at the back, the child in my version is also quite funny.
This week was all spline. The walk cycle was proving to be a bit more challenging and so I finished my spline and submitted it for review and made alterations to it to make it less cartoon walky. The bounce in the initial spline was a bit overboard and so in the final version, the knee bends aren't too prominant. For the final outcome, I'm very proud of this walk cycle. With it being one of the most difficult animation actions to animate, I am pleased with how bouncy and flippy its feet are. It gives a little character to the ball which is nice.
Week 8: Body Mechanics Plan:
Body mechanics is one of the important animation tests that animators do to test their full body movement animations. To gather the best references, its advised to record your footage from two different angles, which is what I did... at my work... before it opened... wearing Tracer leggings... But its all in the name of animation!
The references allowed me to create a reference sheet with basic key poses and what their timings would be. As most of the legs would be hidden behind the sofa, I wasn't too worried about doing another walk cycle. George also said it would be fine even to fut it all out and start from 60 is in the immage below. However I wanted to give myself a challenge, and so I decided to do the whole animation from start to finish.
This animatic helped me see that core silhouettes in each of the core parts of the reference. It gave me a better visual cue to see how the body is meant to be positioned, if its rotated funny or not rotated enough. As well as helping with positioning, it game me a chance to see if differnet parts could be exagerated to give the movement more life. Although I tried my best with the references recorded, I am no actor and so using my intuition, I looked to see if any part needed slowing down or speeding up. Eventually coming to the conclution that its at a good pace and I will see later on when blocking if there are more things such as hand movements need more exageration.
Week 9: Body Mechanics Blocking:
So when I asked for a challenge, I may have eaten my words. This week was very challenging. Blocking this animation sequence was very time consuming. Originally I had finished the blocking but wasn't happy with it. After reviewing it, both George and I agreed it needed to be re-done. Thankfully, the new version is 100x better and one I'm very pleased with.
There was still work to be done on it, pushing poses more, rotating the chest to follow the direction the body is wanting to face. At one point I hadn't realised I'd broken the ankle of the model during the animating. Little pieces here and there but the bulk of the blocking had been finished, and it would soon be time of spline.
Week 10: Body Mechanics Spline:
There was a lot of work still to do on the spline. George's feedback was to get the walk cleaner, work on the movement from standing to sitting and the head direction. However, it took a while to get the spline into a place I was happy with. I was having lots of issues with the speed and distance of the curve around the sofa. In the end, I did get it but only after making lots of little changes to the height of the hips. The overall animation also got better with the walk behind the sofa. Although it wasn't going to be scene from the angle I had set the camera, I still to make sure that I was setting a high standard for myself by making sure the animation was clean. Overall the final animation is something that I'm very happy with. If I was to look at if forever there would always be things I could change but for my first time animating something this complicated was an achievement and a nice milestone in my animating studies.