Ankitha Rao

May 9, 202311 min read

Animation!!!!

09/05/2023 Character Animation for Film and Games - Final Assignment Blog

Hello, I am back with again with another blog entry, in this post I will be writing about the process of creating the different animations (A stylized Walk Cycle, Facial Performance and the Game Play Pack with 4 different animations) for the final assignment for this teaching block and what principles, concepts and my understanding of the animations and may more things and the whole process of creating the animation.

Stylised Walk Cycle:

The very first thing I did before creating the animation was what type of stylised version of walk cycle would I would be creating and what rig I would be using to create the animation. Below is the process of creating this animation.

Research and Development

I choose the Tom Rig for the stylized walk cycle and choose to make him look drunk, after choosing the characteristic of the animation I choose the reference for it and did the analysis for it, so I can get the key poses and the line of action or any arcs that were present in the reference.

The reference is from Kelvin Perry 100 Walks:

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxSa9kM6YLDqXzGPqEC2Ia2aGWsB9TLxKR

Below is the Image for the Tom Rig

Blocking and Blocking Plus:

Then I started creating the creating the key poses of the walk cycle which are the

Contact,
Down,
Pass,
Up
contact Mirror
and Mirror the down and pass and up for the rest of the cycle and made sure the first and the last pose is the same.

After this I started creating the in - Between for the poses wherever they were necessary and finished with the blocking plus for this animation. At this stage I had gotten a lot of feedback from my professors and external contacts to make the necessary changes to the animation, like the weight shift and then adding more In be tween's and pushing the poses more to make it look dynamic and then working on the line of action. This whole time the animation was in stepped mode, this is because we don't have any interpolation between the posed and we can see it without any strange/unintentional automatic interpolation.

Blocking and feedback

Video of 1st Stage Blocking

Feedback Given by Kshitij

Feedback Given by Aditya: Associate Animation Asset Specialist at Rockstar Games

After getting all the feedback I started working on them and made the changes which were given to me as feedback then I started, then I started animation the tail of the using the overlapping action principle and used the timing and spacing principle for the tail to offset the keyframes and to give it a nice and smooth flow for the tail, and I have used this method for the body as well so it looks more dynamic.

As it is a cycle I kept a constant expression on the using the global offset feature of Anim bot keep the expression throughout all the keyed frames.

Polish:

After making sure all the poses are correct and there no funny thing happening in the animation and there are sufficient in between, then the whole animation was converted to spline tangent, then it was working in the graph editor which was more of tweaking the animation to make it smooth and if necessary, removing the key frames or adding it. After making sure the spline is smooth and there is no need for any more tweaking or changes, I then started working on the look of the surrounding, making it ready for creating a good play blast like creating a background for the character and adding the lights to make the scene lit.

Below is the Final Animation for the Stylized Walk Cycle

Lip Sync and Facial performance:

The very first thing I did before creating the animation was decide what type of performance I would create, at first I wanted to recreate my harry potter scene with an cartoony rig to make it look a bit different, then I thought I would not have that much appeal since I am just recreating the scene and it would not even have a context since its a scene somewhere in the middle and it did not have an beginning or end, so I choose to create my own Dialogue which was a part of my daily life and the dialogue which I decided to use was Huh.....Hey!! Don't Touch My Pizzzaaaaa!!!.

The story is basically where she saw her friend Russel touching her pizza which was lying on the coffee table, so she shouted at him not to touch her pizza.

The Inspiration to get this dialogue came from my friend who suggested me to use the everyday scenario for the performance then a movie dialogue or something similar. This was the process of selecting the dialogue and the story behind it.

Research and Development

After, selecting the dialogue then I choose the Neka Rig for the performance and then recorded the reference by acting and saying the dialogue myself and then I analyzed the reference, like find the key poses and then find the key expressions and the arcs for the lips and the line of action or any overlapping actions. While I used the reference I shot as starting point for my poses I used many other references for the mouth and posed of the body since I had to exaggerate the reference.

Neka RIG

Shot From the Reference which I Shot

Blocking and Blocking Plus:

Then I started creating the creating the key poses for the body first and then I started working on the facial expressions and after blocking I started adding in-betweens for the body and then the facial expressions, after this I had gotten feedback from Johana that I should add a bit more poses in the beginning for a better story and push the poses more and also to work on the hands to give it a better silhouette.

Since I started blocking in different animation layers, when and keyed all the controllers, when I added in-betweens and changed it into spline, I faced a lot of jitters in the animation and it was very slow, so I baked the animation and used a single layer to create the animations then to make sure the jitters are gone, I deleted most of the key frames in the body since it had most of the jitters in the arms and only kept the key poses for the body and then I stared adding the in between just for those which poses or expressions and deleted a lot key frames to make the jitters go and also moved the keyframes to reduce the slowness of the animation.

Below is the Video for Blocking.

Feedback Given by Johana Olivia - Technical Animator at Good Boost

After I got the feedback, I started working on the feedback which I had got, so I started adding more of the key poses in the beginning to give it a better story and then I started creating more in between for the body to make it smooth, then I started animating the earrings and the hair as secondary animation and using the principle of overlapping action and arcs for this, and pushing the key poses and making the animation more dynamic in terms of body movement and facial expressions, I checked the silhouettes to make sure the poses are clean and understandable and not all muddled up, after this I choose to work on the poses of the hands and the fingers, even though they are simple I wanted to make sure they are clear and understandable.

Polish:

After making sure all the poses are correct and there no funny thing happening in the animation and there are sufficient in between, then the whole animation was converted to spline tangent, then I added the which I had recorded and made sure the audio and the poses match correctly, I had to do some tweaking of the frames to make sure the audio and animation match. When I converted the animation to spline I faced with a lot of jitter and pops, for this I had to delete a number of key frames to make the jitters go, since I was keying all the controllers when I creating the in between for the expressions and the lip sync they were the causes of the jitters in the body hence the deleting of the key frames helped in this situation and solving it.

Then it was working in the graph editor which was more of tweaking the animation to make it smooth and if necessary removing the key frames or adding it. After making sure the spline is smooth and there is no need for any more tweaking or changes. Then I worked on the tweaking of the mouth shapes by using the phonetic mouth chary and diving the words into phonetics to make use of the mouth shapes.

Then I Started working on the Scene setup, at first I used the diner setup, but it was not matching accurately as i wanted, so I decided to use a living room with another character and used the over the shoulder shot make my Neka as the main character in the shot, with this setup its gives a bit more context to the dialogue and a beginning and an end to the story

Below is the Image of the Scene Set-up to give the story for the character - image of the diner.

Final Scene setup for the shot Living room - Neka and Russel.

Final Scene Set with Lighting

Below is the Final Animation for the Facial performance

Game Play Pack Animation:

For this part of the Assignment we had to create 4 animations as a set, they were Idle, Walk, Run, and we could either do Dive, Doge, Jump or Dash and for the last one I chose to do a vertical Jump.

Research and Development

After finding the references which I wanted to use, I analysed each one of the references and then started finding the key poses, I also reference the animators survival kit for the poses of the walk, run and jump as for the idle animation I choose a reference from the internet. Then I Found the rig I wanted use for the shot, The rig I used is the Spider Gwen Rig by Alex Samar. Below are the images from the reference analysis.

Spider Gwen RIG

Blocking and Blocking Plus and Feedback for the shots:

For this each of the animations were created in separate files. I started blocking for each of the shot , like creating the key poses first for each of the shot, by creating the main key poses using the animators survival kits reference, and then I started adding in between for each of the shot and when I sought the feedback for these animations I was told to add a more hip movement for the walk cycle and fix the snaps for all of the animations, same was said to my run cycle and the vertical jump as well and for the idle animation I was told to add a bit more of body movement overall as it was looking to still.

Walk Cycle

Run Cycle

Idle Animation

Jump Cycle

Polish:

After making sure all the poses are correct and there no funny thing happening in the animation and there are sufficient in between, then the animations were converted to spline tangent, then it was working in the graph editor which was more of tweaking the animation to make it smooth and if necessary removing the key frames or adding it. After making sure the spline is smooth and there is no need for any more tweaking or changes I then started working on the look of the surrounding, making it ready for creating a good play blast.

Below is the Final Animation for the Facial performance

Creating The Playblast For All the Animations:

For this I followed the tutorial on the canvas, for creating the playbalst I had to used the Maya Hardware Renderer, and made use of the screen space ambient occlusion to increase the appeal of the surroundings and the rig as well, also used lights to create the right atmosphere and the emotion for the shot, and also used the anti aliasing for blending the pixel information and getting a clearer render quality. Then I hid all the screen ornaments such as lights controllers HUD's , Manipulators, Nurbs Curves, Controllers, Surfaces any IK Handles or any of the Nurbs controllers and the grid. This is the method I have followed for creating the Playblast for all the shots.

Then I took the play blasts for the walk Run and Jump and even the stylized walk cycle one in different perspectives for example Side view, Front View and the perspective View as different play blast videos to premier pro and combined the 3 views of the different views into one single Video.

Self Critique:

This was an Assignment which took a lot of focus and understanding the different concepts and principles of animation, when I first started this project it was very hard as I could not apply some of the principles to animations which I was creating, then I stared watching the internal tutorials like the walk cycle one to create the base for my stylized walk cycle and then when I got the feedback from Constantinos and Kshitij they told me to focus more on pushing the poses and they body mechanics of the character, because of that I started studying the body machines for the walk cycle like the weight shift and overlapping action for the body using the reference which I had took, and then I started studying the pendulum animation for the tail, like the follow through and off set of the key frames for a smooth motion.

While creating the stylized walk cycle I had to learn a lot and then work on them to make the animation better, Since I I had to scarp and start the animation aging a few times, to get the look and feel which I wanted to achieve, even now I am still not satisfied with the animations. I followed the similar procedure for the facial performance, for this I had to study a lot about the mouth shapes and the phonetics arcs and the jaw movements for this animation, and also pushing the poses more for exaggeration of the animation. For the game play pack i had it a bit easy since I knew the principles and i had to just implement them to the animation.

I felt that I took a lot of time creating these animations Since the Stylized walk Cycle also took me a more than 20 days to finish it, I felt that I had done a good job in starting the assignment earlier, I started this assignment in the mid of march, and I could these shots an ample amount of time to create it block it and to polish the shot. the whole time frame for creating 3 shots took me about 2 months to finish these animations, the stylized walk cycle took me about a good 20 days to finish it, and the facial performance took me another 20 days and the game play pack took me about a week to finish it.

when I was working on these I thought I was taking a lot of time to complete one animation, I would like to work faster in the future and not give so much time on one animation, the most time I gave was on the blocking stage of the animation and gave less time for polishing the facial and the gameplay pack, in the future I would like give more tome to the polishing stage as well.

With these in mind I would like to work more on the body mechanics, exaggeration of the poses and get a deeper understanding of principles of animations and implementing them in future. I would also like to focus on the action out the references by my own, I had took the references for all of the animations except the facial performance from the internet, with this in mind i would like to shoot all the references for my future project on my own and also learn some acting as well.

On a final note I would like to add that I still have a lot to learn and I understood one that that you will never be satisfied with the animation and you will want to keep on perfecting it and you need to know when to stop, so i would like to learn that, like when and where I have to stop and also like to understand different approaches to animations from different perspectives and make an approach which I can make it my own.

Thanks!!

I will be back with another blog soon.

References and 3rd party Credits:

Stylized Walk Cycle