Advanced Character Animation Session 5 Animating & Polishing.

The aim of this session was to assess the quality of the advanced character animation project in order to make it better than the initial video that was presented to the class.This was the best way to receive constructive feedback from the class about the positive aspects about the project as well as the negative aspects about the project.One advice that was given to the class was to act out the scene as if you were the character in the story.

For the rocket mini project the aim was to make a story where the rocket was showing the emotion anger.As mentioned in the previous blog post the storyboard states that the rocket was angry as the hatch failed to open as it began it's blast off towards the ceiling.That is when the hatch failed to open for the launch causing the rocket to crash back to the ground.When the animation was made there were two cameras from difference angles recording the animation sequence.


The animation seems to be blocky in certain stages for the duration of the animation however the main area of improvement may be the movement for the rocket character.It needs more of a sense of urgency to display the fact that the hatch has stopped it from leaving the station.There is one powerful tool that can help to adjust the motion of the animation ad that is called the graph editor.That is when the graph editor played an important role as it enabled the user to make the flow of the animation smoother.

The first video is the Close up shot of the rocket blasting off in a fit of rage as the exit was blocked off by a hatch.The way that this has been represented in the short animation as the rocket's behaviour changed gradually from a calm state to more of an aggressive state.The rocket twist's it's neck from right to the left as a sign that it is preparing itself for the journey.The rest of the launch was recorded by the second camera from the top of the environment.
                                           

The second video is the top camera which witnessed the launch of the rocket along with smoke.The rocket builds the momentum up slowly up to the moment it reaches the hatch.That is when the rocket's facial expression was adjusted from being clam to more of an angry expression.The animation ends with the rocket falling to the ground instantly.

The inspiration for the animation was the cartoon Road Runner where the laws of cartoon physics were used as reference for the duration of the animation.The Unique aspect of the rocket animation is then the coyote is a symbol of the rocket starting off well but ends in an unsuccessful disaster.

Advanced Character Animation Module 4 Character Reserach

This week the main focus for the advanced character animation project was to gather reference materials using the references that were avaliable. The internet was a useful source of research as it showed thousands of images , youtube videos , and online forums. All of the resources for the project can be found using the hyperlink below.

 https://www.flickr.com/photos/103488598@N03/with/22709971939/

These are the concept arts for the protaganist which is a teddy bear.The idea for the project was to make the teddy bear seem soft and cuddly on the outside but tough on the inside. Initially the teddy bear was going to be showing off in the animation. However that would not be as funny as a teddy bear failing bursting into tears as the first machine breaks as it is rusty.

Here are are two 3D renders to show the transition from the sketch to the 3D Teddy bear that was used for the advanced character animation final year project.The teddy bear was specifically tailored to be used for animations that can be viewed by children and adults.

This is the front perspective for the 3D teddy bear character. Constructing the teddy bear was okay however the difficult part was getting the details in specific areas right on point.

This is the finished product for the 3D teddy bear which was fully modelled , textured , rigged and finally skinned.The professional comparison for the 3D teddy bear was the cartoon series Marcha and the bear.The teddy bear is not to the same standard a the bear from the cartoon series.



The teddy bear was skinned to a reasonable standard where it could perform a number of exercise monuvers for the gym pre workout,work out.The animation was going to be about a teddy bear going to the gym for a workout.Thats why the storyboard was created it was a reference plan for each stage of the animation project 

This is the standard that was visualised for the finished product of the advanced character animation project.As it is the closest example of a 3D bear shares a similar anatomy. The story has been viewed by someone else and they said that the 3D bear remained them of this particular animation.

Advanced Character Animation Module Session 3 Body language/ Character Animation / Peer Assessment Feedback Exercise

The aim of this week's session was to understand the importance of body language with regards to character animation. Body language focus's on an individual's characteristics in order to get a fair idea about their personality. There are many twenty five varieties of body language to choose for your character's personality. The difficult part is trying to get your character to relate to the members of the target audience.

.http://listverse.com/2007/11/08/25-examples-of-body-language/.

A scene was provided by the lecturer as practise for the final project. As the aim of the animation was to enable the rocket to show it's emotions through it's body language and eyes language. The story is about a rocket who wants to blast through the hatch but unfortunately it fails to open at the right moment. This results in the rocket being damaged by the concrete which covered the rocket. This was a great exercise as it transferred the knowledge from the current task to use for the final project.

After reviewing the storyboard more than once , it was difficult to figure out how to make the teddy bear seem confident as it went to the gym. Then it occurred that one of the many reasons why people goes to the gym is to unleash stress in a productive way. This is the angle that the story was based on for the advanced character animation module. To increase the amount of research material a Pinterest board had been constructed to gather visual references of people confident and angry. This was a real advantage as it gave the teddy bear character that edge that it needed to be believable for the target audience. Just below is the hyperlink for the emotions reference.

https://uk.pinterest.com/aahmed0739/emotions/

The best way to understand the relation between emotions and characters animation is to act the sequence out as if you are the protagonist in the environment. For an example in Polar Express there are the 3D characters in the story along with the actors in real life who are the driving force. They are the ones who are using motion capture to give the animated characters realistic movements and voice overs to make the characters facial expressions flow with the words.


To gather as much references for the angry character task many references were found with the assistance of YouTube videos and Pinterest page. But the most effective page was the you tube videos as they show the instant transformation from a person being clam to a person who has lost control of their anger. As you will see there are a number of compliations of people who have lose their nerves for many reasons. All of this research helped to develop the emotions displayed by the rocket character.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkogiJVG9TvG5jfgsVNUKb-YWqDm45RvK

The first video displays the emotion that the rocket has as it goes through the ceiling.The anger is not instant it builds up to moment when the hatch fails to open as the rocket began it's ascension.If this emotion come across in a successful way then it is a huge success if not then it will be a easy to fix.

The second video is another example where there are many moments in the film where people have expressed their anger through their body language and apparent in their facial expressions.There is one moment in this clip when the tall officer orders everyone to sit down , everyone sat down out of fear .The officer was very tall , strong and had a powerful atmosphere which make him dominate everyone.

                                    

Here are two playlists for the rocket shipaniumatipn please check them out and feel free to comment on this blog with any enquires or constructive comments.

Advanced Character Animation Module session 2 Storyboard – Pose to Pose Presentation

 At the start of the advanced character animation process the first step is to sketch a spider diagram with all of the initial ideas for the project. Then decide which one of the ideas would be suitable for the advanced character animation module project. Once the idea has been confirmed it is important to start gathering as much references for the project as possible.

The second step will be the most important aspect of the production as it involves research and development of the idea. The research and development process applies to all disciplines. The research part of the advanced character animation module may have taken roughly a week.

Once all of the research elements have been gathered the next step of the process is to communicate the idea to the target audience in a visual way. Before creating a storyboard it was vitial to understand the difference between a successful storyboard and an unsuccessful storyboard. That is why the lecturer decided to gives us a presentation on what makes a great storyboard and an unsatisfactory storyboard. Taking all of the information into account the student began to sketch out three storyboards then analysed them to make sure that they were exactly what the student wanted to communicate to the target audience. Afterwards the storyboards were scanned into the computer where they were taken into Adobe Photoshop CS6 to be edited for the presentation as well as the online diary.




 The first storyboard is simply introducing the protagonist who is a teddy at the gym. The teddy bear had an aim which was to build it's body up. The storyboard goes onto show the excitement displayed by the teddy bear when it's eyes  have spotted the equipment. The storyboard goes on to show the pre workout that the teddy bear engages in before the real workout.

 The second storyboard began with the end of the pre workout as it stopped the push up exercise. The reason that the teddy bear had stopped it's exercise was due to the fact that it had spotted the pull up machine. The teddy bear slowly made it's way across the room towards the pull up machine.

The final storyboard displays the moment when the teddy prepares itself for the first intense moment. However the moment it began it's epic journey of building muscle it was the very same moment that journey ended .The reason that the exercise ended here was all because the pull up machine was old , even fragile so it was never going to last long. The storyboard was fairly easy enough to make but the difficult part was creating the facial expressions for each key frame.

        

Both of these films display the type of power, posture , pose, balance , weight and overall appearance that would increase the quality for the advance character animation project.All of these element would enable the teddy bear to have a omnipotent ambience about itself.

Advanced Character Animation Module Research - Present - Evaluate

The aims and objectives for the Advanced Character Animation module is to understand the principles of animation ,and emotions then finally apply the knowledge to the 3D characters for the project .To be more specific enable the viewer to become more engaged with either the protagonist or the secondary characters.This will be a long process as there will be a task to complete every week and each task will have an element that requires more explanation and understanding.Here is the production time table that will explain the process for the next thirteen weeks.

That is why it is important to engage in as much intensive research as possible to get the best out of the tasks which will contribute to the final project.The most effective way will be to use the online social media websites ( Flickr , Pinterest , Facebook ) to gather as much reference materials as possible etc.If you want to be able to view the research materials there will be hyperlinks which will will take you to the social media websites. 

Flickr Page (https://www.flickr.com/photos/103488598@N03/) , 

Pinterest Page (https://uk.pinterest.com/aahmed0739/advanced-character-animation-research/)  

The social media websites have managed to inspire the development of the advanced character animation project.Now it is time to discuss the idea generation for the advanced character animation project.The brief was open which meant that it could have been anything within means. The lecturer gave some brilliant advice which was to mix two elements together that don't go together at all.The teddy bear which is known to be soft goes to the gym to gain some serious muscle.As the bear began it's pre work out it fails to get pass the first exercise machine which is the multi use exercise machine as the bear fails to achieve the first chin pull up.

  Before the project was on the way everyone was informed that the proposed idea will require a great amount of organisation and the same amount of focus which will primarily be on the weekly tasks.That enthusiasm will be the main driving force that will truly bring out the best quality for the finished product.  

 Towards the end of the first session the class were given the task of critiquing the trailer from the animation called the secret life of pets.The class were split into groups of three / four student per group.The aims and objective was to find out the intention of the cat and how the cat was displaying the emotions through the chosen frame. Everyone knew that the cat was resisting the temptation to eat the turkey but failed miserably. There were many guesses as to what enabled the viewers to guess what the obvious factors were. Some said it was the eyes , facial expression,the body language and so on. All of the answers provided by the class were correct as they described the behaviour of the cat towards the turkey.

Lighting & Rendering - Lighting

This week the task was to understand how to solve the problem of turning a highly laminate material to a normal material. A number of steps were required to reach the stage when the material would appear to be normal.The first step required an alpha channel to be incorporated into the image attributes.To achieve this the hyper graph had to be used to navigate around the material attributes.  

The first render of the Bradford University flag on the ground has a translucent material around it creating a glowing effect covering the flag.The first take was to find the first material to lower the intensity of the glow.Then replace it with a Blinn material and upload the flag material to replace the first material. Unfortunately there was a problem with the plane as the material required to create the gradient was not applied until the end as it was not located .

After the material has been applied to the material the next step was to incorporate an alpha channel texture to the plane object to make the red colour stand out as it is the dominant colour. This way the colour red will be more clear and realistic.

This is a render of the flag once the alpha channel has been applied to the flag material which is getting to the stage where it almost resembles a flag in real life.The final step was to

This is another angle of the flag which shows the transformation from the original flag material to the final flag material.

The final render is the final product which is the University of Bradford Flag somewhere in the mountains.To improve the final product another texture could be incorporated to the three dimensional environment to give it more of a realistic apperance.

This is the environment which was created using the chromakey method. This scene shows the kingdom of Gondor in all of its glory embedded into the mountains.

Introduction to Lighting & Rendering .

The aim of the rest lesson for the lighting & Rendering class was to gradually become acquainted with the lighting & Rendering module.The best way was to create a three dimensional plane using a texture for the plane along with a bump map to create the gradient for the plane. 

The first step was to obtain a texture of the ground from the internet then save it onto the computer as a .tga file as it is more effective than a JEPGE file & time effective with regards to rendering time. The reason why this texture has been chosen for the three dimensional placement is because it possessed the texture that was required for the three dimensional plane.

Here is the file that was provided for the plane's material to give it the correct texture. But to make it more realistic the UV's had to be tweaked a few times to replicate the ground.As the texture appears to be very generic for the ground's gradient.

This is the final render of the plane which has been constructed in Autodesk Maya 2016.There is room for improvements that could enhance the overall apperace of the three dimensional plane.Overall the final product is satisfactory so the student can not complain as they have learned a new way to create a three dimensional plane.

This is an example of a three dimensional displacement map that has been incorporated to a floor plane to create the texture and to give it the required gradient.