Last Minute Post - Inbetween

I wanted to make this post right at the end before deadline, just to show a collaboration shot between my and y team mate, which he was struggling to get done on time as well as the other stuff we still needed to do, therefore it was decided that I would take the shot and do the Inbetweens as well as the colour before the hand in so we would have the final shot.

This is a picture of 1 of my inbetweens in his shot. I tried my best to stay true to his style of drawing as much as possible so it would be consistent. Here is the final shot which stemmed from this;

Talk this way - Lip Sync

For this study task it asked us to create a lip sync a long with an audio track which was already provided for us. I chose a 5 second audio track which I thought would add a lot of emotion to my phonemes I had to make to create the sync. I enjoyed making the mouth shapes using the reference pictures which were also provided. I found this task to be a challenge because I usually struggle to sit down and pay close attention to audio tracks which are linked to my drawings, as I usually like to have music playing in the background, so sitting in silence was a hard task.

I am proud of how the lip sync turned out, however on my player it seems to be slightly out of sync, even though on the after effects file it matches up perfectly.

This was the dope sheet I made for the lip sync task, regardless of my messy writing it made sense to me and allowed me to match up the lips to the sound with ease, although I feel as though I would have been better off doing the task by ear. The time remapping tool on after effects was used on this task, and I feel like there was a lot of wasted time in that. I feel like doing it by ear would have saved a lot of time without a lot of effort to map out the lips to the time as well. 

Colouring - Aaaand Again

This week, like the last 2 weekly blog posts, has been more of the same, just colouring, a lot, of colouring. I have however also made 2 assets for the animation, to help with finishing off the animation. One was a small bug to assist shot 5, which I animated, and a pose for my team mate's walk .

Other than these assets/concepts, I got on with some more colouring. 

This shot was interesting to colour, as it is the only shot where his shadow colour changes whilst he is in view of the camera, usually it happens between shots, however this one has him in full view of the screen. 

Colouring - Again

I am running out of things to say about the colouring of this animation, I am steadily getting it done, however I am now unsure of whether I am going to get it all finished by the deadline day, as I do not want to sacrifice quality for quantity. The goal of this animation is for it to be submitted into places as a finished and professional product.

This week I have gotten a few shots done, some my own and some by the other members of my group. This was also the first time I have done colouring on a shot in the icy area's I did the backgrounds for, which allowed my to decide on the blue tint for those sets of shadows.

This was a shot by my team mate and the first of the coloured ice area shots. 

This was a really fun shot to colour as it is a very clean shot, and the character gets progressively smaller, meaning my work got easier as it went on. 

This was my own shot, which was relatively easy to do, however as some of my linework did not add up, I had to fill in some gaps before I could carry on with colouring.

Colouring - A change of Shadows

Over this week I have continued to colour the animation, this grows increasingly harder as we progress due to the fact that every single shot has double the amount of colour frames as linework frames, due to there being both colour and shadow layers. For example shot 19, which I coloured this week as well as a plethora of other shots has 60 frames, meaning there is 120 frames of colour, 60 for colouring, and 60 for shadows. I am enjoying figuring out how the shadows will react with the lantern the gnome is holding, and overall it adds a lot to the animation with the lighting. It makes it feel a lot more dramatic and gives the animation a lot more visual interest.

This shot which I have coloured this week, shot 19, is a 360 degree shot and the longest shot of the animation. This shot was an idea which I pitched right at the start in one of our first group meetings. It is a shot I was really passionate about, due to timings of each shot and workload, I was unfortunately not able to animate it, however doing the colouring I was able to add my own personal flare whilst adding to my teammates animation.

Here are a few other shots I have coloured and shadowed this week, one of them was from the rocky area, and therefore had red shadows. Shot 19 has a pitch black background so therefore he has black tinted shadows. I wanted to give him these tints because I thought it added a lot to the idea that he was in different areas in the animation.

I also coloured the rest of the shots from the first scene so that we could composite our completed first scene together.  As they are in the forest area, they  have purple tinted shadows. 

Moom - Talk this way

During this task we had to choose a set of 5 expressions using a pre existing list which was provided for us. In this task I chose; amusement, fear, bravado, confusion and pain. I thought that these would provide a good range of expression, and would allow some good lighting for the character to be presented in.

I did not use myself for the reference photos which were needed for posing the character Moom (who was pre existing and provided). I only did not do this because I didn't feel like I was capable of expressing myself in an exaggerated manner which I was going for with this task. Here I will post all of my finished Moom Poses with their reference photo counterpart above them. 

Amusement 

Fear 

Bravado

Pain

Confusion

I tried adding some mood lighting to all of these. I also gave him both a plain to stand on and to put behind him so that the light would be more dramatic and also so that his eyebrows would show up better, as a regular render on the Maya software would show up with a black background, it was not too obvious. In pretty much all of the poses the eyebrows add a lot of expression so I thought this was necessary. 

Moom - Walk this Way

For this study task, it was laid out so we had to make a walk cycle in Maya using the premade character of Moom. During this it was the bare minimum to make all the key poses with no inbetweens. It was optional if we wanted to make it smooth using the graph editor. I am disappointed to say that I did the bare minimum in this task, I am disappointed in this because I really wanted to learn more about walk cycles, and animating in 3D, however due to my own time management, I did not leave myself enough time to go back and smooth out my animated walk cycle. I had done the key frames before and planned to go back, however the colouring and the additional backgrounds I had to do meant I never had time to do so.

Here is my looping walk cycle

I am happy with how this turned out, it definitely is a looping walk cycle, however I wanted to go back and add to it using the graph editor. I had some trouble following the video instructions provided, but only due to my way of learning. I found the answers to any problems I had online with no difficulty. This was a fun task to do and I enjoyed learning the set up and timeline in Maya.

Why 2D Animation is Limited 2

In this post I am going to compare the difference between the processes of 2D Animation and 3D animation, and why 2D animation is so much more time consuming.

The information from this blog came from http://media-freaks.com/the-process-of-3d-animation/ as a main source.

The start of the process is the same, however 3D animation, and even stop motion, after the animatic stage, go into another step of pre-production which is model making. And though model making is incredibly time consuming itself, after the model is made animation becomes simple because it is just a case of lighting and moving the model itself. This comes after the rigging portion, where you rig your model in order to be able to move in the way that it needs to.

A video which explains the core differences is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwL5dQbmwUg

To sum up, 3D animation, whilst also difficult and time consuming, has a much larger pre production stage than 2D, due to the making and rigging of the model, however it has a much shorter animation stage. The post production is pretty much the same though because of compositing and lighting and general fixes.

Why 2D Animation is limited

When we first started the project, we already decided that because we all specialise in 2d digital, that would be our medium. However we all knew that this would be a time consuming task because of the process of doing 2D animation.

For this research I looked on the process section of http://drawmill.com/ . This was a good place to start because the animation company set out the process in a way which is easy to understand to everyone.

The main takeaway from this is that there is a long process in every aspect of 2D animation. There is an extensive process for each step which must be followed to create a successful animation. I will explain this using examples from my own work in this module.

For this I will use shot 2 of our animation, which is complete at this stage, and also a shot I worked mostly on by myself.

The first stage is scripting, which took about a week, which I did not do, but I pitched the Idea, however after this is the storyboard process, which I did take care of.

This is the storyboard stage, as it was all hand drawn, this took a fair amount of time to complete because some stuff has to be redrawn because it may work on script but not in practice and visual.

The next step is the animatic, which is using the storyboard to create the timing,

This is the animatic for shot 2, it takes a long time in this process to map out the timing properly otherwise the animation will be off. 

Next is the actual Animation itself. On this shot it took about a week to fully animate this 2 second shot, this is the real problem with the process which you use for 2D animation, as every step is time consuming, but looks great as an end product, so you end up sacrificing a lot of time to cover the aesthetic.

Next is the visual effects and the compositing, which takes ages because you have to take a lot of different assets and put them all together but also make sure that it looks believable and fluid.

In the next post I will compare this process against that of 3D and how it differs. 

Time to Colour

There is not a lot to say in this post, only that I coloured a couple of shots this week,almost enough to complete the first scene of the animation. This week I coloured shot 3 and 5, my team mates and my own.

This is the finished shot 3, and I am really happy with how the colours came out. 

This is the finished shot 5, this makes me incredibly happy because this shot started awfully and it not is one of my best ever looking pieces of animation. 

My turn to Background

I have a total of 3 Backgrounds to do, and I knew this would take me a fair while because I had to match the amount of detail that my team mate had been doing in hers. I had 1 layout to work from and 1 I had to make up myself, all 3 of these took me the week, which I think has put me behind in my colouring and makes me question if I will finish in time.

This was the rough I did using the original layout for this background.

This was the result of this layout. This took me about 2 days to finish.

I am so proud of this, I feel like it definitely feels cold and does its job well, I used a lot of different brushes and techniques in this which I had not used before. I feel like the fog adds a lot to it, and it saddens me that this will mostly be covered up by a lot of snow and fog.

This is the rough I did over the original background so I could see where everything is. I am going to try and recapture the same feel of sheer cold that I did in the previous background. 

 This was my second background, it is a lot closer up, and there is still a lot of fog, which is kind of the point because he is running into the fog. I feel like this one is not quite as successful as the last one, but it still does its job well.

This was the last of my set of backgrounds, this is probably my least favourite because it is a top down shot, this was very quick to do but it is not as successful because there is not enough of an establishing backdrop to make it feel the same

Shot 21 - The Last Animation

Shot 21 is another close up shot, but also one I need to do before I start on my backgrounds and start on the colouring. This was a relatively easy shot to do, and I am OK with it. However at this point I need to get on with other stuff so I don't have the time to come back to it. If I had more time I definitely would change the shoulders and make it look a lot more solid, and also hold on the face more so it is obvious what happens.

Here is my first test for this shot

And the final version of it

In hindsight I feel as though I may have rushed this shot just due to the fact that it is almost Christmas and I need to get stuff done before we return from the Holidays. There is definitely a lot wrong with it but I do not have the time to change it at this point. 

Shot 5 - A vast Improvement

After the abysmal attempt at shot 5 before, I decided to try shot 5 again, this time however, I needed to try something different, because it did not work the first time. It was suggested by one of my classmate's that I try a smear for the turn, as it means I would be able to gain the same movement in just a few frames, so I attempted that and it worked far better than the original version.

This was the skeleton I used to animate from, however looking at it now it is obvious that the breathing needs some inbetweens. 

This is the first version of this, which already looks a lot more solid than the original, however the breathing does need some inbetweens in there, so I added them and the final result is one that I am incredibly proud of. Even though the breathing is looped, it will not be obvious in the final version because it is covered by a monster flying past the screen. 

Now in Colour

I decided that I needed a small break from animating. So I decided to colour a shot in advance of my allotted colouring time. I decided to start from shot 1, as it is such a small shot with not much animation. I also then went on to colour shot 2, because I was so happy with that shot that I wanted to see it complete.

Here are my 2 coloured shots for this week, I am really happy with how this turned out. I realised colouring would take me a fair amount of time due to the fact that there is double the amount of colour layers than there is line work layers. This is because there is a colour layer, and a shadow layer above that. Every area I want his shadows to change colour with his environment, hence why the are purple in these first shots, because he is in a purple forest.

Shot 15 - A better shot

Shot 15 ended up really well, I used a reference video using one of my team mates and I am really happy with the results. I am finding in this animation that I love doing the secondary animation, especially with the lantern and the 3D effects of it coming towards the screen.

Here is my initial line work using Adobe Animate.

Here is one of my render tests after exporting into Photoshop.

I really like the way this shot is coming along, and it is even better after the awful shot of last week. 

This is what I thought was the final version of this shot, however after some feedback on Friday I realised I had given the gnome a sort of waste coat? Which was a mistake so I went back in and cleaned it up. 

Shot 5 - The cursed shot

I think it is fair to say, this week has been a waste for me. I spent all of this week on a shot which has failed completely to convey or show any sort of emotion it was supposed to. I am not quite sure where it messed up but this by far is the worst piece of animation I have ever done. I am embarrassed to show this shot but it has showed me the importance of reference video.

I wont say any more on this, all I can say is that it doesn't work as a shot, the movement is completely wrong.

This was one of the breath tests for this failed shot.

This is the final version of this one, the rest I will not upload because it doesn't make much of a difference because the end product is the same, I will carry on doing my other shots now and come back to this one at a a later time.

Shot 17 - How about a close up?

Shot 17 is a pretty easy shot so there really isn't much to say bout what I did, I followed the same process I used with shot 2. However I realised the movement of the shoulders was far too fast in my original version so I had to clean it up. This one had a lot of line tests so I will upload just a few of them here.

This shot in the animation is supposed to convey a lot of emotion because he is at breaking point. So i really pushed his facial expression using the previous character sheets from my team mate.

Here are a few tests;

Here is the final version with no clean up 

And here is the final version to be used in the animation

Shot 2 - The Run Cycle

This week I was to start animating, with my first shot being one of the first ones I pitched to the rest of the team when we first sat down together. This was to be the 2nd shot of the animation, which also happened to be a run cycle. Before this week I had never done a run cycle so this was a new and challenging experience for me.

I started by blocking out in adobe animate rather than Photoshop purely due to how my computer runs program. It is much easier for me to block out in animate then move to Photoshop to do the line work.

This was the first attempt at a run cycle using Richard Williams as a reference. However after getting feedback I thought I could add some more bounce to him. 

The second attempt had a lot more bounce but was not too dissimilar to the original. I then began the line work. Because of the way my computer runs Photoshop I make a few different renders whilst I am working so I can be sure of the movement and secondary animation. 

Here are my render tests during this animation. 

And here is the final 2 versions, one is the run cycle and one has the added lantern into it.