The last 3D animation fundamentals assignment of the first semester is Performance animaiton, so I plan to apply what I have learnt this semester to make a better quality work, not only for the end of the course grade, but also for the future job search, where a good showreel will get more opportunities.

First I found some reference clips, I found a dialogue between the main character and the housekeeper in the first episode of Alex Rider, and then the scene took place in the kitchen, of course, it would not be impossible if I built the items manually, but the focus of the term1 course was not on the building of the items, but on how to make the movement of the characters better, the lighting system of the camera, the visual effects, I think these are more important, so I went to some free and open modeling software and found a combination of scenes suitable for the kitchen, and finally I put all the scenes together like this.

However, many of the items in this scene were not textured, so I had to manually select the Arnold material, and for some complex props I used Substance to paste the mapping, and the final result I could get is as follows.

Once you have built up the materials and lighting for the scene to get close to the desired effect, and then masked the lighting, it is a huge load on the computer to display the mapping in real time after importing the character.

This time the animation was different from the previous one, it needed two characters, when I found jerry in the resource, but I couldn’t find a suitable one to match the same style of girl character, finally I had to resort to a free model resource with full decals and a matching image style, I imported the decals, replaced the decals and started K-frames and then found that the character would collapse on the surface of the bound body when doing the K-action. At first I thought it was a history problem to remove the solution, but then I realised that the original model would also have this problem when re-imported, but not in the render window.

It was when I was doing the mouth animation that the process really got complicated. You can’t see the surface of the model, only the facial movements on the IPR rendered screen, as the nearly 30 seconds of footage I chose had a lot of dialogue. Luckily the facial binding on the male lead’s side worked very well, and I needed to pay attention to the blinking of the eyes, the twitching of the tongue due to the articulation, and the subtle turning of the head and neck, which are all important details that determine whether the animation is detailed or not.

Fortunately, the final close-up of the girl’s face is not particularly badly rendered, but there is one section where the lip-synching is not particularly good, which is a pity.

The first is at the beginning of the scene, when the girl is setting the plate, she needs to pick it up and put it down, and there will be a handover to replace the hand for holding and placing. The second girl, again, needs to be restrained on the handle of the pan when showing it to the boys.

Of course I have already shown how to restrain the phone in the previous Spider-Man project assignment, but of course this is, as I said at the beginning, this project is about applying all that we have learnt in term1, whether it is inertia of movement, use of props, or mouth animation, ultimately combined in the final project in term1.

Finally all the cameras were set up with a good focal length, and the original intention was to focus the cameras on the characters to make the background bokeh effect, but unfortunately there were problems with the characters and it couldn’t be solved so I gave up, and finally I set up different focal length cameras and used the action bulr effect in the rendering settings to give the action a more dynamic feel.

The final product is my render, but as I’m still in China and the VM doesn’t seem to be linked to the school farm, I ended up having to render in low resolution with a lot of noise in the process, and when I have time to optimise the scene I think I’ll re-render it again in high resolution.

This week’s training was to make a full set of body mechanics. The movement of a character is one of the most important things to demonstrate the level of the maker’s work, so when many animation and game companies are recruiting animators, they often need a showcase to showcase the level of the animator.

First I needed to find references, I went on youtube and checked out some mechnics animations, the more common ones being parkour, weightlifting, and synchronized gymnastics. I was more interested in the mechanics of gymnastics because it looked so elegant. In the end I settled on a gymnastics balance beam demonstration, simply because many other gymnastics body mechanics have been done by many people and I prefer to do something different to challenge myself. The reference I looked for was the balance beam gymnastics championship video from the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

After selecting the video reference I needed to select the character again and found a character in the character library that matched the b. Since it was a women’s gymnastics sport, I should have chosen a female character that matched the video. This isn’t a problem exactly, as the Incredibles’ mother can also extend her limbs in the animation, but in this section our character doesn’t need to do extensions and Spider-Man Gwen doesn’t have extensions, but we can still pose with fk.

After I thought it would be another simple movement if I could use fk to get the character’s swing as extreme as the previous times, I found out that I was wrong. Because the video I excerpted had two flips in the air and the hands would touch the plane, if I used fk, as the body torso rotates in the air, the arms have would rotate with the body as well, unlike the video where the hands steadily hold the ground and wait for the body to go over before releasing the hands.

The first is to overturn and redo the movement with ik, because the controller of ik is capable of not following the body’s movement, I have checked the relevant information, and indeed when doing grabbing and pushing, ik is undoubtedly much better than fk, or the second method, whenever making a grounded grab, attach the point on the palm of the hand to the plane The second method is to attach the point on the palm of the hand to the plane whenever a grounded grip is made, and then disconnect the grip when the hand is about to be released, but the body is moving in this way and the arm is swinging unnaturally when the grip is made, so I gave up the idea of the second method and had to redo it, but the length of the opening movement was not much, just a waste of production time, but in the production process of an animation company, time is money, so learn from this experience and you can take fewer detours in the future.

After that I followed the reference and adjusted my animated character step by step, but this week’s task was not to get the mechanics movements smoothly done in their entirety, but to get the blocking done before I did. What is blocking?

In an animation company’s animation process, character movement is often not done in one step, but in several steps.

The first step is to adjust the camera and character positions in Maya or other 3D production software, based on the storyboard that has been created. This is the 3D version of the storyboard, and we generally call this step layout.

The second step, on the basis of the layout to the character action for further debugging, equivalent to in two-dimensional animation, we need to add keyframes to the character, rather than frame by frame the action are drawn out, with the first step of the same reason is that this operation can have more modification of the space, and look at the overall effect, at the same time in the company process, to facilitate the animator to coordinate the operation of the process.

The third step is to refine the blocking animation, which is also equivalent to the complementary frame in 2D animation, called polish in the industry, to polish the character. Some people may wonder if the 3D software will not add intermediate frames on its own? Each animator will know from personal experience that an animation without adding detail to the frame count is very rudimentary and will have a lot of faulty movement.

The next steps are lighting effects and rendering and so on. Today I will focus on how to make a blocking animation, and in the next issue I will use the blog to study the process in detail. Next is a demonstration of my completed blocking animation.

I finished David’s blocking last week and this week I’ll be tweaking it with more movement, i.e. polish and spline.

The main action is still focused on adjusting the speed of movement of the controller, the principle is the same as that of the ball bouncing, adjusting the inertia of the movement to be more linear or more in line with the physical relations. But as we have more character controllers, we have more curves to adjust, and yes, this time we will be working mainly on the curves of movement.

But the arm swing is not easy to compare and adjust, so this is where the motion trail comes into play, by comparing the front to back frames, adjusting the misalignment of the arm swing, moving the arm swing and hand swing to the effect we want to achieve, and then combining it with our curve controller so that our character is nicely dynamic and has the Stylized feel of this theme, so I’ve got the polish and spline right for this week, although it’s probably still far from perfect

Finally, although it wasn’t this week’s assignment, the lighting was put on anyway and I put in warm and cold light in the front and back and finally output and here is my finished work.

In class, Luke showed us examples of stylisation and the need to find references to make the stylised moves we wanted to do.

Stylised, it is also said that it can be personalised. Looking up a lot of walking references in YouTube, you can find that there are indeed a lot of differences in the way people walk, and this difference, or the difference in personality that arises with the person, leads to a very different style of walking for each person.I have selected 100 walking positions of teenagers walking in YouTube because this walk is more common in animation and has more dramatic tension.

In my character library, I chose David’s swinging pose, mainly because his controllers are less complicated, his hands and feet can be switched with ik Fk, and his face controller is easier to manipulate.

The stylised walk often reveals the state of each person, for example when angry, when sullen and when jumping for joy.

Whether it is realistic or non-anthropomorphic animation, the audience always needs visual resonance, and this resonance needs to be based on regular contact and easy to understand, so anthropomorphic style of movement is very important and indirectly an important indicator of an animation that is anthropomorphic or realistic. As we have seen a standard visual aesthetic established by a number of famous studios such as Disney Ghibli. So many novices’ practice work is often labelled as unpleasant. It is therefore very important to make the character movements as realistic as possible.

In fact, abstract characters and abstract movements can still be considered as a kind of art that resonates with people, but on closer dissection, we can still find that these works are still not separated from the movement of nature, the traces of movement that we perceive as anthropomorphic or anthropomorphic, but only a more exaggerated and dramatic approach by the author on top of these, to express it with an artistic vision, so the conclusion is that, whether or not Abstract or concrete, we still need to master and apply realistic dynamics at the beginning of our studies, so that in the future, our secondary works of art can stand up to more scrutiny and examination.

Regarding the principles of animation, the timing, arcs and posture to posture relationships that are considered when doing a normal walk should also be considered in a stylised walk. In my opinion, a basic stylised walk can be obtained by changing the amplitude of the posture, increasing the slow in and out and adjusting the timing during basic walking practice. Here is my stylised walk blocking

Today’s project is to do a Full Body Walk Cycle with props and a movement of ones own.I’m a fan of Spider-Man, and it’s no exaggeration to say that before I started my art career, I drew comics and Spider-Man all through my childhood.So for this full body I chose Spider-Man as the model for this task.

Then I thought of a scene where Spider-Man jumps down from a tall building and gets a phone call from Ken, probably from Aunt May, berating him for not coming home at a late hour. So this time the prop master a phone, in fact Spider-Man’s web can also act as a prop, but this time the subject is mainly walking, so it’s better to use a more common idea for an animation.

With the general idea in mind, the next step is to place the character in a rough position, which is equivalent to a breakdown of the action, and a small layout of sorts.

After the layout breakdown, the character’s movements were then adjusted and optimised. After the layout breakdown, the character’s movements were then tweaked and optimised. Of course, I’m sure I could have made the walk if I had just imagined it, but to give it a Spider-Man look, I thought I’d find some references, and I went on youtube to find some Spider-Man game references to try and make it look more like Spider-Man.

After that, the first difficulty is how to make Spider-Man’s pose after landing at high speed, how to make it more natural, I referred to the video, Spider-Man usually jumps on the ground, the arms will be up due to inertia, and the legs will be slightly straight when they touch the ground, so that Spider-Man has a better leg bending cushion when landing at high speed.

Then it was time to start the walking cycle. The previous ball walk was relatively easy because there were no hands, but this time I wanted to get the character’s walk right not only by paying attention to the swing of the cross, but also the swing of the head and the arms.

The latter is to constrain the phone to make a hand-held phone action that will complete a task condition for the character to take props during walking. One big reason why the phone is used for this animation is because only two steps need to be completed to easily achieve the hand-held prop effect, the first is to constrain the phone to the hand controller like I just said

However, to take the phone and put it back at the same time, the phone needs to do one thing and that is to appear at a fixed time and then disappear at the rest of the time, it is very simple, just k-frame the display switch in the right column so that it can appear at a fixed time.、

Finally, after adjusting all the movements, the mapping is displayed, with the lights visible in the preview window, so that palyblast can present a better picture.Here is my finished animation.

In addition to the fox bouncing, this week’s tasks finally led to an important training in the principles of the laws of motion in animation, namely walking animation.I then looked on Google for references, drafts of the walk cycle animation and storyboards.

• Note the change in height of the stride when walking.

• Pay attention to the length and arc of the lift to the drop of the foot!

• Ensure that the soles of the feet are planted on the ground and that the toes are bent.

After taking care of the above, we are ready for the K-animation, where we need to pay attention to the height of the span, the rotation, and then also the target ball pointing at the knee, as in the reference picture.

I looked for other references, closer to human movement, for example, how many frames it takes to walk and how long each walk pitch is.

Then the finished character will be curved and adjusted to make the inertia of doing it a little more fluid, as it will take about five steps, I need to make the alternation of the front and back feet into one loop so that I will have a reference or copy over to adjust the angle later on when I am doing the loop.

Finally, all the angles were adjusted, the lights were put on and the final render was done.

In today’s bolg, we are going to be advancing to a small animated character, the fox, which is said to be a small animated character, but is actually a ball bouncing, with the difference that we will be adjusting the fox’s tail as it bounces.

So by the same logic, since the fox body is still a ball and the model is pre-bound to bounce deformation, which is what I was trying to say in last week’s ball, we do not need to make bindings here and just focus on the character dynamics.

I looked for references to the storybroad of fox bouncing and drafts of trajectories, and found that to adjust the fox’s tail properly you need to get the tailbone swaying in the right position for horizontal jumping.

So when I made the adjustments, apart from the deformation and orientation of the fox’s head, which is also the spherical body, the tail also conformed as much as possible to the laws of motion, so as not to violate Newton’s laws of motion.

Below is the graph eidtor of my tail node.

I know that this line is still not regular enough, and when I finished uploading the video I noticed that the movement of the tail was quite chaotic, and that the rules of the swing were different for each bounce, but of course in real life the fox’s tail will still be a bit different for each horizontal jump, because of the length and distance, but not this huge difference that I saw, but the difference of the regular swing and then some adjustments will make the whole process more natural and more comfortable to look at.

Next I did a couple of jumping piles in succession, at different heights as well as at different distances, bouncing the fox completely and adjusting the X-axis nodes in the graph editor as we did in the first week to break the nodes and make the arcs more natural.

This is my fox bouncing animation below.

Final thoughts: The right rate of bounce and tail swing with the right posture and speed is the key to a good animation. Therefore I find that I still need more practice in rhythm and node control.

The first week of our course training was to do bouncing ball training, a classic introduction to animation, and even though it is a small animation that seems relatively introductory, it is not easy to bring the movement patterns into play and make bouncy balls vividly, so I found draft diagrams of bouncy ball trajectories online to help me better understand and supplement the group!

So I do according to the teacher’s teaching method, first of all, the height of the ball’s fall, the height of the Y-axis in order to do a linear decrease in the height of the landing, after doing the bounce, and then the Z-axis for traverse, the amount can get a complete animation of the ball’s falling body! Then open the animation chart editor and adjust the curvature of the bounce so that the ball can stay in the air longer and more in line with the motion.

Well, when I finished the series, I realized that even though I had adjusted the ball movement and curves, it still looked stiff and not vivid enough, and when I saw the sketch I was looking for, I knew where the problem was, my little ball didn’t make shape changes, and with shape changes the little ball movement would be more dynamic.

But there’s a problem with doing the little ball deformation.There are two options for deforming the sphere, the first I thought of is using the R key to zoom in and out of the sphere, which is the usual and rather crude way, and the second is to use bindings, which bind the sphere to the controller. Due to time and familiarity with the binding capabilities, I chose the former, but the latter would undoubtedly be the better choice, and I think I’ll optimize this detail the next time I animate a complex scene.

Here is my preview rendering of the effect. I’ve turned on motion trails and animated onion skins (ghosts) to see the motion trails and of course the animation graphs to optimize the animation.