I learned how to better convert blocking to polish before I made it to make it smoother.

I did a lot of dialogue content and blocking, but I didn’t end up having much time for polish, and most of my character animation for this dialogue was all with expressions and mouth shapes, and I found that I didn’t have enough expression content.

Reflection

Although I roughly completed some polished animations, I did not render these in full as I found that my level of character performance had not particularly improved from the previous year’s semester, only that I was more fluid in my manipulations and knew how to use curves and keyframe placement points.

During and after making it, I searched through many references and looked closely at it. I found that my character’s personality, and the exaggerated dramatic nature of my character were not obvious enough. Assuming I made my character more dramatic, it might have made my character more lively and alive. Here are the videos I watched during this process.

Although I didn’t do very well in this project and could have shown a brilliant animation control in my showreel, I feel relieved that I have found points to work on. Firstly, to learn from the good examples of other animators and see how other students bring out the drama and tension in their characters; secondly, in my final FMP assignment, which also requires the character to show tension, I can spend more time focusing on the dramatic conflict of the character and expressing it with body language as much as possible, instead of being so stagnant as I am now. Here are videos I’ve found of animation school students, so hopefully I can get to their level!

Last semester we recorded animation shows and tried our hand at blocking and polishing, as each student chose a different direction, some studied UE4, some studied VFX and some studied game character animation, so not all of us did well with this subject. Personally, I prefer a role in character animation or video choreography as opposed to match move track or vfx. So I continued to hone my performance animation during my term 3 independent project.

I decided to start fresh and work on the details of each step, starting with the most blocking, how to get the character stuck on top of the right keyframes and where it would help the animation effect and look more natural.

So without having tuned the animation editor curve, my blocking looked like this.

However I feel that my movements are still not exaggerated enough to make the animation more interesting and my adjustments still look a bit like the movements of a real person. I have therefore studied other references and will continue to work on better characterisation in future fmps.

Then this week, I started animating the scenes in the cave, working on the bouncing movements, especially how robots, as mechanized characters, should go about showing the mechanized movements.

I needed to make some jumping and climbing shots below, so I found some video references.

Then a reference video on climbing was found.

I researched what jiggles I needed to make when climbing to stay on the crag, and the movement pattern of a powerless release to land.

I then added details of the hand grip shake and the foot shake in unison and here is the overall set of movements.

I talked to Jay during the mobilisation process and found that there are many ways to do simple character capture and then modify the details, which may be a way to improve efficiency.

There were a lot of fixed shots and similar walking shots that were not shown, so I won’t list them here. In the end I exported all the action and scenes in ABC format and sent them to Jay, who did the post-editing and special effects, here are the edits we made twice, the latter being the final unrendered rendering.

This week I started working on the Car Crash scene. Unlike a car passing quickly, the camera cuts through faster and you can’t see much detail in the animation of the car, but if the car is moving unsteadily and drifts over, you have to make more detail in the image and the camera takes longer to focus.

Therefore, since we have to do crash videos, we have to simulate the animation of a car driving unsteadily and overturning resulting in a car. We can often see this side of some scenes in movies, however it is just a sense of picture in our mind, it is not rigorous to simply imagine and simulate the picture by ourselves, I googled the Racing Car Crash Compilation video, I think it is a good reference to learn and observe the motion trajectory of an overturned car frame by frame, it is the most basic requirement as an animator.

Again, I set up two 3D cameras for my part to ensure consistency in the animation.

Then make a track on top of the car driving.

After making the trajectory and then designing the direction of the car’s swing, I of course had to draw on a real tail-flick shot, so I drew on the diagram in the video to make it as realistic as possible.

Also as this was the first shot where the car started to appear to be out of control, so a simple one time drift could not simply show that the car was out of control or that a single drift drift would be too rushed to flip the car out of control, so I did the first shot where after exiting the corner the car started to show signs of swinging from side to side due to the car going too fast and driving unsteadily after drifting out of the corner.

Then add body vibration and tyre shake to complete the animation of the CC01.

Then for the 004 scene as well, first do a good job of matching the trajectory of the car and matching the movement of the camera so that the image is on the subject without too much drift.

I then referred to the footage in the video to find a better reference and to learn how the effect of flipping sideways and spinning the car around in the air and finally landing on the ground.

Finally I added details such as tyre wobble when spinning in the air, body drift when bouncing up and down, tyre rotation left and right when drifting, etc. Here is the action I have tuned

Through this collaboration I understood how 3D animation and special effects will work together in film and television effects.

After doing the layout, I started to make the movement of the robot. I started to make the details of the robot’s movement. First of all, our character is a robot, not too anthropomorphic, and I looked for some references to study how the robot moves.

Then I add some slight head vibrations when the character is forbidden, and I add some pupil scaling when the eye is blinking.

Then the walk also looked for material on whether the robot’s walk would be as linear as a human’s, and found that the robot might be more straightforward and mechanical in its walk.

I then started to create a walking cycle, with mechanical movements and jerks in the head, neck and waist to give the figure a more stylised movement.

I then went into relative detail on what follows, as well as refining.

The week’s subs and drawings were completed and I divided the shots with murry lowe. We had a conference call to work out what our respective splits would be, murry made the front scenes and I made the back scenes, so we started the shots.

We found that the character’s knees did not bend before we made them, so we had to start over to find a character that could walk properly.

So I looked for new characters that were also more in line with our original character style and didn’t have too many expressions tied in, which would massively reduce our workload and only convey the character’s expressions through eyes and blinks and tilted heads.

The good thing is that this doesn’t particularly affect the overall progress, as the characters are still close to the storyboard characters and we will be adjusting the shots in maya a second time – after all, it’s normal for 2D images to have minor discrepancies in 3D.

I started to create a layout split based on the split, first setting up the camera in a fixed position, then shifting the character and matching the character to the camera position.

The first week we set up a group in discord and Jay and I organised a group to work on a feature animation, we organised a group with Lowe and Murry to work on a short animation of about 2 minutes to fit the size of our group.

I was in charge of the animation and the show, and as the animation part would start in the middle, we had a weekly conference call to discuss and confirm the script during the pre-work.

Here is the script we discussed and designed

Full view of the scene, with the regular sound of a crashing cabinet in the vast ruined city 

In close up, the robot is repeatedly banging on the cabinets, trying to reach the place where it normally works (trying to water the flower pots in the house that have no flowers), but the prescribed route is blocked by the cabinets that fell yesterday, and then the first-person view shows that the route is wrong and cannot be resolved, a picture frame falls down after banging on the cabinets a few times, the robot picks it up and wipes it with his hands twice, and prepares to put the frame back, but finds a drawing on the back that looks like a child’s drawing A map like a child’s treasure map 

Close up of the robot’s face in surprise 

In the middle shot the robot rushes out of the house, during which it looks back at the flowerpot and turns directly to the slope outside, where the robot climbs up with the flowerpot and drops it, sending it flying. 

(Several short shots in the middle of the scene of the little robot charging and refuelling on the way and asking for directions) 

– (Reaching the target point, first person view of the robot, display showing confirmation of the target point, close up view of the little robot running back and forth across the screen, entering from the edge, looking at the ground, then exiting the framing area from the other side, then entering from the far side on the same side, finally removing the rubbish from the target point) 

Suddenly there is a loud noise, the gravel on the ground is shaking and a sandstorm comes 

Swept the little robot into a deep pit, black field 

When it wakes up it finds the edge difficult to climb, but it finds a dying grass, and a small doll, at this point it walks over to the plant and tries to water it, at this point it fixes to first person, there is no water, the robot taps its arm and pours out two drops of water which fall onto the blade and slide into the soil, then the plant in the little robot’s field of view grows and spreads around, the camera follows the plant as it spreads and pans to the little robot The camera follows the plants as they spread, panning to the little robot, lying on the ground, thinking about it, looking at his watering hand and sliding it 

The camera then runs out of power and the view fades to black 

Finally the robot is given a long shot and it is found that no plants are spreading, it is still the same, end of scene. 

As our focus was on the final rendering of the action and the post-rendering of the effects, we skipped the character drawing design and the character rig.

The character was finally chosen as the main character

This week luke started uploading the official version of the car model and mapping, and in the recorded video he explained the editing parts that we need to make in animator, I was responsible for the 0200 and 0300 shots of Car Pass and the 0100 and 0400 shots of Car Crash that followed.

This week I started working on the CC section, using the same method I trained on before, first adjusting the displacement of the car and then creating a new camera to correspond to the camera position of the clip in the real footage, so that the match move students could match the animation to the real footage according to our output.

Once the shots are done, the next step is to test the speed and timing of the car passing through the lens. In addition to matching the lens in maya to the real shot, the close-ups of the car passing through should also be matched as closely as possible, otherwise it will appear too early or pass through too fast for the lens to keep up with the problem.

In terms of car motion adjustment, in addition to doing the car shake and tyre vibration details that we tested earlier, we know that when driving a car, we grip the steering wheel is required to deflect left and right to ensure that the car does not drift, so I also add a slight sense of left and right sway in a straight line.

Here is an animation of my first version of testing

In addition to the feature animation in the group project I also worked on the indie film collaboration project, I was responsible for the animator position in both projects because I wanted to train more on my animation and I thought that more practice was the only way to get better in training.

My indie film project involved animating the car driving and making it as realistic as possible. The animation was then tracked into the live video, and through post lighting and filtering, the 3D car was better integrated into the live scene.

This week we started with a simulation exercise of how the car movement would probably be driving on the road. In the recorded session Luke did a great job of showing us how to make the car move more realistically. For example, during the car’s journey, the car’s body will have a slight vibration during the journey due to the vibration of the car’s engine, and the roads that are generally driven on are uneven surfaces, so the car will have bumps during the journey, and we animator need to add Some details of the slight body vibrations.

Also, the wipers move to make the car feel more realistic and dynamic. I have made both wipers oscillate in the same way, but with small differences in movement to make it more realistic. Also the movement of the tyres during driving, the unevenness of the road and the shock absorbers that cause the four tyres to vibrate up and down, we were able to add these details to the car animation.

And then finally I learned that in the animation editor I can turn on infinity and then when I finish animating a loop, I can turn on post-infintiy and choose a regular loop or a loop with deviations, which allows for a more mechanical action when animating a non-living loop and makes the process more efficient. This makes the process more efficient.

This week’s topic is how we can use two different solvers in conjunction with each other.

Usually in rigid body simulations you want a solid object to shatter as a result of some kind of impact or force. For example, you might want an earthquake to destroy a house, causing concrete walls to break, wooden doors to shatter and glass windows to break. Or, you might want a swinging demolition crane ball to make a hole in a wall.

Most of the fragmentation tools in Houdini support a pre-fracture workflow, where you can break the geometry into pieces in SOP and hold these pieces together with glue constraints. Pre-crushing gives you complete artistic control over the appearance of the damage (for example, whether you want large fragments or small jagged pieces). Objects collapse when a force exceeds the strength of the glue, or you can manually animate the glue when you want the object to collapse. If you need more control over fracture, there are many lower level SOPs.
Simulates fracture patterns associated with different materials: concrete, wood and glass.
If you just want a bunch of fragments to stick together permanently, give them all the name attributes. The nodes that work on the fragments will treat them as one fragment at a time. This can be useful, for example, in wood splitting, where you often want to combine small fragments into larger jagged chunks.
For certain effects that can be broken straight away, you will often want to process larger pieces early in the shot and have them break up into smaller pieces later in the shot. You can do this with a level of glue constraint. You can animate higher level constraints to break up larger pieces into smaller pieces.
The RBD material breakage node provides clustering control when the material type is ‘wood’. You can use the RBD clustering node for manual clustering.