MVIM – Evaluation and Film

YouTube

To Evaluate this project I strongly believe that I have created an animated piece demonstrating a character who’s Monologue and Inner Monologue differ from each other, as well as giving a good character performance.

Going with a simplistic look with both my 2D and 3D areas, allowed me to focus on character performance of the character and it has really helped especially for a first attempt of actually animating full 3D character, plus using the Arnold render has really pushed the quality of the animation. On top of this the sound and audio really do compliment each other, sounding fluent as well as having a good pace throughout the animation.

Although these are good points that I have been complimented on I still see a few areas which can be improved. For instance while animating with the audio did help get the character performance I was looking for, it was a constant struggle to think of what will be doing during the animation, although I did plan out where character will end, I never really considered what the character will be done in between the start and the end, this is where I should of had some pose-to-pose, poses to set me up when it came to a certain area of the animation, where I know what the character will be doing and thinking, plus there were a lot of areas where the character felt stiff and was doing a lot of twining with their am movements, something I would improved on if I had more time but also something I will take into account for next time, perhaps maybe starting with the hip when putting the character in position. As well as that I should of used Moom for this animation piece instead of B-Boy, although B-boy was good at character performer, he’s more of a character to practice walk cycles and movement, where as Moom is more of a character performer, with better controls for expressing emotion through the face.

Overall the animation I have created a creative, fun piece of animation that appeals to the brief and is quite humourous.

Vimeo:

Rendering and editing ‘n’ shiz

So I finished the render and despite a few drawbacks during the process, it looks gorgeous. During the render. 2 of the computers had turned themselves off in the middle of the night, which was kind of irritating because I had to restart the render from where they left off when I came in on Thursday morning which meant I had to delay the editing till it was finished. But after a couple hours it managed to render the whole scene beautifully and I was ready to render.

The rendering stage was a long and irritating process, when I imported the audio and video they some how were not sync with each other, which was strange seen as I had animated to the audio in the first place so it would. So to fix this I had to go through it and speed up a section of the audio so it would keep up wit the video, I mean the audio sounds a little higher but it works well.

The next problem was probably the getting the 2D thought bubbles into the premier. It proved to be difficult because when I exported the scenes from TVPaint they had a black background, instead of being transparent. To fix this I put the scenes into after effects and added a mask to area I wanted to be shown, making the rest of the area transparent. And to make sure the thought bubbles looked like thought bubbles, I messed around with the feather and opacity settings to make the bubbles look more cloudy and foggy than just a plain white image.

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Yesterday I ran into a bit of a problem with the character, which is typical seen as I’m so close to finishing. The eyebrow control of my character had stopped working for some unknown reason, despite that I had already animated the eyebrow’s movement, it had some how separated itself from the character. Which was kind of annoying because in some of the scenes the eyebrow movement is necessary to display what my character is feeling, and without it I doesn’t look right.

After several mouse clicks and desk slamming, my lecturer Deborah helped out with a solution. The solution was to import another B-Boy into the scene, and copy and past all the keyframes that I had made on the previous model. It was a long and awkward process but it worked out in the end.

And now I can finally start rendering. At the moment I have 3 machines rendering my animation, and while that is working I can finish up on the 2D areas.

It is done!

After some blood, sweat and tears, the animating is finally complete, well sort of I still need to go other the animation and edit a few poses, but as it stands the animating is completed.

Animating the character was a tricky process, mainly because I think I would of been better of animating with Moom than B-Boy, this is because B-Boy is better for movement and poses, where as Moom better for performance, which is the main factor of which this project is about, god dammit James! And because of this it was kind of tricky trying to show what emotions the character was feeling but it made up for it with it’s ability to be easily manipulated.

Now that animating is done, and once the animation is tidied up, I can proceed with rendering it out and while that’s on the way, tidying up and finishing the 2D sections as well as the audio. And once it’s all done I can put it all Premier and submit it, hopefully before Friday.

Little Sneak Peak

Things are coming together quite well, so far I’ve managed to animate up to 800+ frames so that’s good. Having importing the audio into Maya animating has become much more easier to do, as it helps save time when it comes lining the finished audio and video in the premier.

As for the animation itself it looking really good so far, I’ve had a few people look at it and they like the looks of it. It’s a bit rough in some areas, I need to give the character more life by moving the body a bit more but so far so good

Wasting time here

So today was kind of an interesting one. The reason why I say that is because I spent of my time fixing my mistakes with the audio in audition, than actually continuing with animating. In  my mind I thought that if I cut the final audio sample together, I could then import the audio file into Maya so I could animate with it, that way I could sync with the audio and not have to cut down and manipulate with it in Premier. As simple as it sounds I still had a few problems with it. I tried to to add a few effects to the finished version so, the VA didn’t sound like a child, problem was I increased the semitones instead of reducing them making his voice higher, and instead of changing it I accidentally saved it and I couldn’t re-do my mistakes.

Which doesn’t sound like it wasted a lot of time but because I was messing with Audition whilst Maya was still on (as well as other programs) the computers CPU couldn’t handle it and kept closing Maya down, every time I opened it, so I did what any smart person would do, and tried turning it off and on again. As well as that worked I lost of lot time of where I could be animating.

But despite all of that I managed to import the audio file as well as animate a few more seconds of animation, which is good… I’m trying to keep positive here. I won’t be in tomorrow to continue with animating, but when I get back on Monday I’ll crack on with it.

Focus!

Today I began to animate… HOORAY!! Because now that I have finished audio recording I could now begin. So far I’ve only manage to animate a couple of frames but so far it’s looking good.

 

Little bits

Today I spent a couple of hours animating some of the 2D sequences that will appear within my animation. So far so good, they look a bit rough at the moment, need to tidy and ink them up. But yeah I’m pretty pleased with them. Hopefully by tomorrow I will be ready to start animating in Maya.

It was an accident I swear

So did a little test animation to see, one that I haven’t lost my touch with TVPaint and two to experiment how the different scenarios that my character will come up with will look like. So far so good that movement looks pretty smooth, but I’m a bit meh on using stick figures, obviously they’re easy to animate and quick to draw but they don’t look interesting. I’m going to continue with these tests tomorrow and see what peers think.

I also manage to record my voice acting for the animation yesterday, only problem is my script is way too long. This isn’t really problem because I can edit down the script to reasonable time and it’ll still make sense, but the voice acting just doesn’t sound smooth and fluent. At the moment I’m going to use the audio as reference for the animating I’ll hopefully have started by Friday, but I may go back and edit the script and record it before I submit it on the deadline.

“GET TO THE RENDAAAARR” – Arnold 2016

Yesterday I managed to finish or roughly finish setting up my scene for lighting and rendering. It was my first time using the Arnold renderer, and let me say it looks good but man it was a bugger to get the hang off.

At first, after adding the spot light and area light, I did a quick render of the scene, but when I did nothing appeared on the render, at first I thought I was rendering from the wrong camera, but that was the case. I then thought, with help from a peer, that the gamma correction wasn’t turned up and couldn’t pick up anything, but after some research and a little video tutorial video about Arnold rendering from Lynda.com #notsponsered, I discovered that to have anything show up you need to increase the intensity of your lights so that they will be able to illuminate the scene.