Making of Character Animation and Reflective Statement

Fig.1 - The Making of Character Animation

             

Fig.2 - Story Boarding

I started working with the walking cycle, followed by the attack combo and ended with character performance.  After doing the walking cycle and the attack combo which I will be talking about later, my skills were more refurbished in animating, thus giving me more flexibility when working on character performance. 

I got excited when thinking about my final piece and started thinking of a scene that was stuck in my head. This scenario was about someone who randomly decided to urinate in a pot of rice and does not feel sorry about it, however, it was suggested that he does not eat from the rice, therefore someone asked whether everyone had to eat from it. this scene made me chuckle and I decided to create my own scenario using the audio. Thus started off by creating the storyboard. When Storyboarding I used different references from Canvas and Google. I decided to add cameras to the scene and play with them. Shown in Figure 2, I added handheld cameras, pan cameras and more. Doing the storyboard, helped me a lot in understanding what I want my characters to be doing, and gave me more insight into what will be happening in the scene. although afterwards when placing the characters on set I had to adjust some of the scenes for appeal. 

Fig.3 - Staging 

Fig.4 - Anticipation 

After all the ideas, I went to CG-Trader and got different sets to create the envisioned mise-en-scene. I then proceeded to add all the characters to the scene and positioned the as done using the storyboard. I then used sources from Canvas and YouTube to understand how to move audio (since there will be silence at the beginning of the scene), I was also able to learn how to colour code the keyframes, which helped me a lot in establishing who was saying their lines. After organising the scene and Keyframes, a graph editor was used to help work on the arcs with the arms and hips. Since the girl model had a small waist, I decided to exaggerate her hips when moving and talking which I thought went well. 

I then started looking at the lists of 12 principles of animation and made sure I added them to my characters. For example, I used squash and stretch a lot in some of my animations for any big expressions. This is shown in figure 5, the cat has a shocked facial expression, therefore I proceeded in stretching his head in one keyframe for an exaggeration. When animating I looked at google images that represented the poses that I wanted and started acting out some of the poses for reference whilst animating. 

Fig.5 - Squash and stretch

After I finished Posing, I decided to add the lip-syncing. I used many sources to understand the mouth movement, I started mouthing the words whilst animating which helped a lot when understanding how your mouth works. I then went forward to putting my hand below my chin to keyframe evetime a character's jaw should be moving which magnificently helped and improved my animations. This then went to me adding facial expressions by using the eyebrows and adding blinks, making them look more alive. 

Fig.6 - Vieport options for playblast and Lights for rendering

As excited as I was with the end product, I decided to playblast and go to viewport enabling everything I saw fit. After hearing about the extension I proceeded to add lighting to the scene and started rendering. I used 5 area lights; two lights coming from the ceiling representing the living room lights, one from in front of the television for screen light and other lights to brighten up the places and characters. Afterwards, I rendered the scene and went to Premiere Pro to input the sound and sequenced images. I had an issue with the sound not matching the sequenced images, this is because when rendering out the images, for some reason the timing was faster than it was play-blasted in real-time. However, I solved this by reducing the time of the frames so that they matched the wording of the audio (more details on personal studies blog). 

Fig.7 - Exaggeration 

Before creating the final (character performance). I worked on the walk cycle. I decided to use a reference from YouTube of a guy walking confidently. Using this source; the arms, shoulders and legs were exaggerated to give the character more of a personality. I then added a wink and a little hand gesture to sure its pompous side. I went through this process by block posing, adding in-betweens and using the shift key to move the frames where the timing was suitable. After I thought this was done I went straight to doing the Attack Combo as shown below. 

Fig.8 - Pose to pose and Blocking

After doing the walk cycle I had more confidence and flexibility in animating, I repeated the same process from the walk cycle to this. Since my reference came from an animated short, I decided to use some human references as that seemed like a suitable option for me to understand more about movement. Since there were a lot of attack combos in a short amount of time it was hard for me to place the keyframes at the right time. However having people look over it, helped me see the animation from a different perspective, mostly when I have been staring at it for days. At the end of the day, animating the walk cycle and the attack combo gave me more of an understanding of my character performance project as my skills were enhanced. 

In conclusion, I thought this project was a success as I was able to tackle my problems and solve them. I was able to learn a lot from my sources and Maya. What I would do differently, is focus more on my graph editor and poses. I would have also made a list to tell me what I am missing and remind me of what to turn on or off in settings, also may have asked for more advice from tutors than from public eyes. In addition, loved how my skills were secretly being polished before tackling my final character performance which I thought was a success.