3D Animation Log #10 (12/5/17)

DISCLAIMER: This post was written on the date shown but was posted on 15th May. Also image editing tools were not working at the time of posting. Might update them later on, apologies for the inconvenience.

 

DEADLINE DAY!!!

 

I started the by finishing the rendering of my animation (took 2 days…). While waiting I worked on the planning documentation necessary to pass the assignment. Once rendering was done I began working on completing the animation. To do this I used Adobe After Effects

The animation on Adobe After Effects

The plan was to add the frames first, then add subtitles to the scenes where Eve speaks, and finally add the sound. While looking at the preview where a few things that did not seem right. First was with the camera, occasionally it would do close up shots which I did not make it do in Maya, but I kind of like it. The second was the length, the 2D animatic had a run of 60 seconds, the 3D one though 47 seconds. It then compared the 2 animations to see if there was a time different in 1 frame.

3D Animation (7 seconds)

2D Animatic (9 seconds)

I did some changes to cut the time but I did not think it would be this severe. Then I realised why, according to After Effects each second equals 30 frames and not 24 like in Animate. So with that unfortunate piece of knowledge I started working on the special effects starting with the fade in and fade out effects. I did this by using the create solid tool and fading the opacity when the animation to start and ends. Also these effects double as filler so that I could delay the length of the animation.

The scene fading to black in the end

Next I did the subtitles since I did not have any voice overs in the animation it would make sense to add subtitles as a substitute.

Subtitles added to the animation

Before insert the music to animation I listened to music I made yesterday and played animation along with it to see if the 2 would be ok together. Unfortunately it did not seem right so I decided to start again from scratch but this time make the music fit in with the video. It took me about an hour to create the music yesterday so I was not worried at all. I went for a more synthetic feel this time but still kept the mysterious tone, after all Eve has been transformed into mysterious alien-like lifeform. In all honesty though most of the good instruments on GarageBand that I have are synthesizers.

The instruments used for the new soundtrack

The rest was pretty simple I just dragged the sound file into After Effects and then exported the file via Adobe Media Encoder. And soon before I knew it the animation was finally completed.

I then completed the planning documentation and this production log. It has been a long process but my 3D animation, and my second year at Higher Education is completed.

3D Animation Log #9 (11/5/17)

Out of the 15 rendering process that I have conducted at the start of today only 5 were done overnight. Fortunately none of them but one had any errors. After checking the progress of the rendering and re-rendering 2 frames as I had to interrupt the process on several computers so that other people could use them (I cannot be selfish about this). Also I COMPLETELY forgot to render frames 1227 to 1256 so I had to render those scenes too.

After a bit PC organising I worked on the music for the animation. I had to use my Mac for this as GarageBand is only for Apply operating systems. I wanted the music to have an orchestral feel to it but in a low and mysterious way. Because of this I used organs and electronic keyboards imitating bells and have nice soundtracks built in already.

Screenshot of GarageBand

Normally I would use the finished animation for the sound but since it was not finished I had to use 2D animatic instead. To make even trickier is that had use both GarageBand and the animatic on Mac, as normally I would use the Mac for GarageBand and a PC for the animation. I think the music might be out of sync in the product but hopefully it goes well. I just wish GarageBand measured the music in seconds as it would have made things much easier.

But overall today was another boring day. At least tomorrow will be interesting.

3D Animation Log #8 (11/5/17)

I decided to one last minute addition to the animation before rendering it. When Eve is stationary she appears motionless so I decided to make her shoulders go up and down to give her a bit of motion. I got the idea from a mobile played last night Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, on the character menu their shoulders move so I thought it would be idea to incorporate this into my animation. It would give me more marks anyway.

Normal Shoulders               Raised Shoulders

I had a bit of trouble rendering the animation at first mainly due to the fact that: 1) The animation is long and it would take hours to render, and 2) Arnold would not batch render so I had to use render sequence. When doing test renders a frame at 1080p took 26 minutes, while at 720p it took 11 minutes. Since time is of the essence I am going to go with 540p since it will take too long to render with the other options.

To save time I came up with a cunning plan. Instead rendering the whole animation at once I would render each scene separately using different computers by saving the Maya file onto the main computer. I did this before and then after it is done I will put them together in Adobe After Effects along with the sound.

3D Animation Log #7 (9/5/17)

I started the final part of the animation by doing the walk. I used the walk rig I did a while ago as a guide and 2D animatic for the frames. Looking at the number of frames it took Eve 200 frames to walk to the end of the scene, but since that will take too long when hand animating (copying and pasting frames did not really work out) I am cutting down the time to 100 frames. To begin with I focused on the legs and did the arms and the other stuff later on.

Leg stage

Afterwards I did the arms and then added the details, hair and eyelid movement. It was daunting having to do all of this but eventually the animation was done.

Arm stage

There was one scene in the 2D animatic which was the final scene where Eve walks into the darkness of the tunnel. Remember when I said I was going to use movie magic, well I going use it on that scene but I thought instead I would simply have the camera facing Eve instead of being behind her as she walks just to save the trouble of the creating a new asset.

The original final scene

Before working on the lighting, rendering and sound, I had to create a camera to record the animation. The last time I used a camera was back in 2014 when I was using 3ds Max and it worked more or less the same as before as far as I can remember.

I made the camera in the same directions as how my 2D animatic played and it was pretty to easy use. It works the same as how you animate an asset. It did not take long to finally have the shots I wanted and I feel proud about them. After a few bits to clean up later the animation was done.

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

So now it was time to do final job before rendering, the lighting. In the past have been not got at lighting at all as shown in last year’s 3D work and my game level, with a bit of help from some peers I managed to get it to work. I used lighting tools from Maya like point lights and from the Arnold renderer. I also had to tone down the specular and reflection on the my textures as it would reflect the lights and make my assets, especially Eve, like rubber dolls. Soon I rendered using the Arnold renderer and thus final touches were done, and for once I finally have shadows in my scene. It took a while for the frames to be rendered so I wonder how long it is going to take to render 1400 frames?

The rendered frame (a bit too pink-ish but it looks nice)

Now all that is left is to render the animation, create the music for the animation and compile it all together and then we have will have the animation up and running. I also need to render the rigs as well, but I will not do them around the same time as the main animation as I learned that the hard way years ago. Maya has also been crashing on the computers inconveniently quite lately so hopefully it does not happen during the rendering process.

3D Animation Log #6 (8/5/17)

Last week, last push starts today. At home my PC is quite slow so I could not really approve what I did yesterday, so today I started by looking how the animation went and decided to fix some of the areas that seemed out of place. Afterwards I resumed working on the animation from where I left off.

After adding some details to yesterday’s scene including the speech movement (I do wonder how awkward it is going to be especially with no voice acting) came “the doom scene” as I describe the scene I think will challenging to do because of the eye issues. However with the scenes of Eve examining herself and a later scene where remembers her name I accidently swapped them around (oops). But it was only small mistake so it did not really hinder my progress. While doing the mouth movement for when Eve says her name I decided to change the dialogue, originally she was going to say “Eve… That’s my name, Eve” instead I changed it or least going to change it to “Eve… My name?”. I also omitted some dialogue stating that she cannot remember anything else but the dialogue gives the assumption anyway. So for time proposes and the fact that I am not a professional on lip syncing it does makes things a bit easier.

Eve speaking

Then I worked on the scene where Eve examines herself for real this time. Because of the eye error I made changes to the narrative of the scene. Originally as I already mentioned before when Eve touches her ears her eyes move to each ear, however this time Eve simply touches them for a moment, around half the time originally intended.

Original Scene

The new scene (similar but different portrayal)

So needless to say I was pretty happy with how I was able to get the scene done. All that was left was Eve examining her surroundings again, but this time by moving her head while speaking. As a substitute for the eyes I simply turned her waist from left to right.

2D scene

3D scene

Before the final scene Eve also speaks about what has happened to her. Because the original scene involved speaking and no movement at all (it was simply killing time for the animatic to reach the 50 second mark) I decided to add some movement to the 3D scene. In this case moving her arm up and looking at it.

2D scene

3D scene

By the time I did that scene I realised that I think this animation might go over original 1340 frame count my 2D animatic had. So I decided to cut something else yet again. In the final Eve walks but before that Eve looks into the distance, but this scene was meant to kill time so that scene is now scraped. This is what the scene was in the 2D animatic.

The deleted scene

All is left to do is to have Eve walk and do a bit of movie magic, well sort of. Hopefully by the end of tomorrow the animating will be done.

3D Animation Log #5 (7/5/17)

I began my work checking the number of frames it takes for Eve to rotate at every direction. According to the 2D animatic it takes Eve 24 frames per turn to change direction, so naturally that is what I did for the 3D animation. Also after rotating myself I thought it would be a good idea to rotate her waist starting from when she faces backwards so it won not be like turn-pause-turn-pause etc.

Facing Front

Turning Right

Facing Right

Facing Backwards (the outliner was not blocking anything)

Facing Left

Turning back to the front

Back to normal

During the animation Eve also has to move her eyes from time to time however when I tried to move one of the eyes this happened.

Eww gross…

This can be a problem as later on Eve has to move her eyes in one key scene later on. I do not how I am going to fix the issue as re-binding the skin did not work. But I will worry it about later on.

So after I rotated Eve I worked on the next scene where Eve realises her current state. In this scene Eve talks, however there will not be any voice acting in the animation due to time constraints. (AND I KNOW EVERYTHING I HAVE TO CUT HAS TO DO WITH TIME BEING AGAINIST ME, AND YES I HATE IT SO MUCH! (Rant over). So naturally I have to move her mouth according to what she says. So it will not just be moving the mouth up and down it has done properly.

Eve’s discovery

Later on Eve will have to examine herself by holding her ears and her eyes have to move from right to left. I did attempt to fix the eyes numerous times but unfortunately I could not get them to work at all. And as for the arms, since they are small, hopefully there will not be any awkwardness. So hopefully I can think of a way to make the scene work even if I cannot fix the eyes. And hopefully there will not be anymore errors.

Motion Capture Research

Motion capture (or Mo-Cap for short) is a process of capturing actions or movement of people or objects and translating it into a 3D animation. This process is used primarily in military, entertainment, and sports for computer vision. This is also used to create motion animations much easier especially for digital characters in film and video games and is preferred over key frame animation.

An early form of motion capture came in the form of rotoscoping. Rotoscoping is an animation technique used by animators trace over footage, just like motion capture except that the original actor is drawn over. So in way it is a similar process to motion capture. While motion capture transfers animation data over to computer generated characters, rotoscoping is used to draw a new character overlapping the actor.

Disney movies used this technique (from: youtube.com)

Motion capture has been used in numerous films such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Avatar, Rise of Planet of the Apes and its sequel Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. The film to use real time a motion capture system was The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. This was used to stream the performance of Andy Serkis into the CGI skin of the character Gollum as it was being performed.[1]

Andy Serkis as Gollum (from: animationxpress.com)

For gaming it has been used to capture actions of actors to incorporate them into in-game characters. Games development is also the largest market for motion capture, mainly due to video games drawing as much revenue as movies meaning high demands for massive amount of quantities for motion capture. For the most part there are 2 types of character animation for games, real time playback and cinematics. With real time allowing the player to use pre-created moves (or rigs) to execute specific actions while cinematics are for cutscenes such as fully rendered movies like intros and in-game cutscenes.[2]

There are different types of motion capture including magnetic motion capture, mechanical motion capture, and optical motion capture.[3] Magnetic motion capture involves using sensors on the body connected to a control unit providing real time movement. Mechanical motion capture involves a performer wearing metal strips like a skeleton with each joint having a sensor. In addition the performer can wear gloves or use contraptions like articulated models or mechanical arms for key framing. Optical motion capture captures data digitally and is widely in digital media such as animation and video games to bring more life into the character. This method also uses reflective markers placed onto the actor’s suit making it easier for software to identify the position in 3D.

Each of these types comes with their own pros and cons.

• Magnetic motion capture as already provides real time movement but also provides no correspondences making positions and rotations absolute, and also it is cheaper than optical motion capture. However because the actor has to be connected to a device it is difficult to move around. Also the method is affected by magnetic fields so it is often a recommendation to use special stages.
• Mechanical motion capture in contrast to Magnetic Mo-Cap is not affected by magnetic fields but it does have its flaws. One of which being that the movement is not realistic and technology use does not acknowledge the ground so actions like jumping cannot be done, and also the equipment has to be recalibrated often making it quite problematic.
• Optical motion capture allows the actor to move freely as they like due to the suits light weight, allowing more actions to be captured. Unfortunately it is very expensive, the markers on the suit can be hidden by props and other actors, and are prone to light interference.

For the creation of 3D animation there advantages that motion capture has over traditional animation such as its near real time movement reducing the cost of key framing, secondary motions can be recreated easily, and also there can be potential for free software and third party solutions reducing costs. Among the disadvantages of motion capture includes the obvious cost of the software, movement that does not follow the laws of physics cannot be captured, and if the character models proportions are larger than the actors then the movement might be dodgy.

We have been using a piece of software that supports motion capture and that is Autodesk MotionBuilder. MotionBuilder is used for motion capture and is also used for virtual production and keyframe animation. The features of MotionBuilder include real time display and animation tools, facial and skeletal animation, and “Best-of-class” support for motion capture devices.

Autodesk MotionBuilder Logo (from: en.wikipedia.org)

Autodesk MotionBuilder (from: renderositymagazine.com)

There are other software that supports motion capture including Brekel and iPi Soft. Both of these motion capture software support markerless motion capture and can use off the shelve cameras like the Xbox Kinect.[4][5]

iPi soft (from: ipi-mocap-studio.en.softonic.com)

 

 

References

[1] Gollum Actor: How new motion-capture tech improved The Hobbit, https://www.wired.com/2012/12/andy-serkis-interview/

[2] Who uses motion capture?, http://metamotion.com/motion-capture/motion-capture-who-1.htm

[3] Types of Motion Capture, https://sagarlonkar.com/about-2/motion-capture/types-of-motion-capture/

[4] Brekel, http://brekel.com/

[5] iPi Soft, http://ipisoft.com/

3D Animation Log #4 (5/5/17)

I resumed working on the animation today after finishing my Game Level assignment and made excellent progress.

Frame 128 in the 2D Animatic

Frame 128 in the 3D animation

Unfortunately due to Eve’s short arms (which was a design flaw on my part) I had to edit the scene, so instead she tilts her head to her hand. Unfortunately the wrist did not move well, also the armpit moved as well which it is not supposed to do.

The error (Eve is literally face palming herself)

So I once took up pain weight tool and fixed the error, well sort of. Even though I fixed the armpit I did not how I was going to fix the wrist without messing up the arm. So instead I moved the arm to another position just to be safe.

The fixed scene

I still need to use paint weights in some areas but I am going to fix them later on. More tweaks later and frame 168 was done.

Frame 168

From frame 168 to frame 227 Eve is basically standing up so the next step pretty easy to do although I did have to move other parts afterwards within that time span. In 2D animation frames 168 to 205 had a key frame every 12 frames (mostly) and from then on until 263, on frame 227 she starts to finally reach her standing position.

The timeline in the 2D animatic of Eve’s rise

On frame 205 Eve’s left leg should start to position itself so that Eve can stand up. It was pretty basic stuff until near the end I made a change different to the 2D animatic. Once Eve reaches her height she shakes her head before setting to frame 267 when everything else relaxes.

Original 2D Animatic shot

New 3D Animation shots

I chose to do this just to add more dynamic movement in the animation. And I think it looks rather well, it makes it more real.

Now came the hard part, once Eve stands up she has to rotate 360 degrees to look around her surroundings. I thought it might be a good idea to focus on the legs and root first before tweaking everything else.

My tactic to execute this complicated animation is that Eve moves her right leg first then herself turns right followed by her left leg. And before her left leg touches the ground her right foot will tilt preparing the next step. Once she turns to her right immediately after her left leg touches the ground she turns right again with her other leg in tow and repeat until she returns to her original position. However I do need to make changes from the original timetable to make it more realistic. Originally she turns to her right at frame 288 and again at frame 314 she turns backwards. Now on my 3D animation she will start turning at frame 310.

This how the 2 versions compare to one another.

2D Animatic: On frame 288 she has turned right

On frame 315 she turns backwards

3D Animation: On frame 288 Eve has turned right except her left leg

On frame 315 Eve has not turned backwards yet as she has just finished turning right

So as you can see I may not completely follow the timeline, I will show how I went with the process next entry.

3D Animation Log #3 (28/4/17)

Today during my work on the animation I have decided to make changes to the timeline of the animation to make it move in real time. As I have already mentioned before I will be using the 2D animation timeline as a reference however after I have done the main keyframes and the initial animation I will then fine tune the animation to fix it. I will also be using the actions reference clips help me with the real time movement.

These are the steps I am going to take during the first shot:

• Move the arms back and then use them to get Eve up
• When Eve starts getting up she will press herself up
• Afterwards she will use one knee for support and then stand up using the other while placing her right hand on her face

Also by the time I did this entry Eve’s left leg is oddly in the position as her right leg. I might have forgotten to keyframe it or save when I made the change. But it is only a small mistake but I will not fix it due to time constraints, it should not be a huge problem.

The animation as of now

3D Animation Log #2 (27/4/17)

Today I have finished my rigs for my games level design assignment. Now my next task on Maya is to complete and start working on the animation. I should point out that this entry only contains work that I finished before.

After finishing the character rigs for the game I added more controls to the rig, two for each of the eyebrows and eyes. I also fine-tuned the mesh using paint weights (no images were taken of this unfortunately).

Eve Model with controllers

Meanwhile I created the scene for the animation, the cave. Development for the cave underwent the same procedure as the assets for the game level. This included creating the model, unwrapping the mesh, extracting maps, and texturing.

Cave

As for the crystal I simply re-used the crystal asset however the only change I made was making the crystal transparent.

With the assets created and ready to go it was time to begin working on the animation. For the process I will be using the 2D flash animation I made in the last assignment as a reference for the timeline.

Production of the animation will eventually come across some roadblocks and that is exactly what happened today. The error was that the back of Eve’s top sinking into Eve’s back. Despite my fine-tuning with the paint weights I only focused on the arms as when working on the Eve rigs occasionally the arms, especially with the jump rig, as the arms would move irregularly. So really I wanted to focus on the area that gave me so much trial and error and fix it so that history will not repeat itself. Eventually the error was fixed.

Scene before painting weights

Scene after painting weights