Evaluation
of 3D Animation
In this report, I am going to
evaluate my 3D animation project and talk about what I did, where I had come
across difficulties and where I could improve for next time when I do animation
at a Bachelor Honour’s degree level.
To begin my 3D animation work, my
group and I had to discuss a story that would involve three characters at least.
We also had to find some rigs that we could use in Maya. I had found one very
useful rig to download for free called the Andy rig; it allowed me to change
the clothes, IK chains and gender. The face sliders were very useful to express
different emotions like joy, sadness, anger, disgust, shock, and happiness as I
could manipulate the eyes, the eyebrows, the mouth, the tongue, and teeth. The
website I found this was on creative crash.
We then came up with two possible stories; one that involved a man, a genie, and a woman, and another involved a couple of friends and an old man. Thinking on which was the best animation to produce that was simple, we decided on using the friends and old man story. This was about two friends, one who was good a football; the other isn’t. We discussed that the first friend (my character) would kick the ball from right to left and the other friend would kick the ball poorly. I had my character run in to the scene and see her friend tired out. She looks sad and has an idea to help her friend kick the ball. She shows her how to, and gestures her to try it. The other friend then has a go at kicking the ball and ends up kicking it further than she intended. We see a short scene where an old man is painting on a canvas, to which suddenly the ball comes hurtling down from behind and destroys it. Angry, he kicks the ball back at the girls and hits them both.
We found this story to be very useful because we could have a character each to work on in scenes and concentrate on animating one thing to get better results.
Next, we had to create test rigs for our characters. I had created a walk test to show the fluidity and the speed of how I was going to animate my character. The comments fed back to me stated that the walk cycle had her doing a weird head bop movement whenever she reached the contact point. She also had a weird leg snap that happened only because the knee pivots weren’t moving at all, and the IK chain in the middle of the leg tried to follow that. Learning from this I had considered what I was going to do when I came to animating.
Next, I had made a test render for the lighting in the scene. I had struggled with this part the most as I am not used to making lights in scenes. Running low on time, one of my group members had created a scene that we were all going to use, and I used this to test the lighting. I had found that the lighting was good for this particular scene and decided to keep it the same as it was made originally.
The next step was to create a series of playblasts for blocking out the scenes to see what the characters were going to do. I had accidently saved over previous playblasts and couldn’t show these previous files. Instead, I had showed how I was animating the project as a development.
I still received feedback from my playblasts, and I could use them. The first playblasts I showed had the girl run into the scene and make a crouching action, which did not look comfortable. I agreed with the feedback and discussed about what I could do to improve the animation, like adding in a skid and a follow through motion. The second playblast of this apparently looked better with the follow through of the girl when she immediately stops before the ball, but the motion of her stopping looked dramatic, as she thrusts her body into the air and making an uncomfortable bend in her body. I then redid this by making her body go straight and fall back and add more secondary motion in. They commented throughout this that the arcs on the arm swings were particularly effective.
The second scene according to the group critique was good and didn’t need improving too much, only saying that there needed to be expressions in her face.
My final scene I had to animate, the girl slid about when she kicked the ball. This was due to the Master controller being moved. They commented that the legs needed to move in this scene. Admittedly, I needed help to figure out how I was going to make the feet move around. It was suggested that the legs and arms needed to be FK chains instead. I agreed that the arms but disagreed with the legs because the feet controllers would give me more lenience to use the foot rolls and toe lifts when she moves.
Once my animation was done, I had to render each scene out individually. I had looked through the available renderers for the scene. Using the Maya Software render looked undetailed for the character rig, but the grass in the scene had appeared whereas using Mental Ray showed the detail of the character model, at the cost of not showing any grass. I decided to then render without the grass fur showing.
We then came up with two possible stories; one that involved a man, a genie, and a woman, and another involved a couple of friends and an old man. Thinking on which was the best animation to produce that was simple, we decided on using the friends and old man story. This was about two friends, one who was good a football; the other isn’t. We discussed that the first friend (my character) would kick the ball from right to left and the other friend would kick the ball poorly. I had my character run in to the scene and see her friend tired out. She looks sad and has an idea to help her friend kick the ball. She shows her how to, and gestures her to try it. The other friend then has a go at kicking the ball and ends up kicking it further than she intended. We see a short scene where an old man is painting on a canvas, to which suddenly the ball comes hurtling down from behind and destroys it. Angry, he kicks the ball back at the girls and hits them both.
We found this story to be very useful because we could have a character each to work on in scenes and concentrate on animating one thing to get better results.
Next, we had to create test rigs for our characters. I had created a walk test to show the fluidity and the speed of how I was going to animate my character. The comments fed back to me stated that the walk cycle had her doing a weird head bop movement whenever she reached the contact point. She also had a weird leg snap that happened only because the knee pivots weren’t moving at all, and the IK chain in the middle of the leg tried to follow that. Learning from this I had considered what I was going to do when I came to animating.
Next, I had made a test render for the lighting in the scene. I had struggled with this part the most as I am not used to making lights in scenes. Running low on time, one of my group members had created a scene that we were all going to use, and I used this to test the lighting. I had found that the lighting was good for this particular scene and decided to keep it the same as it was made originally.
The next step was to create a series of playblasts for blocking out the scenes to see what the characters were going to do. I had accidently saved over previous playblasts and couldn’t show these previous files. Instead, I had showed how I was animating the project as a development.
I still received feedback from my playblasts, and I could use them. The first playblasts I showed had the girl run into the scene and make a crouching action, which did not look comfortable. I agreed with the feedback and discussed about what I could do to improve the animation, like adding in a skid and a follow through motion. The second playblast of this apparently looked better with the follow through of the girl when she immediately stops before the ball, but the motion of her stopping looked dramatic, as she thrusts her body into the air and making an uncomfortable bend in her body. I then redid this by making her body go straight and fall back and add more secondary motion in. They commented throughout this that the arcs on the arm swings were particularly effective.
The second scene according to the group critique was good and didn’t need improving too much, only saying that there needed to be expressions in her face.
My final scene I had to animate, the girl slid about when she kicked the ball. This was due to the Master controller being moved. They commented that the legs needed to move in this scene. Admittedly, I needed help to figure out how I was going to make the feet move around. It was suggested that the legs and arms needed to be FK chains instead. I agreed that the arms but disagreed with the legs because the feet controllers would give me more lenience to use the foot rolls and toe lifts when she moves.
Once my animation was done, I had to render each scene out individually. I had looked through the available renderers for the scene. Using the Maya Software render looked undetailed for the character rig, but the grass in the scene had appeared whereas using Mental Ray showed the detail of the character model, at the cost of not showing any grass. I decided to then render without the grass fur showing.
Throughout this animation process,
I have learnt new techniques in Maya. I had enjoyed using the downloaded rig as
it had a lot of uses in morphing nicely, allowing me to add interaction with
objects like the ball and make a nice scene to render out. I knew that using
one that I’d make up would have taken a long time to model and making sure it’d
work. For when I do 3D animation next time, I would consider how I’d make my
scenes and think carefully about using FK more than IK if I want to achieve
adding in more principles of animation.
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