11 Seconds - 3D Animation

This is my 3D Animation...

This is going to be a page about what went on when I was creating my 3D animation in Maya.

This is an image that was taken of the animation, and this is the setting from the front room.
This is in a monologue type setting, since to the character there is not an actual audience. As you can see this is a typical room view.
The decoration in this room is purposefully hideous, I wanted it to be clear that it was the room that the character was complaining about. This has proved successful, due to when people have looked at my animation they new the subject in which I have guided the sound clip to be like.
The main thing in this room is the wall paper. This is gaudy and horrible. This was a main feature that I wanted within my work. This is because I wanted to base all the other models in the room off of this feature.
The main reason that I went for wall paper that look like this is because I wanted something large and bold and pink. I wanted a stereotypical room that a female may create in there home, if they had no taste what so ever in decorating and furniture.
Another thing that I wanted was that the furniture was truly distasteful, and it would make people question as to why I would put it in there. Because this is basically what the character is supposed to be portraying to the audience.
Looking at this image, you can see that there is a character in the middle. and that he looks plain and ordinary, I wanted him like this because I wanted him to obviously clash with scene. This is not something that I am usually used to doing, because, in most cases, animators/games designers/artists would usually like their characters to blend, at least a little in to the theme, this is so that they can show the connection. However, I kind of want this character rig to look out of place with it's surroundings.
This is the perfect character, for what I wanted for my animation, this is why I did not go looking for already made up rigs on the Internet... I did not see the point in wasting time in looking for a more suited rig, when there was a rig that was already at hand and was also a match for the idea that I had. I did not want to take more time on the Internet than I already was doing. Looking for the furniture models and some images that I have incorporated into this animations has already taken up a lot of my time, just finding them, and then making them usable to me.

This is a side shot, this shot is to show the backface culling on the walls. This is because, when mixing up the camera angles, when I record the animation, I do not want the walls to get in the way of the camera.
In this shot you can see that you can still see the back of some of the objects, this is a problem, this is going to be solved by applying backface culling to the models. However, not all of them will need this, this is because I will not be going behind the character, so the furniture and models behind the figure do not need backface culling applied.
In this shot you can also see that there are some objects that could not been seen before. These were behind the cabinet, and from this shot they can been seen more clearly.

This is a shot of the room that shows the ceiling more clearly, even though it has abnormally large tiles on the ceiling, it is not that important, due to it not being a main feature, I would of liked to be able to make this more aesthetic within the scene, but with the time frame that I have, I did not want to be fussing with making things, that may only show up for a second, a priority, there where other things that were much more important.

There were a few hiccups with the movement of the animated figure, one was that the face was moving and looking at the same time, this was unrealistic in the fact that people usually look before they move, so I have made it now, that the head turns to look before the body moves.
Another thing was the stomping of the foot, the leg came up quicker then it went down, this is not a believable interpretation of what it would look like and there was also at the same time a bit of a jerk movement in the right leg of the figure.
So I have tried to change the speed of the leg going up without making it too lone in a way, I just want it so that the character makes a stomp, it does not have to be a powerful one, just one that an audience would recognise as one.
I also got rid of the jerky leg movement, this was just a frame save that I had in there previously, before the rework on the stop, and I had mistakenly forgotten to delete it, this was something simple to fix.
The movement of the head was relatively easy to do, I just had to make it so that I deleted the correct frame saves and not other ones. But after that was done all that had to be done was to make sure that I was on the right frame, and that the character was just about to move his body, and I turned the head into the same position as the last one, except this one will be a couple of frames ahead of what the last ones would of been.

For my animation I am going to set up two different lights, one is going to be an ambient light and another is going to be a directional light. I want there to be light within the room to show that the main light is on, but I also want it to cover all of the room, that is why I have chosen an ambient light, also on this light I have made it so that it will cast shadows on the furniture models that it touches, this is because every light that is cast makes a shadow, even really low lights go that as well.

The other light, the directional one is going to look like that it is shining though from the outside, even though I have an image there to say that it is stormy outside (as depicted from the sound clip) there shall still be light emitted from it, even if it is not very strong.

For this scene I have made the lights fairly dark, this is because I wanted it to add to the 'darkness' of the sound clip rather than take away, which to me is what a brightly lit room would have done.

This is the character when all of the controls have been selected.

This is the time line for the animation, the green line along the bottom signifies that there is a sound imported into the animation, and all the red vertical lines show that there is a frame save here, and by that I mean that there was a movement made by the figure with one of it's controls and I then saved those movements one by one, or by selecting all that I had changed and saved it again, this was then saved to the frame that I had selected by pressing the 'S' key.

As can be seen a lot of frame saves are needed, but half of them are inputted by the software, so basically I am only physically making about 1/3 of the frames, the software creating the rest. After doing this I will go back and fourth between the frames and make sure that the character is moving smoothly within the scene. With the one that I am making now, this shall be fairly simple, due to the background not moving. So all I have to focus on the character. This is due to the sound clip being almost like a monologue.

Key points for this animation that I wanted within it.

One is that I wanted the mouth to really look like it was saying the words of the clip.

This is because I wanted the animation to look as realistic as possible, this is because it will make it more believable that the character is saying the sound clip. I wanted it to be as close as possible, so using lip syncing I am trying to make them flow together.
This is hard to picture, because in some cases not all the letters can be shown, this is because animation may loose it self, in the case of a character talking fast in some places, it might make the words in the end not even look like words an just like a whole bunch of movement that means nothing to people that are watching it.
I wanted it to look like the character was saying it, but also that the facial expressions also portray the words that are to be spoken by the man. 

Two is that I wanted the character to look around the room that it was in.

This was something that I wanted because I wanted to make sure that the scene that the character was standing in actually tied in with the animation and that it did not just look out of place. This was something that I originally thought would be easy to do, but I did not think about all the little things that went into making the movement look real. Not only did I have to move the characters main body, but I also had to think about what happened before and after the actual turning. As can be seen from me mentioning earlier, I had to make sure that the head was moved moved before the body had actually turned. This is because people look before they move, and I had not really thought of this until it was pointed out, but since it was I could see what they meant, so I went ahead and began to make changes on how the character was moving at that point. I wanted to do this because I wanted the animation to look as smooth and realistic as possible.

Three, I wanted the figure to lift his hand and point it towards the camera.

This was something that I wanted as soon as I heard the clip. This was something that I definitely wanted that would emphasis 'One day' being said by the character. This was something that was very characteristically challenging, since a lot of the parts needed to be moved just to get the hand to be raised, never mind that I wanted the fingers to move. After that was positioned, I used the hand controls to make is so that there was movement within the fingers. This was done bit my bit, due to each finger knuckle having it's own control. I had to make sure that they were all place right, so that the hand did not look warped.
I had to make the index finger move more than the other fingers, this is due to making the finger have a pointing action. This was then turned into a fist so that the next action that could be performed.

Four, I wanted the man to stamp his foot.

This was something had to do, since I have not seen anyone seriously stomp their foot before, so using a class mate as a subject, I had them stomp their foot a couple of times so that I would be able to try and copy that form and apply it to my animation. This was somewhat complicated due to there being so many body movements of the character that had to be made. These were the back, legs, feet and also the arms. These were all key to making the character move smoothly while in transition.
This was easy but at one point I seemed to have a slight glitch within it, and this was something that I needed to get rid of, when I found what it was it was rather simple on how to correct it. This was key to my animation, because I wanted to get the feeling of my character across rather visibly, due to that being the only thing that I can manipulate to make it so that it fits with the feeling with the sound.

Five is that I wanted the room that he was in to be terribly decorated.

This was one of my favourite ideas that I came up with, because other than the character, the background also plays a good part of the animation, due to the idea. The idea being that the man is not happy that his partner has decorated his living room horribly.
So to do this, I looked for garish wallpaper, carpets and rugs, and I kind of wanted them to look like the person tried to match the decorating, but it would, in the end just look terrible.
Then I went on to the internet to look for the worst furniture I could imagine being in the same room, due to none of it matching, unless there is a duplicate.
I wanted this because I just really wanted to get across what it was that I wanted the character to be frustrated about and I wanted it to be trivial, rather than serious and I feel as though I have gotten this across.

Evaluation of 3D Animation.

For this animation I am happy with the way that it turned out, there was a lot of doubt that I had about me personally being able to make a 3D animation, due to it being the first time that I had done something like this.

What peers thought about my animation.

Feed back for the animation was done in a big group and not everyone spoke and a lot of what was said was the same.

Positive

The camer angles and the use of it was good

Zoomed in shot of the face that pans out.

This is a shot that gets the whole rigs movements for this bit.

This is a shot that cuts to the face and then follows it left to right.

This is another panning out shot and this is to show more of the room.

The movement for the character was fluid.

This is a series that shows a smooth point to the character that was noticable by my peers.
This was something that took a large amount of time to do, due to all the different parts that had to be moved and readjusted at times.

This was also something that I wanted to move to the section of the clip that says 'One day' to put emphis on it.

The lip syncing of the figure was spot on.

This is a series of frames that fits with 'Some' as you can see the character is using exagerated movements to get across the words.
This was what I spent the most of my time animating on. This was something that I wanted to be sure that I got right. This was also because it was one of the hardest things to do.



Good facil expressions of my character.

As can be seen from these random frames, the character goes though a number of negative facial expressions, and this was something that I thought important to the animation and the character.


Negative

Some of the movements of the character was not as smooth as it could be.

At this point in the animation the character is crossing their arms, and this was not as smooth as it could be. The the arms sort of rebound at one point and this is something, when looking for things to mention can be seen, however, if just to be seen by an audience, and all they have to do is enjoy it, they would not really notice something like this.
To correct this I would have to go to the arm rigs and see where on the timeline the rebound happens and either try to get rid of this, and if I cannot do that, try to smooth it out as much as I possibly could.

Some of the sound was out.

Going back and looking at the Maya file I can see that the character is in sync with the sound. So the problem that is happening here is that the rendering went wrong. This is because I was not paying enough attention as to what the frame rate was, so that is where that problem came in, so that does not really have anything to do with the animation itself.

What went well

With this animation, while within Maya, I feel as though the lip syncing of the animation to the sound clip went rather well. I am pleased that I got this done to a really good personal standard.
I feel as though I did not need that much help when it came to this, so the animation was something that I could be proud of achieving on my own accord.
This standard does not really translate over into the other animation though. This is due to not being able to render and then put back together properly within the software that is available to me in college.

What did not go well

The one thing that did not go well between the translation of the frames from Maya, into a different piece of software so that it could be made into a video with sound.

I have figured out that this is a problem due to the fact that the timings that I have inputted into the software for making the frames into a movie is that I calculated the wrong amount of frames.

Due to human error and me not checking to see if they were numbers that matched up, I got the number of frames wrong, instead of doing it 30 fps, like it was in Maya, I calculated for it to be 24 fps, so the timings in the rendered out video will be slightly out, but it will not be too noticeable from the 30 fps that it should of been. (This was from getting confused with the 2D animation along the line.)

But as you can see from me making the evaluation, I have noticed this too late, so the animation cannot again be re-rendered to the correct timings that it should be, due to me not having the software at home with me, and the animation being due in at 9:30am Tuesday and today is Monday.

What would I do differently 

For this I would re-render my animation. But before I got to this part, I would make sure to double check the frame rate that I selected within Maya. To make sure that they match up better, there is no saying however that the sound connection will work seamlessly and that I would still not have to tweak it.

Another thing that I would do differently is maybe no spend so much time trying to sync the mouth, but also work on the body movements on the rig, I feel as though some of his movements are a bit lagging and slow, and do not give the quick impact that I was going for.