Rendered Final Animation

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP40w9shws4

                Here is my finished animation for this semester. I have some reasons for why I consider it effective and where it could have been improved. First of all, the facial animation itself is quite strong. I think the lip syncing is almost spot on with the various blendshapes working nicely to form the letters to a pretty nice degree. The arcs on the arms work quite well due to my manipulation of the graph editor, but a negative is that there are still some issues with the rigidity of the arms and body movements. The sharp darting motion of the eyes is nice and adds a lot of characterisation. Some of the movements of the arms and head were quite well timed with anticipation and thought coming through in the way that the character moves his hand at the 8 second mark and opens his fingers before he closes them again in the finger interlocking shot which establishes further, the mindset of the character. The target audience of this animation is probably people who already know the Nightcrawler character and in looking at this, maybe the people who don't know the character may not fully understand the relation of Nightcrawler to the animation. 
   
             The overall render itself is of quite a high quality with the lighting looking nice and shadows being cast in a way that it looks like sharp interior lighting. It was darker during the first render but after taking the sampling up and manipulating the grade in nuke, i was able to get the desired effect. The chrome mia material that was used to create the reflective mirror texture also came out believable although slightly darker than I had hoped. The rotation of the in scene camera runs smoothly in this animation but could possibly be a little bit slower.

    Looking at the secondary action on the tail, it is smooth but maybe moves a bit too much in comparison to the rest of the body. When animating, I tried to make the tail move and react to the movements that the rest of the body was making and trying to make it react to the words and emotions of the character. This actually worked well and although the movements are subtle, convey and mimic how the character's thoughts are shown. As for the movements of the head, I tried to make the movements less literal by offsetting them, as per the lecturer's request. By doing this it added asymmetry and a sense of realistic imperfection to the character.

     Again to talk about the mouth and facial expressions, the scowling nature of the character works well with the quote, his eyebrows lowering and raising at certain points of excitement in the character's voice. The animation as a whole has definitely been successful with some slight issues that I will learn from. This has been my first attempt at creating blendshapes for facial animation and so, it was quite an enjoyable and interesting process to create emotion through these facial features and lip sync it to the Taken quote, allowing for a new approach to the famous action scene.            

Individual post with 3/4 render of character

Individual post with Front Render of character

11 second club: UFO Animation

http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/april15/entry/WTxxOs

       
           Here is an E.T inspired animation from the 11 second club. This entry came in the top 11 in its respective month. It seems nicely rendered but the first thing that I noticed with this animation is that the lighting seem to be too intense to the ppoint that it causes visual errors and distortion to the characters' faces. The dialogue may not actually come from an alien based quote but the animator has put some thought into setting the scene for the viewer to see a coherent story. The li syncing could be better and I see some issues on the alien's lips, most notably for me, when he says, "I really appreciate it." The animation on the alien's grin, however, is smooth as well and the squash an stretch motion is visible throughout it's movement.   

         There is some nice subtlety and secondary action where the man takes the leaf out of the air, something that I didn't notice on my first couple of viewings. The other subtleties here, such as the movements of the eyes and head work very nicely and are smooth with the overall character thought processes. A well animated piece that got the point across straight away with a very simple concept, with the movements working very well to tell the story and give depth and characterisation to two characters that the viewer has only just met. There is a sense like you know the characters and what they have been through from just a few simple lines of dialogue. This goes to show how powerful the animator's role can be in the storytelling process and here, the animator was successfull in getting those plot points across.  

11 second club, "What we do in the Shadows"

Here are a few clips from the 11 second club competition where the quote is from New Zealand mockumentary film, "What we do in the Shadows."

    The tough part with this quote is that it deals clearly with vampires and so, looking through the list of animations, found no real new take other than vampire characters.

Here are some of them.

http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/october16/entry/s0286m

Here is the first one. In it, the lip syncing and the overall characterisation is quite strong but the movements of the camera and the characters are too sudden and cause the viewer to lose that relationship with the animation. It seems like the animator tried to do this as a hand held type shot almost like the actual film that the quote is from but failed to make it work.

This short character is quite well done but the other blade like character fails to interact properly with him.

Here is another animation from the same competition. This one is a 2D animation.

http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/october16/entry/WM3zpH

This animation is quite good. The characters fit the style of the dialogue and are nicely thought out. They don't come across as generic vampires like in some of the other animations. Their movements are interesting t watch and the character thought processes are clear. The small hand movements that the shorter character makes gives a Woody Allen neuroticism to the character that really allows me as a viewer to understand him. The arcs on the sword swings are particularly powerful too.  The taller character plays off of this well and is very well lip synced.

Finally I will look at the winning entry for this 11 second animation competition.

http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/october16/winner

 The staging of this animation is really powerful. The characters are similar to the one before this but still take a fresh take on the quote. The way the character opens his cape and reveals the clothing is very nicely animated with facial expressions reacting perfectly to the events in the scene. I wonder what it would look like in 3D, I feel that the dark setting would not look as nice were it created using 3D software. One criticism that I found was that the framerate seems inconsistent. The latter half of the animation seems to move slower than the first half and so made me question the animation slightly. Other than this, I feel it is a really well animated piece. 


    

11 second club evaluation

Here are some more evaluations of 11 second club animations


http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/march17/winner

     The winner of this animation competition is very powerful. A well staged, well animated piece that contains elements of secondary action in the cigarette, small subtle movements and a strong sense of life and realism in their character's personalities. I noticed some slight issues in the movement of the lips but other than this, it is very strong. The squash and stretch on the character's face in the final few frames add nicely to the personality of the older character. He smirks and in this moment, his thoughts can be clearly expressed on his face. The movements of the camera between the two characters is nice and works well, establishing the story and making it easier for the viewer to follow.

     The scene itself could take place anywhere thanks to the quote and so, here is an entry that did poorly but has the same quote in order to see the difference in animation and storytelling quality between the two.


http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/march17/entry/yEBvkx

    In comparison, this animation is very weak compared to the first one. The movements are very static and mechanical and the lip syncing is off. The camera movements are weak and the story is difficult to follow. The mouth only seems to move up and down unlike the various mouth shapes of the character in the winning entry. The facial expressions are strong but still fail to communicate a message. The best thing that I would suggest for this animator would be to look more at how the mouth moves and try to replicate the phonetics more. By looking at this animation in comparison to the first one, it is clear to see that there are some very large differences in the animators approaches.  

  

T pose renders

Renders of my character from various angles.

Modelling the scene and creating the blendshapes

            

                     In order to create the scene for my animation, I thought about how I planned to animate the character talking into a mirror almost threateningly. This made me think about the Travis Bickle character played by Robert DeNiro in Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver." I decided that the modelling of the scene should reference that slightly and look like a small apartment that is shabby and run down. It contains a pan on the wall, some small shelves and other kitchen appliances such as an oven, sink, table and chairs. I added some basic polygons as bolts on the doors and lit the scene from above, adding a camera that would rotate around the character at the end of the animation. A bump map was added to the walls in order to create a more painted wall effect.


              Creating the blendshapes would be a fairly new process to me as I had never done it on a facial animation before. I had only really animated using them on polygon primitives. Firstly after a bit of research, I figured out how to create them but there was an issue with the mesh pulling forward on itself and so I was forced to rerig and reskin the character before recreating the blendshapes. The blendshapes are actually a great resource and I like how two or more blendshapes can be merged together to create a new shape. Something that I discovered about the process is that the verts relate in a one to one correlation and due to this, deleting any part of the mesh, will cause the verteces to reassign themselves randomly, ruining the blendshapes and making them unusable. (I now know from experience).

         Using a blendshape guide recommended by a classmate, I was able to create the basic phonetic mouth shapes and paint the blend shape weights so only the face would contain the deformation.  

                 These mouth shapes would help to create the words needed to replicate Liam Neeson's voice.  I also created blendshapes for basic emotions such as happiness and sadness and blendshapes that create blinking effects and adding a deformer to the tongue.

Here are some examples of my blendshapes.

 Angry

Happy

 

I feel that this process went well as even though I had the frustration of having to recreate the shapes, rig and skin, it taught me a valuable lesson about blendshape workflow and how to best optimise it for greater animation results. Soon, I will write about the animation process.
         

Ideas Generation

I had feedback from someone in my class on different animation ideas for the Taken clip that I am doing. Here is an image of the various new ideas.

Rigging and Skinning

 The rigging process was fairly straightforward this time as I used an autorigging system, "Advanced Skeleton" in order to rig it. http://www.animationstudios.com.au/advanced-skeleton. I tried to rig the face with the same program but this didn't work out si instead I decided on blend shapes as the animation method.

 Here is a shot of the eye rigging which was created using an aim constraint. I worked on the Jaw and fixed a few issues before painting the skin weights seperately. At first, I had tried auto skinning with advanced skeleton but it didn't work how it should have so I did it as a new skin.

The skinning process basics. 

                                                                   Skinning the spine.

                                                       Rigging and skinning on the tail.


                                               From here, I will work on the blendshapes.

Blend shape examples

Here are some blend shape examples. I am now working on creating the blend shapes for animating my model. Most blend shapes seem to deal with elements such as the mouth and eyes seperately. The mouthmakes phonetic shapes for various letters and the face is then distorted to fit with various facial expressions such as Anger or sadness, with a rest pose.

 As for the eyes, they can be done seperately or together. An example of this would be doing the eyes half closed, open and then a blink as I will do for my character.   

Here is a real world example with squash and stretch on the character. Here the tongue movement is clear as is the rotation and curving of the lips. Using the verteces in the mesh, you can manipulate them to affect the shapes of the finished model. It is substitution.


BLENDSHAPE TROUBLESHOOTING:     An issue that I had with the blendshapes at first was that I was duplicating just the head faces rather than the whole mesh. It turns out that doing this will reorder the verts so there is no longer a 1 to 1 relation so the whole mesh needs to be duplicated, with any further duplication coming from the first duplicate. It is thankfully interactive though so the verts can be moved after the blend shape is applied. Using the "Front of Chain" advanced blend shape option also makes it so that the shape comes before the skin in the heirarchy. 


Image references

Image 1:   http://www.francescolupo.it/works/otto/otto016.jpg
Image 2:   http://userpages.umbc.edu/~bailey/Courses/Tutorials/ModelNurbsHead/images/Phon-Typical.jpg
Image 3:  https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/88/3e/0e/883e0e8b97198f63ee3e00f767b9da0c.jpg

Another 11 Second club analysis

http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/july07/winner

Animation from the 11 second club: July 2007


         This animation is interesting, although simplistic, it contains a lot of nice subtle movements in the hands and eyes. It is well timed, such as when the letter is opened and contains real characterisation. The use of the letterbox is nice to think about as the addition of a prop, something for the characters to intewract with other than themselves is something that can add a lot to a scene. The animator has clearly put a lot of thought into the little things here and the secondary action is incredible. I would really like to see this animation rendered out properly though. Looking at it again, there seems to be some small issues when the character on the right is moving towards the other character but it is mostly unnoticeable due to the well animated expressions on the character's faces which draw the viewer in.

         The movement of the lips themselves could be better as I feel that the synchronisation of audio to action is slightly off. The story is clear and looking at the other principles of animation, it is clear that squash and stretch are present on the character's faces as they speak, allowing for a higher and better sense of realism. The use of arcs is great as well as the characters move fluidly when turning and rotating their heads, arms and uperbodies. One final criticism that I have would be that the character on the right seems to have some movements and facial expressions that conflict the tone of voice making it seem slightly strange. I noticed this mainly around frame 20 with the character on the left. The character should possibly be slightly less calm about the situation when he says, "We have to."  
       Overall though, it is a nice, well timed animation in both body and face that was worthy of winning the competition that month.
          
              

Interesting Paper on Facial Animation and the science behind it

Facial Animation is an important part of this semester and so I have been reading up on the subject. Here is a paper that contains information on everything from muscle modelling to blend shapes and was quite enjoyable to read. It contains diagrams and the writer writes about pros and cons when dealing with the process of 3D facial animation. I found a lot of interesting things in this and I will continue to search for more relevent research papers in the future.

  http://graphics.cs.uh.edu/website/Publications/2007_facial_animation_survey_bookchapter.pdf

Interesting Animation Blogs

http://pixartimes.com/   

1. The Pixar Times is the first professional animation blog that I want to write about in this post. As one of the most influential animation companies of all time, it is interesting to read about everything that is going on with them and their research. Constantly updated and dealing with the vast empire of films that are in their collection, this blog covers characters and films with articles that link to the animation processes and research ideas. 

http://www.speakingofanimation.com/

2. Speaking of Animation is a blog that was created by four professional animators.  who work in industry. They give news about the world of animation in their posts as well as providing inspirational elements and educational bits on animating. They don't update the blog very often though and so the site suffers from a lack of regular material but there are still videos with interviews and industry related information.


http://www.animationphysics.com/

3.  This blog is a free educational site for animators. It deals with information from traditional 2D animation to 3D computer graphics and stop-motion related material. It contains lots of information on providing context to how the principles and laws of physics apply to the world of animation. Unlike the others on this list, it is less news related and more focused on teaching. It provides multiple tutorials, some of which i have looked at, The tutorials are organised into four categories for easier access and understandung, basic animation, character animation, effects and character effects animation and lighting and visual effects. Looking through these, it is clear that this blog contains some very nice content.

The modelling process

 I started off by creating the outline and a basic mesh with pointed ears and basic lamberts so i could visualise the images that I was working from.

 Following on from this, the character's face had to be molded a bit more to the shape of the character but still basic and generic.

 I mirrored the generic mesh and began to work on it some more, whilst manipulating both sides.

 I retopologised the character to try and fit the likeness a bit more. At this point, the humanoid features were getting closer.

 Extruding downwards I began working on the arm and hand. Two fingers and a thumb are all that Nightcrawler has on each hand so it was easier to use the extrusions on the fingers.

 Moving on, I mirrored the mesh again and joined up the central vertices, creating a basic clothing mesh.

 I had also made a tail at this point and soon began moving onto the hair. The hair was an extrusion that had been seperated into a new mesh. Following this, I had some of my classmates speak to me about the progress of my model and redid the arms based on this as I had accidentally made square arms instead of rounded ones. 

 Here is the fixed arm setup in rough mode. I made sure to retopologise at this point as i worked on the cave of the inside of the mouth and added nostrils, teeth, a tongue and eyelids.

 Finishing off the mesh, I worked on the hair and nails and fixed any small issues in the character's jaw etc, making sure to speak to other people in order to see how my progress was going. I then went on to fix any issues in the clothing and lower body before I was happy with the mesh.

I then used basic textures to create the character look, trying to make it like the comic character style that I had planned when I chose the character.

Storyboard changes

I changed the ending of the storyboard to incorporate the mirror idea as it added to the overall flow of the video and a twist at the end.

Star Trek quote: 11 second club

http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/october10/entry/nkohIS

Feedback in class

Letting others evaluate my work really helped me with understanding how i was going with my production diary and storyboard. I graded my own work and it turned out that I had actually underestimated my abilities and got a higher grade from the others in the class. Comments were made on the timing of the storyboard and the Liam Neeson quote. I was also advised to stay away from using a phone in the scene, something that I had already decided. The use of a megaphone was suggested as the character could possibly be delivering the speech to a group but due to the fact that the quote references the kidnapping of his daughter, this may not be the best idea. The idea that a mirror could be used and right at the end of the scene, reveal that the character was just talking to himself in the mirror, somewhat like that of Travis Bickle, Robert De Niro's character in "Taxi Driver."

Had this been more of a full body animation, maybe incorporating the acrobatic nature of Nightcrawler but for this i need to focus more on the face. In doing so, the mirror idea might be a nice addition. The naturally misconceived nature of the character provides a nice change to portray him as actually threatening. Maybe the mirror scene could provide the character with the idea that he is trying to learn to live up to his demonic image and in the last shot he fails and has a saddened look on his face. 

Nightcrawler's Character story

The teleporting demon mutant is a member of the X men and despite his devilish appearance is a religious and extremely kind character.


Here is the character's biography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcrawler_(comics)

Image found here: http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/deathbattlefanon/images/9/90/Nightcrawler.png/revision/latest?cb=20150223183700

Wire Mesh

         Taking the drawing that I chose for the character of Nightcrawler, I drew around it in photoshop in order to create a topological reference for my model. Here is the finished product. It isn't perfect but the generalised idea of spider web like topology is enough to allow for an interesting reference that can be used to form better facial structure. By studying this proper topological referencing, it is easier to see that more edge loops in areas such as the mouth and eyes will provide better help when it comes to deformation problems. 

Storyboard for Facial Animation

My Google Calendar for this semester

My Google calendar for this semester is full of various activities from working on my university work to sporting events to international events. This production calendar will hopefully help me to better manage my time at the university during this time.