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.