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Skipping and Exhausted

While the first animation I made was just a walk cycle, I wanted to do the unique ones next for my other two characters. I decided I was going to have one character skipping and the second walking while looking exhausted. I started with creating the exhausted animation first as I wanted to save skipping for last as I feel like it would take the longest.

At this point I feel like I've got a decent grasp on creating basic walk cycles without the need for a reference so I didn't feel like I needed to do too much research for this one, but I did use this tired walk clip online for reference when creating this exhausted animation.

This was my final outcome.

With this one done, I moved on to the skipping animation. This one was defiantly more complicated so I had to look more into how to create this. Fortunately I found this video on Vimeo from a user called Felix Sputnik, Felix uploaded a 5 minute long video that goes in depth on how skipping works and how to animate it. He talks about timings, arm and leg motions, body rotations and more and was the perfect video to help me with creating my animation.

When it comes to doing these animations, I always find it easier to start with just the feet and legs. I'll focus on getting the positions, height and timings right before I work on the upper body. Once I'm satisfied with what I have, I then copy the keyframes and mirror them to create a smooth cycle.

So far, this is one of the more complicated animations I've done, mainly due to how you move your feet when skipping and the extra step you take do perform the movement. However I'm really pleased with how this one turned out.

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Stylised Animations

As I'm focusing on just creating a showreel of animations, I want each one to feel unique and different from each other to allow each one to stand out on their own. I've created a list of stylistic cycle animations I'm going to attempt to create for all three characters.

For all three, I'll be attempting to create their own unique walk and run cycle, each one showing off their personality type. In addition to these, I'll try to create a more unique animation that's only for the specific character. For example the main character MT-103 can have an animation of him dribbling a basketball, or his daughter MT-202 skipping.

I started with MT-103, his character is quite overly confident so I wanted to try and convey that in this walk cycle. I watched a few videos of different people and characters walking, but I was struggling to find a good reference I liked till I remember a animation that trended online a while ago.

in 1988, a soviet animated cartoon called Treasure Island came out based on the book of the same name. It featured a scene of three characters walking across the screen with distinctive walking styles, however the man in the middle stands out the most with his strong confidence. I decided this would be my refrence.

I put most of my focus on making his steps feel heavy and giving him strong shoulder swings like in the gif above. I didn't use any special tools or anything, just mostly came down to keyframe timing and curve adjustments. This first one was the original animation I created first before talking to my tutor about giving it more character.

This second one is the new one with more of a focus on the confidence using Treasure Planet as a refrence.

I also decided to ditch rendering the animation on 2's as I found it was a mixed bag if it'll look good or not. Didn't feel like I have the time to optimise the animation to work perfectly on 2's so I'm just focusing on rendering normally for now.

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AA4D11 – Major Project: Animation (January 2024) Changes and goals for this project

After I submitted my last module, I spent the time before I got my next one thinking about how I'm going to go about creating this project. I was trying to work out how I would go about creating the assets, animations, the different scenes, vfx, audio etc. While I feel like it's something I can do, I don't think the time I'll have to get it done will be enough without me overworking, stressing and possibly affecting my health. So I have decided instead of creating this short film, I'm going to uses the characters and assets I currently have and create a showreel.

The showreel will consist of the same characters doing different things. Such as their own unique walk and run cycles, a unique animation for each one like one character skipping and another running with a basketball.

Secondly, I want to do two animations that are more than just the single character doing a cycle. I'll animate a least one scene from the short film I planned on creating, I haven't decided yet on what scene but I want to pick one that I think will be a more interesting one to animate.

For the second animation, I want to find a scene of two people talking, either from a film or show and animate two character talking to each other using that audio as a reference.

Going into this final module with this plan has put me at a bit more ease, as I was already getting a bit stressed thinking about all that I would've had to do to get the whole short film done. I also feel like this'll give me a better chance at showing off different aspects of animations that I'm capable of doing.

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Lessons Learned and Reflection

This module taught me a lot about managing the work load to avoid feeling overwhelmed. I neglected this for a while, and the more I did the more and more I felt overwhelmed by the work load I had left for so long. Once I got help with breaking it down and giving myself daily goals, I realised how it was no where near as bad as it felt like it would be and found myself enjoying the work more too. Going into the next module, the very first thing I will be doing as soon as possible is to break it all down again. As the next module is going to be the start of the main production of the film, I cannot afford to let it overwhelm me as much as this as done.

Secondly, I only received a little help with a few things here and then, but I would not have been able to get this done without that little bit of help. But even then I still feel like I needed more help with bigger things. I will discuss with my tutor about seeking artist from other courses, breaking the work down will defiantly help with avoiding feeling overwhelmed but there's still going to be a lot to do that I know I just won't be able to do by myself. I would also love to have the experience of working on a project like this with others, I've done so in the past and it made thing a ton a fun and resulted in work I was really proud of.

I'm really starting to look forward to start full production on the film now that I'm going into it with everything I've learned from this module. And not just with this project, but future ones too. I've always started projects by just jumping into it with a rough idea and plan in mind. But seeing how much this idea is coming to life by better management and planning, it has given me the right mindset I've needed to get my motivation fully going to work on this and future ideas.

There's still a lot I wish I had done differently with the work I've done so far, I wish I had spent more time on modeling, working on getting better with keyframe timing and more. But now I know what needs to be worked on, I'm ready to tackle these areas that I need to improve for the final film!

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Showcase of the work done so far

I figured it'd be good to have a little showcase of some of the work that I've done so far, with my thoughts on each one. Starting off with the blockout animatic.

While I'm fairly contempt with this animatic with how it conveys the story I want to create, I do understand it has a lot of flaws. The main one to me is the timing and pace of the animatic. I could've done better at timing the keyframes and overall speed this goes at. Timing is something I need to improve on as I find it difficult to know when and where to place keyframes. I may refine it a bit in the future before I start searching for others to assist with the project.

Scene Set Up

For the scene setup, I'm happy with out it has come out. I feel like it conveys my idea of what the world will kind of look like and gives off the right vibe I wanted. Main issues with this is as I've mention previously is the scale and lack of a few extra assets. Scaling is something I want to work out with another artist, and in terms of assets I feel like I could've added more to convey that this is meant to be a playground. My idea is to have a set of playground activities you'd normally see such as slides, swings climbing frames etc. I only didn't add them here due to the complexity of the modelling and lack of time.

Walk/Run cycle

I'm actually quite happy with how the walking and running cycle turned out, I feel like I managed to do a good job with them considering I haven't made either of these two in quite a long time. utilising the references I had made it a lot more easier than I had expected. The main feed back I received is to add some more motion to certain parts like making the head sway or arms more. The feedback I have for myself is to see about refining the ways it's rendered on 2's, the way I've done so work but I would like to see if there's a better way of doing so for the main project.

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Future Developments

For the development of the final film, I want to go in swinging and try to keep the momentum going for as long as possible. As I mentioned previously, I want to start the next projects organising and breaking down the tasks as best as I can to not feel so overwhelmed. I'll be using the Kanban Trello board again to help keep everything organised and understandable.

When the full development begins and every task is broken down into chunks, I want to start searching for additional support with the project. As I've said, I can do most things but I'm not great at everything. I can do simple models but that's about it, and I'm bad at scaling the models to be the correct size. Same goes with texturing, lighting, editing etc. If I can find help with these areas of the project, it would make working on this far more easier, faster and would make the final film look ten times better and more professional.

As I'm using HI-FI Rush as the main inspiration for this project, I will be gathering as much reference images and videos as possible to help convey my ideas across to potential collaborators as best as possible.

This project has been mostly solo so far, with some help here and there with a few things in between. However I feel like working with a team on something like this is not only something I want to do to help get it completed, I also feel like it's a necessary experience to have. Being able to prove I'm capable with working with a wide range of other artist will help boost my chances of proving myself as a capable artist to potential employers in the future.

I will start by searching the other university courses for potential collaborators, courses like Game Art, Visual Effects and Motion Graphics, Animation and others.

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Project Management

I had a hard time getting started with this project for while, I left it longer than I should've mainly because it felt very overwhelming to tackle. I didn't know where or how to go about starting this, I would just pick at things here and there, but I didn't have a reason for why I chose to do something or a goal. After a few months, I discussed it with a friend of mine who works as a tutor. He suggested I set up a Kanban Trello board as it's what he find to be the best way to manage his work and projects.

Kanban is one of many different styles of project managements, it's designed to make managing takes as easy as possible by helping you keep track of what's being currently worked on, and to increase overall efficacy and flow of the project.

With the Trello board set up, it help give me a much better understanding and idea of each little bit of the whole project I need to work on. It broke down everything and made it far less overwhelming for me. I'd also give me self daily goals, for the block out I set myself to create at least a minimum of 7 clips a day. This helped me feel far better when getting 7 done instead of trying to do as many as possibly.

Down below is a screenshot of the Trello board completed, there are still some assets in the backlog portion but those are being saved for when the next module begins.

When I begin work on the next module, the first thing I'll be doing is to break the project down and organise it into this Kanban system again. That way I shouldn't feel as overwhelmed as I did so with this one and will hopefully boost my motivation to get things done.

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Challenges and Solutions

Throughout this module, I faced many challenges that I had to overcome. Some were due to how I've had to learn how to do certain things like animating on 2's, creating a 3D environment, creating walking and running cycles etc. But there were also a lot of technical issues I had that I had to either find a solution for or a workaround.

For the animations, it had been a long while since I done any kind of it. Only a few small things here and there, so going into creating a full character walk cycle, run cycle and two characters interacting was difficult. The walk and run cycle I was able to do thanks to using a lot of references and guides. The biggest help I found was Kevin Parry's reference he created for animators. However, the two characters interacting was the trickiest one has I couldn't find a reference for what I wanted to do. So I would often make the movement and motions with myself multiple times to get an idea for how I wanted it too look. The main thing I need to learn how after doing this is keyframe timing, as I feel like a lot of the movements are either too slow or fast as I currently find it hard to time it all correctly.

For technical difficulties, I had issues mostly with rendering. A lot of the time, I found that the lighting, shadows and other things in the scene wasn't rendering correctly. Some of it I figured out by looking up the issue and seeing if anyone had a solution, but sometimes I couldn't find anything. One of them were why shadows weren't rendering at all, after some time I figured out that the shader I had set up wasn't correct and needed adjusting.

When it comes to working on the full animation, I plan on going to other people with a variety of skills in 3D and animation for assistance and support. While I'm able to create the scene and animations myself, I know there's a lot of issues with them and having another train eye to point out the flaws would be a massive help in making sure the final film looks as best as it possibly can.

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Updating the characters shading

In the previous module, I spent a fair bit of time trying to figure out how to create the cartoony cell shading look I wanted to my characters and assets. I eventually figured out a method, however it was a pain to set up as I had to do it for every model individually and every part of each characters body. It also didn't work or look good most of the time. It would look too thick, there would be parts that were cell shaded that shouldn't be, and overall just kind of looked messy and flat out bad.

This was all created using the version of Blender at my university campus, which is now out of date by over a year. I'm unsure if this feature is available on the version used on campus, but at home I discovered that there's already an inbuilt line art feature within the Grease Pencil section.

Not only will it automatically apply line art around the models without me needed to mess around with the shader editor, I can also apply it to a whole collection in one go. Saving me so much time instead of applying it to every model one at a time.

Another advantage to this is rendering, the previous version would cause a lot of lag and slowdown issues. And while this one still slows down a bit, the way it's rendered is that it'll only be visible to the camera's pov. If half of the model is out of the camera's view, the line art will simply be cut off saving so much rendering time.

I've gone ahead and updated the character turnaround videos I made previously and this is the final result. I'm much more happier with how this looks and will save me a lot of time when work begins on full production.

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Creating the Scene

To get a good understanding of how the world and scene is going to look and feel. I started to create simple objects and start building the world I'll be using. One of the biggest struggles I've had with doing this in the past is getting the scaling right. So for now, this will be used more as a example of what I want, and see if I can go to something with more skill in this and get some help with getting it properly set up for when it comes to creating the main animation.

The objects I've created for the scene set up are simples ones like a bench, basketball court, road etc. I also looked into created a chain link fence for the court too. This was also created with geometry nodes too, I followed this tutorial from Blender Made Easy. The nodes allow me to change the width, height, pole count etc to whatever I need it to be. This was the first result.

It was getting there, but it looked too flat. I didn't have enough time to add a lot of detail but I needed to look better than this. After talking with my tutor, I figured out what I could do instead.

I got rid of the road and instead placed a wall in its place as having a road so close to a park like this doesn't really make sense. Behind that wall I wanted to place trees, but I had no idea how to go about modeling that. Fortunately, Blender has a addon called Sapling Tree Gen that allows me to generate trees from a selection of presets and alter the vast settings to how I please. I then used the bush model I had and placed it around the tree branches.

In the scene set up files, I placed the trees, added a basketball court texture, added more bushes and adjusted the lighting. This is what I ended up with.

When it comes to creating the final set. I plan to add more to the environment. More details, better texture work, more props and scene decoration and such. For now, this is to get a general idea of how the final world will look like.

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Assets and Geometry Nodes

My modeling skills are very limited, I can create basic shapes but struggle when it comes to more complicated designs. Even then, I find myself working very slowly when trying to create assets and models. So I've been looking for a way to make things a bit more easier for me, and faster. Blender's geometry node system is something I've known about for a while but never looked into until now. I needed to create bushes and trees for the scene set up, and saw that using the geometry node system would allow me to create dynamic bushes that can be altered to any shape I want it to be. I followed a tutorial from Simon 3D on YouTube that taught me how to go about doing so.

With the Geometry node modifier applied to a simple sphere that I've extruded to create more of a hedge, I was able to create the bush by combining these nodes together that I learnt from Simon 3D, this was the result.

As I'm going with the style of HI-FI Rush, I tried to keep the colours and shading to how it is represented in the game. And now that I have this geometry node system in place and working, I can apply it to any shape I want to create bushes or trees in any shape, style and design I want them to be. Here is a cube I extracted and altered with the geometry node applied as an example.

One downside I've found with this however is that once applied to a scene with other assets, it can cause major lag issues and crashes when rendering due to how high the polygon count can be. With a bit more tweaking to the settings, this will be an invaluable tool for me to use.

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Face Expressions

I found face expressions pretty difficult to get right, the characters that can have face expressions can only do it with their eyes has they don't have any other facial features such as mouths, eyebrows, noses etc. Fortunately the eyes the models come with are rigged to be pretty flexible and I can do a fair bit with them. To convey face expressions with just eyes, I felt like I'll need to exaggerate them a bit. More motion than normal eyes make, but since my animation is going for a cartoony look, it works well to over exaggerate them.

I used this as a reference sheet for a bunch of different face expressions, despite them having a full face it still helped to get a good idea for what I wanted to go for. I decided to go with 3 total expressions. Happy, sad and angry. So I looked at row 1, 2 and 4 of this reference sheet for ideas. The sheet comes from this Pinterest image. Pinterest

While I couldn't replicate these faces exactly, I think I was able to successfully capture the expressions and emotions well. The rig comes with a lot of ways to morph, rotate and change the eyes. Each individual eye rig can be key framed, so getting the shapes I wanted was easy.

I found the hardest part was actually animation, it took me a few attempts for each expression before I got something I was happy with. Of lot of changing the timing, slight and large adjustments and adding the exaggeration. After trial and error, I was able to end up with 3 animations I'm satisfied with.

While this was supposed to be 10 seconds long, I found that in order to get the final result I wanted, it had to be slightly longer due to the timing of the animations. But it's only 7 seconds over and I'm happy with the results.

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Personality animation

With the personality animation, I had a few ideas for each character I had. But the ones I had for MT-103 and MT-202 which are farther and daughter, I thought they would work best if I saved them for the animation I have to do of two character interacting. So for this I'll be working on MT-125 which is the other kid that MT-103 mainly interacts with and ends up challenging them to the basketball game which ends up going badly.

In the storyboards and animatic, I had her be depicted as quite a shy and timid person. So I wanted to try to convey that in the animation as best as I could. Fortunately, like with the walk cycle, in the same 100 ways to walk video by Kevin Parry he does a timid walk that's perfect for what I had in mind so I used that as my reference.

Getting the body language was key to this, mainly cause I don't have a lot to work with for their faces. This one does have eyes, but there's only so much I can do with them so this video really helps.

When creating the animation, I made her walking pace slow and short, pushed her shoulders up, kept her elbows tucked in and has her bending forward slightly as if she's trying to protect herself form something. The hardest part was trying to figure out what to do with the hands, fingers are really tricky to animate so I went with something simple. I had her hands close together with one holding the other, pressed her thumbs together and had them slight move side to side on top of each other. It's a little hard to see unless pointed out, but was the best I could think of without it all getting confusing.

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Walk and run cycles

With the animatic done with, I wanted to get straight into creating the walking and running animation cycle. I knew that I would need some kind of reference to create these, but as I'm quite camera shy I opted not to film myself. Instead, I used images like this one from www.schoolofmotion.com

And while this was defiantly handy to have, I still felt like I needed to watch a walk cycle in motion. Fortunately I remembered a guy on YouTube called Kevin Parry who is a professional stop motion animator. Kevin filmed himself on a tread mill and did 100 unique and different types of ways to walk. At the very start of the video was a generic walk cycle which I used as my main reference. (100 Ways to Walk - YouTube)

I started out by creating 3 main poses on frame 0, 8 and 16. Then I added more detail on frame 4 and 12. Here is the final result.

For the running animation, I decided to use a different reference. I wanted a run cycle that was a bit more different. As the style for this project is heavily influenced by the game HI-FI Rush, I decided to see how the main character in that game runs. I tried to look it up online but had a hard time finding good enough footage to reference, so I went onto the game and recorded a bunch of different angels myself.

I took the footage into After Effects and went through some of the shots frame by frame, and basically did the same thing as last time. Three main poses on frame 0, 8 and 16 then two more on frame 4 and 12.

I baked the animations and set the frame step to 2, then changed the animation curves from Bezier to Constant which gives me the choppy look of being animated on 2's which is the animation style I plan to go for.

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AA4D10 - Animation Application (June 2023) Creating the Animatic

This is the start for the Animation application module. Though despite receiving the module in June, I've only now really started to get into it. The amount of work that needs to be done got very overwhelming for me, I I didn't know which part to tackle first or how to go about doing them. I left it for too long so while I'm trying not to overwork myself, I've got a lot to do with little time left. After speaking to my tutor, I decided to start with the animation's animatic.

I was hesitant to start this cause creating the storyboards for the previous module took me longer than I'd like, so knowing I'd have to do all that again with more detail and movement put me off from. But I found a way to make it fast and easy. When creating the storyboards, I saved each of my panels individually on Blender as I found it easier to do it in 3D. With having each panel saved, I was able to just re-load them, add in three to four key framed poses for each character and get them done relatively quickly. Another method I did to help make it more better for me was to get at least 7 renders done a day, that way I had a goal for each day and made it far less overwhelming for me.

One thing I noticed too while working on this animatic is that I had to make far less renders compared to the amount of panels I had to make for the storyboard. The storyboard consisted of nearly 35 individual saves, whereas the animatic had 27. I was able to combine two to three storyboard panels into one render for the animatic which saved me loads of time.

The blockout/animatic to me seemed like would take the longest to do. So now with it out of the way, I can now focus on the rest of the module which I should be able to get done in a decent amount of time once I've worked out a daily goal for them too.

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Reflection

Now that I’ve completed the pre-development of this project, I’m able to reflect on what I’ve done and how I feel about it.

This is the most pre-development work I’ve done for any project and I’m pretty proud of the amount of hours and work I’ve done for the this phase of this project However, despite this I also realise there’s a lot I could still learn and do to improve here. While I’ve enjoyed working on this with some small help from one person, the thought and idea of developing this words, characters and stories along side more creatives sounds like it would’ve made this phase a lot more enjoyable for me. I found myself stuck many times, with no idea what to do next or how to further develop this idea. The thought of being able to bounce ideas with others working on one project sounds like something I’d love to do, though my social anxiety holds me back and is something I’m desperate to work on, especially if I want to get into this industry.

And while I’m happy with what I’ve done, there are still things I want to work on to improve my work if I continue to do solo projects like this one. 

One area I need improvement for is in character creation. Being that they are the main focus of this and many stories, I really struggle to create ones that I believe would connect with audiences to make the film more enjoyable for them. I stuck to simple ones as that’s what I simply found easiest to work with, but sticking with easy won’t push me to make better ones. This is something I hope to work on when I work on future projects.

Similar to character development, writing unique and engaging stories is something I’ve never been good at doing. I usually focus on making comedy stuff, mostly slapstick as I find that tends to be the easiest to write for. And I do enjoy it, but I’ll need to learn to create stories in different genres if I want to continue in this field.

Lastly, my biggest issue that I’ve struggled with in a lot of my projects is procrastinating. I’m fully aware of the negative impact it has on projects like this one as it badly hinders it’s development, leaving me with less time to work on it. Time management and discipline are the biggest hurdles for me to overcome, But I’m dedicated to improving that aspect with this project and hope I can come in swinging when full production beings.

In conclusion, the pre-development stage of this animation project has been great for me personally, as I’ve learnt how to project develop ideas into something special. While I’m proud of what I’ve done, there’s a lot of aspects of this project and myself I could do better with. I’m ready to develop myself when the next stage starts, and I’m keen to make something special.

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My overall journey and inspiration with animation

The dream of being an animator has been a long one of mine, but not one I took very seriously until now. However, it still fuelled my passion for creating videos and films for people to watch and enjoy. While I stopped aiming for animation for a while, I still eagerly took any chance I could at film creation. I took creative media and interactive media during college, then VFX and Motion Graphics for my degree. Each course I purely focused on creating short films with as many software as possible, in that time I’ve learnt a good handful of the adobe suite, 3D software's such as Maya, Cinema 4D and Blender, all with a verity of different skills to learn.

After I finished my degree, I was left feeling a little unsatisfied still. I felt like there was still something I wanted to learn before heading into the industry. I reflected and remembered by original desire to be an animator from when I was young, realising this and talking to some people who motivated me, I didn’t hesitate to apply for the MA Animation course, finally tackling what I wanted to do for so long. 

There are many movies, shows and videos that have helped inspire me to learn, but it was the game HI FI Rush that really got me exited to start this project. It’s vibrant visuals, great character animation, the movement and feel over all really fuelled my passion for this project. I love the way that game looks and moves, and it has become a massive inspiration of mine. My goal with this project is to be able to replicate the style of that game in my own way, and I am very eager to being full production of this project so I can finally really start to learn how to animate fun stuff as base as I can.