Final Animation render

Now that my final tennis animation is complete and I'm happy with it, the next task is to render it out instead of having the video done from playblast. This was the first time I had properly rendered an aniamtion and for a few hours when starting this I didn't know what I was doing at all. Once I had set the correct settings I hit batch render and I rendered it with mental ray. Then I was left with 214 still frames and I was struggling with what to do with them next. I didn't know hwich software I use to put them in but I knew I had to have the video files play in Quicktime. So the only video software I had was Windows Movie Maker. I just guessingly dragged all 214 frames into movie maker, but then the frames where playing but he video was in total 17 minutes so for around 20 seconds oyu would see one frame. I managed to somehow adjust the time lenght of the video and get it down to 8 seconds which was the exact lenght of my animation. All I had to do then was find a video converter and I was done. I had to do this three times one for the front view, one for the side and the other an angle of my choise. After looking at the final product I'm reaaly happy with it.

Lip Syncing

The last task we were set for this term and for this year would be the lip syncing task. Our teacher Sam told we would be doing this task after the Easter holidays and I was really looking forward to being able to do this task. In our first lesson back after the holidays I satrted to collect various sound clips from different movies like Shrek,  Toy Story, The Shining, The Blues Brother and Harry Potter. Basically I collected sound clips from my favourite movies. One thing Sam said that was important was to choose a sound clip that we wouldn't get bored of. I choose one that I found really funny and I was hoping it start to annoy me once I had heard it like 100 times.

The line I choose was from the film Shrek and it's Donkey telling Shrek "Please, I don't want to go back there, you don't know what it's like to be considered a freak. Well maybe you do?" I thought this would be really funny to do and I could get Max moving quite a bit.

When starting I imported the sound clip into maya and began aniamte Max's body to the audio, once I was happy with that, then I would start to aniamte his mouth. This was another important thing Sam told us to do. When starting to animate his mouth I drew out how I thought his mouth would move and look like when he his talking.

These drawings and using a mirror both helped me with how Max's mouth should look when saying certain words.

Here's the playblast video of the Max lip sync task.

After looking at the animation back, I am really happy with and I'm proud of it. This is the first time I have done a character talking and you can tell. At some points his mouth moves quite fast so if I was to go back I would have his mouth moving less, but near the end I think It does look like he is properly talking.

Final Animation Project.

For the modeule Intro to Aniamtion we have a final assignment which the past few weeks have been leading up to. The assignment is to produce a 6 - 10 second animation based of an Olympic sport, we had 5 to choose from which were high diving, tennis, hammer throw, 100m sprint and archery. After looking at a lot of videos for each sport to help me get a clear understand of each sport and ask myself realisticly whic could I do and which do I think I won't get bored of as this animation I would be working on for the next few weeks. But more importantly which could I do well. In the end I went with tennis as it's a sport I enjoy personaly and I felt I could produce a good aniamtion that lasts between that 6 - 10 second guidline.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkuBUEep8eg

Once I felt I had watched enough tennis videos on youtube, started to black out a quick aniamtion of what I wanted Max to do. I wanted him to start of crouching down with a tennis racket in one hand and a ball in the other that I modelled in maya and then have him lift himself up and throw the ball up into to air. He would then hit the ball around three times to finally have a celebrate a win.

Having done the black out aniamtion for all this I found rather easy. However the most tricky problem I had with trying to get the tennis racket and the ball to stay in Max's hand. I started to key frame the racket and the ball but this looked stupid because sometimes the ball would be moving faster than the arm or sometimes it couldn't keep up. So would always delay doing this part of the aniamtion because of this and start t add more deatil into the aniamtion of Max.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkDNwFZgc-Y

One night when trying again to try to key frame the racket to match up with Max's arm I just googled the question "how to attach an object to a character in maya" to which I found a video on youtube which I have put a link a bove showing me how to link the racket and the ball to Max's hand. To do this I would use a link constraint. The tutorial really did save my life because I was always thinking when key framing for the racket was there must be a easier way than this and there was. Once following the video My aniamtion was starting to take real shape with it looking loads better with Max look like he is actuallt hitting something and adding to the belivability.

When going into more detail in Max's movement like at the start I just had his feet sliding across the floor, so I needed to make his foot lift off the ground to look like he has moved properly. This was were my understanding of the walk cycle I had done a few weeks ago came really handy as I had a better understand of how his leg and foot would move, with any step he does in the animation.

During this animation this would be the first time to use the dope sheet properly since the golf swing task. The tool was extremly helpful and saved my life getting this aniamtion to runsmoothly as this aniamtion is the most improtantly out of all my previous works, so it had to look it's best.

Once I was finished I was really pleased with the final product here's a playblast video of my animation. Next I need to render it out properly.

Max Walk Cycle Animation - Week 7

The video above is an improved version of my animatio walk cycle. A couple of weeks ago I atempted the walk cycle for the Max rig after seeing a presentation on Udo and thought I would be able to do it. A week or so after producing my first animation walk cycle I looked at it and showed other in my class what I had done and the feed back I got from it was that it looked too robotic, he doen't have a natural movement or bouce to him.

So Sam set the class the task this week of working on the walk cycle, I felt that now would be the best time to redo the animation. I started from fresh and decided not to open up the original file and work over it. This time I took my time and always looking at my research images and the aniamtion started to look good. One major element I added was the bounce he does while walking this as soon as I added it gave the movement more realism and made it more believable.

My fist walk cycle animation took 30 minutes, this took the whole 3 hour lesson and I feel it shows. I'm really proud of this animation and when showing it to Sam, she helped me with a few tweaks with the footplacment. For example when MAx is about to place his foot down, the heel of his foot will lead and not his toes, because no one does that. also having the feet not be pointing straight forward but however having them point outwards a tiny bit, not too much but enough to give the Max more character in his stance.



Max Jump Animation - Week 6

In this lesson we had a task to animate Max jumping. Getting max to jump I would find to be a really hard task as your trying to give the impression that Max is actually forcing his body to jump and lift himself off the ground to finally land.

When starting this task for the first time I found it kinda easy to to place Max in his key poses, however when I started to play the aniamtion out it looked too fast and blocky.

                               

So what I needed to do was try and get the aniamtion to run smoothly and look belivable which at the moment it doesn't. I felt I also neede him at the start of the animation to prep himself ready for jumping, for example have him either counting down to when he is about to jump or either streching or something just before he jumps in the aniamtion. I also thought I could maybe add something to the end of the aniamtion like him stabling himself after the jump.

I wanted to first get the aniamtion to run smoother, so I used the dope sheet but I struggled adjusting. The main reason was that I didn't key all of the character on every keypoint. This would be a big reminder for me in the future to always key everything. I was also thinking that maybe I could redo the aniamtion because I felt I could possibly make it alot better than before and it would give me a bit more practice.

So I opened up a new scene and began to redo the jump animation. I started with the pre-jump part of the animation and have Max counting down his jump. When redoing the aniamtion I got a better understanding of where to place my keys for example in the first aniamation jump the key poses were around 5 - 7 keys apart, which was one of the reasons why it didn't look so smooth because I wasn't given the rig any time between the key frames to properly move to the next. However with the new one they were sometimes double that.

Another thing I didn't want his jump to be as hight as it was in the previous animation. I thought it might look better as it would look more belivable than before and might actually look like he is lifting himself of the ground. 

Here's the final aniamtion of Max jumping. I am more happier with my new aniamtion than my previous attempts. However If I could go back and change anything it would be to maybe have his count down at the start to be a bit entertaining and have something at the end like for example have him celebrate his jump.

Golf Swing and Dope Sheet - Week 5

This week we were introduced to the dope sheet tool found in Maya. When Sam our teacher first showed us the dope she said this will save ourlives when we start properly animating Max in other things. To help us get a better understanding of the dope sheet we had to animate Max preforming a golf swing. This I had a lot of fun doing as before we as group started to aniamte Max we were all stood up and pretending to swing a golf club. Having played golf quite a lot in my spare time I felt I could approach this animation with a lot of confidence.

However us having to aniamte Max preforming a golf swing and this helping us get a better understanding of the dope we were meant to at first do this animation in three key stages.

the starting poisition, then Max swinging his arms to the far right and then passing his starting point where the ball would be and continuing to swing to his left side. However I started to add other keys between these three key points because I wasn't happy with the animation. One major point I had to keep reminding myself was to key the whole character because if I didn't the dope sheet would be pretty useless to me.

Here's a snapshot of the dope sheet for my golf animation and you can see every strip is a key frame in my animation and in every strip has black boxes and these represent every part of the character Max that you can control. 

When starting to play around with the dope sheet I realised how useful it will be and how much time it can save me to help get my aniamtion looking better. I loved how easy it was to move a key frame where ever you want and this can really help you space out your keys to get the aniamtion looking smooth when it needs to be smootha nd look fast when it needs to be fast. As you can see from the screen shot above the golf animation is rather fast because Max has to gain a lot of speed bfore he hits the ball to get a decent shot.

Walk Cycle - Week 4

This week we started doing walk cycles. We used the Max model from last week and over the week I had been getting used to all the controls on the model and being able to bring Max to life.

I had done a walk cycle animation back in my second year at college however I can remember that it was very rushed due to time and was aniamted alright. When I looked back on the ainmation I can easily find lots of corrections needed to be done and that I can learn from.

Coming to doing the animation with the Max rig all the tips and tricks that I learnt form college slowly came back to me. At first I started with just animating the legs and once I had all these done, I added a quick simple movement to the arms and head. I also aniamted his eyes blinking so he looked more alive. Here is a video of the animation.