Digital Acting 2 - Full-body Animation

Our next mandatory assignment has come along, we are to find a short sound clip and create a full body animation with lip sync based on that sound. We started the assignment by going into groups and discuss which 4 animation principles were important and most relevant for this assignment. After a short discussion we came to the conclusion that Anticipation, staging, timing and appeal where animation principles that would be important to implement for this project.

The rest of the starting week went with founding our sound clip and planning the animation, creating the foundation of the sounds, breaking down the sentences to sounds not letters, planning the mouth shapes and the mood of the character. I also had the time to plan the open/closed and the wide/narrow of the mouth, and making a small sheet of the eyebrow movements and blocking out my first attempt on my animation (later on I delete ¾ of my animation, and after that redoing a lot after I got some pointers from our teacher, so not much of the animation I did in the first and second week remains, just the main posses)

I quickly went through all the sound files we had available on our servers and found a sound I liked, one problem though, there is two persons in the sound clip. I had to decide if I wanted to animate two characters, have one of the characters stand outside of the view of the camera or I could try to challenge myself by making an character with split personalities, as you learn best when you challenge yourself I decided on the last. I would try to create two personalities in one body, one is begging, desperate for the other to stop what he is doing, the other is arrogant and don’t care much for what his dual personality morality is. So the prior personality is bent over, with an lower power center and leaning to the left, the arrogant personality is facing the right and got his power center higher up on his chest, that was what I started out with to create two different personalities and hopefully it would come clear that this is two different personalities in one body.

                                     

 A few scetches I made at the start of th project, left some of the arm movements, right a quick look at the eyebrows. Hard to see what it says, but the best I could get while I am home.
             
With the animation I started out with the lip synching, up down and narrow and wide, before I started making details, the mood of the characters. I started on blocking out main poses, in step keys, before I was completely done with the first phase of my lip sync. With the sound file going in the background it is a lot easier to get the timing down, and didn’t take long to get the first blocking down. When I went from step key to auto keys to start on the rough I got some rotation glitches, but most I fixed in the curve editor, while one rotation on the arm I didn’t manage to fix right away and later I just redid it frame by frame.

                                          Blokk

                                           Rough

I didn’t have many glitches or mayor problems, but the hands twisting, before I wanted to import another rig to keep in the background of the scene. The mash on the rig got twisted and brought out of its place, later on I found out that I wasn’t the only one with this problem, it seems like the controls and the bones on the rigs had similar naming and the coding wasn’t good enough to make it ignore it, so the rigs wasn’t working well together.

                                           Merged rigs, lol

 Changes of curves, creates a more realistic animation, left straight out of blokking, right curves after about a days work.


When I had somewhat fixed the twisting arms by rotating it frame by frame I was starting to get unhappy on how it looked overall, I was happy with my poses, but the in-betweens, curves and timing between it I knew I could get better, I deleted almost all of the work I had done up to then, but kept it on an max file that I had opened in another screen and did it all over again. Main poses the same, but overall it looked way better. I later got a few pointers from my teacher on what cold be better. And again I deleted a lot of my animation, but this time only for one of the personalities, the arrogant/evil one. This time I changed out the main poses so a complete rewrite of his behavior to more evil then arrogant/not caring.

                         
                        Some help from the teacher to plan out the last stages of the animation

Now that I were done with my animation, or atleast what I got time to do, since I couldn’t add two rigs in one scene I ended up with rendering the animation twice, and I ended up with some unfortunate screw-ups on the floor, as well as the animation of the main rig ending early. This is because I actually was planning to end the animation just before the rig got hit, but ended up with cutting his head off after a suggestion from Tim I my class, it did look way better, but unfortunate I didn’t get time to animate a moving hold on the rig in front and it now just stop moving. 

                               

Final render, no fancy lighting or props, even forgot to add walls, but the animation is there, and thats what matters right?

The four animation principles.

 Anticipation- Preparing the audience for the motion.

                                          Arms moving up and in before they shot out to the side.

 Staging- Creating the scene so you lead the eyes to where you want the audience to watch. Adding aothre rig in the backround I desided to not have any animation on him before the end when the main animation of my character was over and had just one pose left to go into.

 Timing- important part of lip-sync and body-language, doing the right action at the right time is ensential for any good animation, and if the timing isn't right it would see like the sound was dubbed. With a sound file to animate after it becomes easier to get the right timings on the main posses, but still alo of work to get down the inbetweens.

 Appeal- The character has to be appealing to the audience, even if it's evil or good.

Compare to a classmates journal: Updated when I get to read one, still waiting for someone(of the ones I know the url to) to put up final version of journal post.

Websites used during the project: 

 http://www.keithlango.com/tutorials/old/popThru/popThru.html

http://www.navone.org/HTML/Tutorial_Splines1_2.htm

http://www.navone.org/HTML/Tutorial_Splines2.htm#hygiene

http://animationsalvation.com/free_tips/lip-sync/1
http://garycmartin.com/phoneme_examples.html