Month: December 2020

Preparations

I had the idea straight away to use audio from the 1985 black comedy Clue, which if you haven’t seen it, is based on the board game Clue (or Cluedo depending on where you’re from), so you can probably guess the basic plot.

In the specific audio segment I chose, a motorist had just knocked on the door asking to use the telephone, and the butler instinctively locked him in the room in order to prevent him from exploring the house and stumbling upon the crime scene that the characters are trying desperately to solve so that they themselves can avoid the mysterious murderer as well as being implicated. Miss Scarlett and Professor Plum are debating whether it would be more suspicious to leave him locked up or ask him to get out of the house. Abruptly, Mrs. Peacock stands up and begins screaming hysterically, “Oh, who cares, that guy doesn’t matter! Let him stay locked up for another half an hour! The police will be here by then and there are two dead bodies in the study!” She is then shushed by everyone else.

This moment is actually very funny in the movie, not only because Mrs. Peacock looks like this-

-but also because of the actress’s incredible campy performance, shrieking and waving her arms wildly. Despite how funny the movie is, though, I of course can’t expect that to come through with just this one audio segment, but that’s not why I chose it. I chose it firstly because it’s intriguing, and secondly it’s very expressive, allowing me to make the most of an over-the-top, dynamic scene that’ll stand out as a performance animation.

I recorded my reference footage, acting out the audio as dramatically as I could, differently every time to compare. I felt inspired to break a wine glass for effect.

Then I split my reference footage into frames in Photoshop, intending to refer to every third image to help me get a good idea of what the pose should look like. I originally planned to delete the ones that are in between keyframes, but decided ultimately to leave them as a guide if I end up needing it.

Next I went into GarageBand and tried to get the audio a little bit clearer, since it’s from an older movie. I succeeded, although the difference is not remarkable.

Then I started looking around for a good rig to use. This was actually trickier than I thought, despite the number of rigs available to us. My specifications were that the rig must be a female human character, ideally older looking to match the audio, more cartoonish rather than hyper-realistic (as I plan my animation to be very stylized) and one obviously with a good control system. There were very few rigs I found that fit all of these criteria. Ultimately I decided on Luna, which I downloaded from Gumroad.

Luna seemed perfect, but as soon as I started trying it out I noticed that her unique looking facial controls were annoyingly visible in every render. Every single one of them had all of its render stats turned on so I had to go through and uncheck all of them.

I created the wine glass, which I’m very proud of, and I was so excited with my ability to make glass that I also gave her glasses, in order to make her appear a little bit older. I then gave her a hair texture with a little bit of gray.

I slid her glasses onto her face, taking care to adjust them as needed so that the mesh would appear realistic with her hair. I added a parent constraint to the top head control and the glasses and got them to move around just fine.

Then I found myself an environment. I knew that I obviously didn’t have to remake Clue, but this specific audio requires the speaker to be a) inside a large older house that would have a “study”, and b) speaking to a group of people who are c) trying to cover up a murder. And so I did loosely base my setting on it. I chose the Victorian Manor and added bottles and cans littering the floor to give the impression that a party may mysteriously have gotten out of hand. Then I added the debris and blood in the background to correlate to the audio and catch the viewer’s interest. Although I’m proud of this blood splatter effect, I’m a little nervous that it’s slightly too grotesque and will give the shot an unpleasant energy that may put off some viewers. But the time for deciding yes or no on the blood is after I’ve finished the actual animation.

I decided that I would do the lip sync before any of the rest of the work, because looking at the face straight on and unmoving when I work on it usually ends in a better result for me. It allows me to get a better idea of how well it’s working.

However, as I started working with Luna, I had a hard time even getting past the second key frame. I couldn’t figure out why, but the mesh would move unpredictably without being keyed and certain keyframes would change when I touched that control again later on, even if I didn’t set another keyframe. For example, I’d key the mouth to be slightly open, and then a few frames later it would completely unhinge itself when I touched another control, and then stay that way when I deleted the new key or hit undo. I tried keying the entire rig each time I made even the slightest adjustment but the same thing was happening regardless. I opened up the completely untouched Luna I’d downloaded and her facial controls were also janky. And so I decided not to waste more time trying to force Luna to work. It would be better not to even start with her and get my work done on a more reliable rig.

And so I went to Janine.

For purely aesthetic reasons I didn’t like the Janine rig, and that’s why I didn’t choose it in the first place. I feel that this character is not only ugly but almost fringing on amateurish. Pointy helmet hair, super shiny solid color blinn all over, barely distinguishable lips, absolutely no nostrils of any kind, really just a seriously terrible nose. She looks like an N64 Majora’s Mask NPC. On her web page she clearly has been given a new texture and significant facial work, because when downloaded as is and rendered she looks just like a shiny haunted doll. Not only did I personally think she was unimpressive, but I felt like any work that I made with her would look would clash with the semi-realistic scene I’ve built.

That being said, Janine has wonderful facial controls. She is by Truong CG Artist so I really didn’t expect less than perfection in her rigging system. Therefore, I wanted to reserve my judgement of her appearance as much as possible because she has the controls that’ll help me succeed in animating this project, and that’s what’s most important. Janine is going to be my buddy over the next several weeks so it’s not my place to criticize her appearance.

I started trying out my phonemes with her and, although it’s not like Frankline’s phoneme system, it really is the next best thing. She’s got a separate jaw and chin control, guides for the corners of the mouth, full top lip and bottom lip controls as well as all the separate points on each lip, a control that just moves the whole mouth up and down, cheeks that move along with the jaw, a full set of tongue controls, and several different deformation controls for the mesh around the mouth, not to mention the lip stretch, squeeze, and pucker controls in the channel box editor. And so I decided that it was time to get to work with Janine.

The phonemes with Janine took longer than Franklin. The audio itself is almost four times as long, and I do have to shape each mouth pose myself. By the time I was done I’d completely burned myself out for the day, but I’m happy with the results and feel ready to proceed to the rest of the animation.

But being burned out from animation didn’t mean I was going to take the rest of the day off. I decided to use that time to give Janine a makeover, which I was going to end up doing sooner or later. I had a lot of fun with it. I’m not entirely confident yet in the Maya 3D texture brush, so what I did is I went into her texture files and I opened her skin document up in Photoshop. I composited HD skin textures onto it and I spent a while hand painting her eyes, lips, nose, and cheeks to give them some lifelike color. For her arms and legs I merely uploaded the same skin texture without hand painting. I composited an HD scan of green human eyes onto the eye texture file. For the hair, I wasn’t surprised to find that the mesh was editable, but I didn’t want to change it so much that the controls wouldn’t work, so I just made it a little bit less angular and helmet-like and I gave it a brown texture (which I also used for the eyebrows). I turned down the shine on every blinn shader. I didn’t edit the mesh of the clothes but gave them texture as well, keeping them similar but making the fabric look like something one might wear to a party in a mansion.

Now she looks less like a haunted doll and more like a suspicious, upper class party guest. I’m proudest of the nose.

Time to get ready to start blocking!

The phonemes exercise was my cup of tea. Although I’ve had some light practice with lip sync before, I’ve never had the experience of getting to work with a phoneme rigging system, and it was wonderful to be able to breeze through it like that. The speech itself only took me about an hour to complete. I found the below diagram extremely useful in helping me get a feel for which consonants have a similar shape.

I also spent a lot of time staring at myself in the mirror speaking along with the words, checking back every few minutes like I was painting a self portrait.

I psyched myself out a little bit though, wondering if the mouth sounds I was making were natural or if I was trying to fit the shapes that I knew how to make. The rig did not have an option for “R”, and I watched myself say “longer”, making that “er” shape over and over before realizing that it didn’t matter anyway; the speaker is British and I am American and so I can’t necessarily rely on myself as a reference in that specific instance- the rig would not actually be making the “R” pose if it is to be accurate to the audio (this small complication gave me a lot of sympathy toward anyone doing a lip sync for a language that they do not speak or may not be their first language). Regardless, if I had needed the “R” I would’ve just used the “T/D” pose and gone in manually to tweak it a bit, or in the case of the Franklin rig I could’ve added a little bit of the “O” in there.

I finished the phoneme work wanting to do more with Franklin, I couldn’t just leave it like that, like some kind of unnerving robotic rap battle.

And so I gave Franklin some movement. Despite intending to film from the torso up, I animated the hips and legs, as I’m coming to realize is absolutely essential for believable motion. I actually animated every single piece of the rig, albeit minimally, as it’s only a 70 frame animation I only meant to give Franklin a little added emphasis to his words. I decided for whatever reason to make his body language just a little bit untrustworthy.

Satisfied with my work, I spent a long, long time adding in an environment and festive sweater for absolutely no reason other than my own enjoyment of the project. And I did certainly enjoy the project very much. Looking forward to working on phonemes more in my performance animation project!

Polishing the gymnast was not necessarily difficult, nor did it take nearly as long as almost any of the other animation exercises I have done thus far in the term. mainly came down to fixing errors pointed out during our feedback session and smoothing out the graph editor through the means of tracking my motion curves.

The first matter of business was to go through my feedback and fix every incorrect pose according to suggestion. Rather than list my process with every single one of these, I’ve included a thoroughly documented example of the a hip motion curve I was advised to fix, in order to give you a good idea of my procedure throughout the fixing stage.

Here is a screenshot of given feedback indicating the way in which I should fix said motion curve of the hip movement.

Observe the below image on the left, and you’ll see that my original motion curve was a jolty, up-and-down movement. On the right is my adjustment to the hip motion curve, and as you can see it is already much better- the body leans into that upward movement more and comes back down more gradually and gracefully as well. The curve now resembles more of a soft peak.

I’ve also included for your reference the way in which I did this. Keeping in mind our ball-bounce exercise and the arc principle, I’ve taken that peak and prolonged the time in which the gymnast hangs in the air, while shortening her liftoff and landing. I also deleted any keyframes which I deemed unnecessary and instead altered the graph editor to resemble the curve as it was with said keys, making sure to check back often to certify that I didn’t accidentally make a serious mistake.

After making sure that I was happy with the new way in which the hips moved during that specific jump, I went through the entire hip animation and repeated the process- motion tracking, smoothing, and editing the curve on the graph editor. Below is a look at the hip movement during my blocking pass:

And here is the remarkable difference visible in the polish pass:

Just the hip movement alone did so much to add realism and gracefulness to the gymnast’s movement, making her feel less jolty and robotic and more human, more dependent on gravity. I do think that specific mini-jump I smoothed out first is my best work; I feel that it gives her a lot more weight, which is hard to do when the character is completing such impressive acrobatic stunts.

Pleased with my work on the hip motion curve, after having fixed all of the issues mentioned in our feedback session, I went in and edited the motion curve on each limb. I focused on smoothness and weight. Of course, with the hip motion curve already done, a lot of the joltiness had already been resolved, as the limb position is so dependent on the hip movement in mid-air flight. Here’s an example of my work with the motion trail on her foot. Below is the motion curve during my blocking pass:

-and during my polish pass:

Here’s a playblast of my finished work polishing the gymnast’s performance. Note the fluidity and more realistic body movement.

In conclusion, I would like to say that my work on the gymnast was my best yet. It was a very good idea for me to work with a character who wears minimal clothing, as it helped me advance my understanding of body mechanics considerably. It was also beneficial for me to use a hyperrealistic rig as I think that it helped me pinpoint unnatural moments. Not only was the blocking incredibly easier with my more proficient knowledge of rig mechanisms, but the polish pass was fun and painless now that I’m more comfortable with the graph editor. I feel that I now have a sharper eye for detail and know what to look out for. Although I may not have an innate understanding of what the body position would necessarily look like at all times, I’m able to spot a mistake when I see one and correct it independently. This work is so far the highlight of what will be my demo reel, and I’m confident in its representation of my skills. This work is a far cry from my early hard hours of frustration producing convoluted, messy attempts. As I said before, if you had told me that I had made this a month ago I wouldn’t have believed you, so great is my progress, but I now must add that the unbelievability is softened now that I’ve stared at my work what feels like hundreds of times.

Preparations

I spent some time browsing the available rigs in the UAL asset library when considering my ideas for this project. Though the Hulk would’ve been fun, I decided the gymnast was a better option for a couple reasons; the first being that a small and agile body would be both a challenge and great practice for me to maneuver in precise, acrobatic positions, the second being that the minimal, tight clothes would allow me to better learn what I’m doing without the distraction of attempting fabric animation or preventing object phasing. Now, as with any typical young American, Simone Biles comes to mind immediately whenever gymnastics are mentioned. I allowed myself to spend some time watching her performances during the 2016 Rio Olympics before coming to the decision to use her floor performance in the 2018 World Championships. The clip below is actually probably the least impressive part of her routine, but I thought that more jumps and less triple backflips would not only be easier for me but also help me learn more about weight.

Once I’d selected my clip, I spent the entire first work day and part of the second sketching out a storyboard. I ended it at her final pose, but intended to allow the video several more frames afterward as a “cool down”, where I let the body adjust to its position and practice smaller, realistic, subconscious movements.

Preparations Continued

I could barely wait to begin animating. But unfortunately, technical difficulties lay ahead. When I opened the project in the UAL Maya Launcher through VMware, I was able to view the texture and assets that come with the rig, but I was met with the annoying difficulty of my Alt button not working. I’m not sure if it’s because I have a Mac or a USA keyboard or a combination of the two, but I was stuck using the onscreen keyboard. After a couple of poses, however, I realized that working that way was simply not sustainable to a productive workflow and switched back to working on the project without VMware, resigning myself to the back-and-forth of downloading my project between the two remote desktops when I wanted to do serious animation work vs when I wanted to render.

As an aside, I did purchase myself a UK Windows keyboard to ease this difficulty. It arrived after I’d already finished all the keyframes for this project, but I’m very excited to make use of it in the future. It makes me feel very cool as I stare at my screen for hours on end.

Day One

After a couple of days of technical difficulties and preparation, I began animating. I found it surprisingly easy compared to my last project, and had finished almost half of the key poses within only five hours, whereas the Knight took me almost four days merely to finish the blocking pass.

I attribute this to me knowing more about how to work a rig, as well as the lack of distracting clothing. I was able to go into this one with the knowledge of which pieces of the rig to never touch, and so didn’t make the mistake of animating the root control. I also was able to use the knee controls to my own benefit rather than them being a source of stress and confusion. One thing that I will say that has frustrated me a little, though, is that I’m unable to animate her ponytail much without skin folds on the back of the neck behaving oddly, so I wasn’t able to put in as much fun hair movement as I had hoped. I was extremely surprised and happy with my success on this first day, and absolutely couldn’t wait to see this hyperrealistic rig in action, so I transported myself and my project back to VMware to render, out of curiosity. Every time I do this you must imagine me with my project files in a virtual briefcase at the virtual bus stop waiting for the digital 12 to Oxford Circus.

I was beyond delighted with how the rig looked in action, but after many hours of gazing awestruck at my work, I realized that the right arm looks a little bit janky on that second jump. It flaps around bizarrely like a robot getting stuck. I resisted the urge to prolong my work day and made a mental note to resolve it first thing the next morning.

Day Two

I went into Day Two with more confidence than I ever have on an animation exercise. I fixed that arm joltiness easily by simply taking a peek at the graph editor and deleting keyframes during the jump that were unnecessary (ones that followed a path they would have anyway, or ones whose motion I could recreate by editing the curves). Although I planned to dig more deeply into the graph editor for next week and merely plot out my keyframes for the blocking pass, I did also edit the curves so that the jumps look a little more realistic- when the feet leave the ground the line is linear, and while they are in the air, bending to an athletic point, they’ve got more time to adjust.

Day Three

I finished my keyframes on Day Three. Overall, I still felt very proud of them, but I was very aware of how jolty and floaty some of the jumps look, especially in the final twisting split. I wanted to wait to work on it, though, for academic feedback, so that I didn’t mess up my keyframes trying to work on a polish ahead of time.

I utilized the time at the end as I had originally intended: I was going to add in a closeup where we see the gymnast breathing heavily after the end of her rigorous routine, and a look of nervousness or excited anticipation on her face indicating her confidence in her performance and possible expectancy to be graded. I felt drawn to do a closeup by the realism of this rig; which I had never worked with before.

I am very interested in facial animation such as lip sync and expression, and I although it didn’t exactly fit into the parameters of this project, I wanted to find some way to experiment with it a little.

Day Four

After almost an entire day of playing with cameras, HDRI globes and frame rates, I was able to produce this. I have to admit that despite its flaws, I am beyond overjoyed with it, and if you were to tell me a month ago that this is my work I wouldn’t have believed you at all. I’m especially proud of the breathing at the end. It’s exactly what I had visualized and it came to me very easily. In my opinion, the expression, arm movement, heaving chest, and neck bending look natural and professional. Despite being a body mechanics project, that’s the part I would show off.

That being said, although I was happy with it, I couldn’t get past that joltiness during her twisting split at the end. I’d also come to notice how broken her wrist looks in that final pose. And so despite being just about ready to submit the project the night before, I decided to take one last crack at it in the final day to polish up that twist just a little bit, without letting myself go too far into the polishing end of things.

Day Five

And so I rendered one more time, keeping my eyes out for little things without necessarily committing myself to a polish. I fixed the broken wrist and I tried to simplify some of the joltiness in the twisting split. I did this by once again deleting keyframes that were unnecessary and editing the curves a little bit, as well as keeping an eye on where the knee controllers were at all times. I also spent some time making sure her chest, waist, and neck looked natural and comfortable between poses. I’ve put some work into the fingers and toes, but ultimately I plan to work on those as well as add in more breathing throughout during my polish pass.

…..And here it is. The jump looks better, which was my intention. Overall I think the quality is better. There are still some changes I’d like to make, but that’s what the polish pass is for, and I’m still very happy with my work.