This is a test render of my Dana animation to check that it all works correctly on the farm and won’t present an issue with crashing for days on end. It also helps me get one more look at my work and spot any last changes.
The hands definitely snap back up a little bit too fast before the “mm-hmm.”
Next step (aside from fixing this) is tracking my footage and putting the scene & Nuke composition together. This is usually easier said than done. I’m also so proud of this animation that I can’t even decide on footage to track for the background- I’m thinking maybe just blurry city skyline + add in some 3D assets in the foreground. Normally I choose my footage before I decide what the animation will be, but 3DE has been down on VMWare for some time and it does not work on my home computer. As it’s still down, I’ll resume my work on Clara before I move on to my tracking for Dana. If I finish both at the same time it may be a good thing- to take a bit of a break from animation before I move on to either the realism segment of the cowboy project or start my third and final pairing.
EDIT- minor, of course, but I may want to update the texture on that phone so it looks like she’s actually on a call
Clara is the hyper-realistic counterpart to Dana. Beginning work on Clara was cathartic, because I finally got to see the pieces of my FMP idea coming together. It’s incredible to already be able to compare and contrast the two animation styles and imagine the finished product, it’s really given me the motivation to push through with it after the frustration that was getting stuck on the cowboy WIP.
The Clara rig itself has not given me technical trouble, other than some irritating joint weights I’ve had to repaint and strange teeth duplicates that were constrained incorrectly. Thanks to my new (yet still quite young) experience in rigging, I was able to identify and solve these issues on my own pretty swiftly.
The only strangeness in animating the Clara rig comes from the fact that I’ve now spent over a month going into work and putting my energy into creating the most cartoonish, rubbery, absurd and zany work that I can. Putting myself in the mind of a child playing a video game with a very short attention span and a juvenile sense of humor. This has translated well for Dana, but as I work on Clara, I find myself wondering continually whether my animation is “enough”. It feels like almost nothing. A small, subtle hip movement every 50 frames. Very precise neck angle. Dana feels like opening a sandbox and just seeing what I can create, Clara feels like tracing an outline carefully.
That said, I am proud of my Clara work, and it’s fun to compare them.
As it stands right now, I’d have to say I personally prefer the cartoonish animation style, but this may be a premature call. I haven’t completed a finished render for any project to compare the two, and that realistic cowboy does have a lot of intrigue.
Anyway, I plan to have a cartoon-realistic shot for a total of 3 pairings, each with their own tracked shot. If worst comes to worst and I can only do 2 pairings, I’ll still have 4 tracked shots and 4 animations, which isn’t bad. I do need to make sure I have time to get my thesis done as well, which has kind of been placed on the back burner for the time being, as I know that I can write quickly and effectively even in a time crunch while I simply cannot cut corners or “just work faster” on animation in any way shape or form without taking huge sacrifices.
As opposed to the Cowboy WIP, I’m very, very proud of Dana. She’s already my best work. Dana represents the stylistic and technical skills I’ve been picking up at my internship- learning to be comfortable with extreme squashing and stretching as well as implementing cartoonish effects in a way that’s both entertaining as well as continuing to make sense.
I love the Dana rig. I discovered it when reviewing portfolios while going through applications to hire onto my animation team last week, an animator had used Dana in a facial animation expressiveness test. I recognized her as being stylistically similar to the David rig, and when I found the creator I downloaded both her and Amy. Sure enough, Dana is a dream to work with. Every control allows deformation and has full options for stickiness, roll, etc. The fingers and face are rigged just perfectly. Although there isn’t phoneme availability, the quick expressions are wonderful, and using Studio Library I was able to build up a phoneme database for the lip sync within less than an hour.
From my first day of lip syncing. I absolutely adore the facial deformation abilities.
I also did some re-texturing, of course.
And adding a bit of personality.
But what I was most excited for and what I love most about the Dana rig is the numerous hair controls. as you can see from my work so far, I love animating Dana’s hair.
The character I’ve been animating in my internship is a raccoon with great ear controls, and one of my favorite tasks is to “add ear floppage”. I’m insistent that he needs to have “jelly ears”. This, when applied to Dana, is the jelly hair effect. I’ve in fact made Dana quite gelatinous in general.
I have very little setbacks to report here. I’ve been working with Dana for a little over a week and have almost completely finished animating her, running into absolutely zero issues. My animation workflow is just as it should be- I’m able to focus on questioning my stylistic elements without worrying too much about tech-related difficulties.
As far as questioning stylistic elements, I guess I will say that I may have gotten somewhat carried away during that “aww”. I know it’s a bit extreme, but I love that rubbery bounce so much, it would hurt to remove. Perhaps in juxtaposition with Carla it’ll be more acceptable. After all, this half of the project is not meant to explore realism.
The Cowboy WIP has been dwelling uninvited in the back of my mind. In contrast to my Dana and Clara work, it has not come easy to me at all, and it’s apparent in the much lower quality of work comparatively to the standard I’ve been recently holding myself to. As it stands right now, it doesn’t deserve a place in my showreel, and I don’t want to turn in work that I’m not proud of. I don’t know why I thought it would be easy, perhaps because it’s a “simple walk cycle”, but it’s been fraught with constant frustration, not entirely due to the fact that it involves both a quadruped and a bipedal character moving simultaneously.
Before I begin, I will just remind the reader of my intention here. This animation is the exaggerated, cartoonish counterpart to what will be a hyper-realistic animation featuring a much more intimidating character.
Behold.
Anyway, my initial issue with the cartoon cowboy shot was a question of how to parent the hands. I intended to have the cowboy’s left hand stay placed upon his belt- as I had planned in my reference footage- but, still having yet to fully embrace the functions of working in FK, I wasn’t sure how to accomplish this, and was frustrated by the mesh deforming when I placed the hands in IK, due to the fact that both were parented to moving objects (the hip and the horse). Luke helped me find the answer to this.
In the same vein as parenting the hands, I had taken the rigged hat from another character and given it to this one, and I struggled to figure out a way to parent it to the head and animate it, yet allow him to take it off later. I tried baking the animation and working against the parent constraint, but ultimately my solution was to duplicate the mesh and toggle visibility- there are actually two hats. I’m not altogether happy with this, though, because it’s messy and because I would prefer to be able to animate the second hat as well.
In addition, I can barely even begin to get into the struggle that was trying to get this onto the render farm about two weeks ago. I’m not sure why, but the frames 34, 148, and 181 (oh my god I have them memorized) repeatedly failed to render correctly on the farm, rendering the perspective camera rather than the tracked footage. I tried rendering the EXRs manually and replacing them, I tried duplicating the camera and rendering the specific frames with that one instead, I tried parenting a separate camera. The most baffling part of it was when I finally got those frames correct and instead 33, 147, and 180 failed. As I pushed through this, I also worked to get my Nuke composition done right, having only used it a few times (though more and more frequently as of late). In the end, though, it wasn’t Nuke that was giving me trouble, even with the complicated file pathing that fills me with anxiety, it was just Maya and its inexplicable failure to render those frames. Shamefully, my solution was finally just to duplicate the frames before each failed one and replace them. It’s not really a solution so much as it is avoiding the issue, but the animation itself needs work and thus is going to need to be re-rendered at some point anyway.
Another huge, overarching struggle, the biggest one you might say, is twofold. Part of this is animating the horse in a way that looks real while of course not having access to reference footage the specifically works for what I’ve planned. I’m working mainly from a muscular diagram, which can only do so much for me. After asking for feedback from multiple animators I’ve gotten the horse animation to a place that isn’t abysmal, but it could be better. The second issue is being unsure where to draw the line in exaggerating the cowboy movement. What is “dramatic” and what just reads as a mistake? I feel that because I’ve been staring at it for so long, it’s hard for me to tell.
I will get help from Luke on this one shortly. It is embarrassing to show work that isn’t good, even if that’s the point of asking for help on it.
Over the past month or so, I’ve been pushing to devote eight hours per day to both my internship and FMP respectively. Though it’s been stressful, it’s been rewarding, and the quality of my work has improved so, so drastically since starting my position at the studio. Of course, it’ll be necessary to delve into this in an entirely separate post as I finally compose a few updates on my FMP work.
In the meantime, I took a break from FMP work for the past two days, as I was moving house, and in my free time I found https://www.models-resource.com/, a site to which models from all sorts of video games are uploaded. The Animal Crossing resources are extensive, and because it’s sort of a nostalgic comfort food for me- and because I sort of misinterpreted the task as potentially being easy due to the character’s simple shape- I decided to rig Blathers for fun.
Blathers with correct joint orientation
I was excited to discover that the FBX file came with a pre-built joint skeleton, already skinned to the mesh, and assumed I’d be able to somewhat speedrun the rigging process. Unfortunately, I’d soon realize that most of the joints were not oriented the right way, which involved an hour or so of playing around with my JointOrient Mel script as well as manually orienting a couple to make sure that Y always faced out/up and X followed the path of the skeleton. In the end it was still a huge time saver that the skeleton already existed, but having to unbind the skin and re-orient the joints ended up being a bit of a step backwards anyway.
Another couple roadblocks that I hadn’t expected working with someone else’s skeleton was the fact that the original creator had not put a bend in the arms or legs, which resulted in my IK Handles not working correctly, and took me a while to figure out the cause of.
Two other minor learning moments were definitely my journey with painting the joint weights correctly on such a simplistic model, particularly the wings, as well as trying to figure out a workaround for how to toggle the regular eye vs blinking eye texture visibility on the same geo. I would prefer that the creator build the mesh with the “eye-cap” (as it’s listed in the outliner) a bit more smoothed into the mesh, or allow a way to toggle blinking, either through blend shapes or actual eyelids, because I ended up having to duplicate the geo, apply the blinking texture, then parent it to the neck control separately, then toggle visibility on the separate eye-caps.
I also built the beak joints and controls myself.
This project was a fun little break from my work, and helped me build upon and reinforce my rigging abilities, while also opening my eyes to how much more there is to learn. I’m mostly glad to have a rigged Blathers to play with, and it does make for a nice little clip for my showreel, though I’m unsure whether the animation comes off as strange/amateur to a viewer who is unfamiliar with the animation style Animal Crossing uses (which I was imitating, specifically Blathers’ waiting idle). Once I’ve got my FMP work ready to add to the reel, I’ll be able to evaluate a lot of my more recent, more advanced work and narrow down what should be included.
