Category: FMP & Thesis

In the span of a night, stretching into the early morning, I was able to track the footage I’d spent days carefully choosing (I had originally chosen a different shot, actually, but it involved a stationary camera, and this presented a problem with determining the depth of the scene; not only did I not want to involve a nodal camera but it also fails to display my tracking skills well in a showreel). Fortunately, this shot, which I’m referring to as Pink_Wall, tracked smoothly and easily.

The shot itself is a one-of-a-kind on Pexels, with camera motion and a ground plane in the frame while still depicting no actual humans. I’d spent days perusing Youtube and alternate stock footage sites, frustrated with the utter lack of stock footage that appropriately depicted a usable background without actors in the frame.

After tracking the footage, I glided through setting up the Nuke composition and snapping the 3DE scene to the ground plane. I was ready in no time to build the set, which is one of my absolute favorite things to do.

This is the composition I created, and I’m almost as proud of it as I am of my Term 1 set from December. [Artist Moment] That one was great work because of the light setup framing the character and highlighting the blood splatter dramatically, but this one is good work because of the way the color patterns bounce the eye around the scene. I’ve chosen green and yellow leaves to draw the eye to the bus stop at the right of the screen as well as the yellow of Dana’s shirt, and the funky festival posters bring attention back the the retro-neon pattern on Dana’s trousers, though shrouded in shadow they don’t steal the stage. The color of the arm in the street art on the left draws the eye to the tan of the tree bark on the right, framing Dana and her action. I’ve tried to include props that place the scene in a time period relatable to the viewer without giving the city a specific location and posters that keep the atmosphere vibrant and cheerful.

I chose to give Dana a bright and stunning outfit to match the personality I will pair her with as well as to help her stand out in a high-contrast scene. It was a good choice as well to give her bright gold earrings, as it adds that extra touch to her face and personality.

After setting up the scene, this was how my shot looked:

All set for a first test render.

However, deep into 3 AM, I discovered that my scene setup still needed a lot of work.

The ground plane, applied with a shadowmatte, is moving incorrectly, and appears to be rendering incorrectly as well, which will present a problem as I fix it in the way her feet interact with ground.

The work I have to do before this is done mainly involves fixing the shadowmatte groundplane. I also intend to animate gentle wind through the leaves overhead.

This is the test render of Clara, which I created for the same reasons as the Dana test render from yesterday. With hyper-realism it’s harder for me to tell whether it’s perfect, but I can no longer spot glaring mistakes.

I watched this split-screen with the Dana render and the effect is really, really cool. It’s really exciting to finally begin to visualize what this project will look like when it’s completed! I’m starting to already get a sense of pride in this work and it’s amazing.

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.

I also did some re-texturing, of course.

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.

https://vimeo.com/597486076

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.

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.

As it stands, I’ve got a shot from a cowboy-style Western ghost town beautifully tracked down to a 0.07 and ready to go. My plan for this first scene is to have two shots, one of a cartoonish cowboy with a stylized walk, and one of a hyper-realistic cowboy rig, and contrast the perception of the audience as to how serious/professional each animation is and the demographic they think it’s targeted towards.

My original FMP plan was to have 4-6 tracked shots. I’m debating whether that’s realistic now, as the shot I’m currently working on is a full 635 frames, which is gonna require a 30-second animation for both shots, stylized and realistic, and in both of these I’m planning to have both a character AND a creature animation. So it will take me literally weeks upon weeks just to get the cowboy shot done.

Not to mention how hard it’s been to do my internship full-time, where I am the manager of an animation team and expected to both come in early and stay late every day, as well as make significant progress on my FMP and thesis. As such I haven’t been able to make much progress over the last 2 weeks because I’ve been settling into this role. Nevertheless, I am absolutely determined to do both and know that I can combine the necessity of getting work experience before I finish my degree.

As I’ve said, I tracked the shot very well. I’ve since been spending my nights after work trying to make progress on my first animation. Unfortunately, I’ve run into some troubles.

Parent Constraint Situation

When I worked on my matchimation from last term, I found a godsend in parenting the hand to the subway poles.

I’d been struggling to keep the arm movement from looking robotic and jerky as the character (Santa) tries to keep holding on while the arms, of course, move with the rest of the body’s movement. Parenting solved days worth of frustration.

So I’d assumed that parenting was the solution here, too. Unfortunately, I did not consider that parenting two moving objects is quite different from parenting a moving object to an unmoving one.

The arms have spaghettified.

After trying to break connections as well as trying multiple different kinds of constraints, I’m officially clueless. I had expected that, rather than deforming, the rig would simply aim at the object it’s intended to reach if I try to stretch it too far, like lifting a rig’s feet from the ground. As you can see, stretchiness is applied to the legs, but the arms give me no option to control stretch, so I’m not sure why this is happening.

After asking some of my most Maya-proficient teammates at work, I’ve decided to reach out to Luke for help and hopefully can figure out some way to get this working without having to awkwardly animate the arms to keep them fixed on the saddle and belt at all times.

Edit: changing the “chef shot” to one of cowboys with horses due to assets I already have available vs ones I’d have to purchase.

My original FMP concept was as follows:

4-6 tracked shots with incorporated CGI Elements that range from hyper-realistic, theoretically blending with the film so as not to be noticed, to hyper-cartoonish, intending a surreal product. Then I will question animators as well as viewers completely outside any artistic field on their takeaway as far as which is more serious / “professional” work, which is more adult-oriented etc

I’ve somewhat narrowed this down into a more concrete idea, at least for half of it. I call this plan “the chef shot”. In the chef shot, I’ll animate a hyper-realistic chef preparing food behind tracked kitchen footage, as realistically possible, and then animate a cartoon chef preparing food in a silly, entertaining way. The questions associated with these will be as follows:

What do you think is the audience demographic (age range) for each?

Which one do you think is more professional?

Which one is more entertaining?

Which is serious work?

Which could you see in a film?

etc etc etc

The chef shot will be its own project constituting either 1/2 or 1/3 of the total. There will be another tracked shot, which I’m tentatively calling the helicopter/horse shot, involving a horse or vehicle, hyper-realistic only, one in a normal setting, intended to blend in as much as possible, and one in a strange or entertaining setting. The questions involved with this project will aim to determine whether the perception of a hyper-realistic shot varies at all based on the silliness of the actual animation. Is it the art style or is it the animation itself, basically.

And then going off of this I should do a shot with a cartoon element that seeks to identify whether the artstyle vs animation changes for that too. Possibly. I’m most sold on the chef shot so far.