daniel-lim.co.uk

Well, I’ve run out of stuff to do again. I would upgrade Wordpress to version 2.2 (as predicted last week), but I’m at work, so obviously firewalling and a distinct lack of FTP program are somewhat restricting. Plus I have no idea if it’s against the rules or not.

I’ve finished animating some hair that was going crazy-mad. I know it’s hardly the most interesting task you can be set, but I did get to write an awesome script (even if I do say so myself) to combat the crazy-madness.

Basically some of the hair needed baking (i.e. all the dynamic movement was recorded and stored as keyframe information) and fixing, so the script basically takes in the number of joints running down the main strands of hai and creates IK splines with a number of clusters (it has to be an approximation otherwise there’d be a hell of a lot of clusters!).

Essentially this means that you can now animate the hair using IK, rather than trying to do it in FK one every single joint, which gimbals like nobody’s business!

The second part of the script, counts through all the joints down the hair length, switches off the IK (otherwise there’ll be trouble!) and snaps the clusters to every other joint and sets a key.

This means you can exactly match the IK hair strand to the dynamic (baked) FK one. So if you’ve got any points where the hair goes a little crazy (or, more often, pokes through her face) you can IK either side of it and just blend over it, providing a very quick and easy fix!

I was very pleased with myself anyway

Oh and I bought the new Maroon 5 album this afternoon. I’ll give it a listen and let you know what I think!

Right-click & “Save As…” to download dl_mp_animUpdate_002.mov (1.35mb)

The hallway sequence! My first ever (proper) walk cycle! Pretty pleased with how it’s turned out. There’s a few things I intend to change (after I’ve done the rest of the mammoth amounts of animation required), but on the whole it’ll do for now. Spent a long time trying to not make it as bouncy and think it’s just about there, but there’s still something bothering me about it - can’t work out what it is… perhaps the arms still move too much? If you know, please tell me!

Ok, here we go, quick and dirty post:

Right-click & “Save As…” to download dl_mp_animUpdate_001.mov (1.76mb)

I actually animated this after Animation Update #2, but since this was rendered first, it existed first. I actually managed to animate the entire sequence yesterday (not including the blocking - that’s been there for a few weeks of course)! That’s 500 frames of animation goodness (efficiency, not necessarily good animation! ;)). Makes a wonderful change to the past few days where I’ve had so much stress it was impossible to do any work. This has now been helped further by my tutorial with Phill where he basically told me not to worry, so I feel much better now!

For the record, this shouldn’t be classed as “Finished Animation” just yet. It’s at a stage where I’m happy with it and should start doing something else. I fully intend to go through again later and make any small fixes prior to final rendering - so if spot anything, let me know!

Kick your shoes off, take it easy! Nope! No time for that, but I must admit I am procrastinating a little. I’ve relaxed the animation curves to check for any crazy rotations and they’re all fixed now apart from the FK controls, which I’m not worried about and the guns (they’re being done in a different way later). Now I should be re-stepping the curves and starting to build more detail in but I’m suffering from the “reaching a big milestone and finding it hard to begin the next mile” syndrome. I do have a tutorial tomorrow as well, so I should probably re-render off everything I’ve got so I can show Phill, rather than panic and run around like a mad man (the norm).

Anyway, I thought I’d let you see how cool it is in full (floaty) motion - yes I have already removed any craziness but this section that I’m showing was the best bit and needed hardly any fixes at all:

Right-click & “Save As…” to download dl_mp_relaxedCurves.mov (1.2mb)

Yes, I’m behind with my posting, but there is work to be done! I’ve spent far too long tweaking the sequences below, but I did make a good start on setting up the “big” scene yesterday before leaving early to go and celebrate Marie’s birthday! Yay! I say setting up because I made a fairly big boo-boo when doing my block animation. I decided that I’d move the transform control (the square control in the rig that moves everything). Of course, that is likely to cause all sorts of sliding problems when it comes to un-stepping the animation curves. So I decided to fix all my scenes by removing the keyframes from the transform. That means I have the rig in the pose I want, but just not in the position or facing the direction I want, aka a lot of moving all the controls and matching up the poses with the old ones. Phew.

Luckily there are only 3 scenes were we see him moving (not including the brief glimpse of foot you see in the street sequence). I thought I was close to getting the big apartment sequence finished yesterday, but of course, I forgot about my second character, so I’m probably about 2/3 of the way though setting up, in reality. Once that’s done though, I can start blocking in more detail into the sequence and should be close to posting up a version with nailed down timings.

Anyway, here are the office and hallway sequences with a bit more blocking and actual pose-to-pose movement (as in the position of his legs is actually appropriate according to how far he has travelled):

Right-click & “Save As…” to download dl_mp_animDaily_005.mov (1.43mb)

As a side note (I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it somewhere else), I’ve now switched from H264 to Sorensen 3 because it doesn’t wash out the images as much - unfortunately, it means filesizes are marginally larger. I’ve also finally managed to get rid of the annoying black borders of previous footage - it actually turns out that Premiere was squashing the images length-ways. Very annoying. Now I’ve got it set to square pixels so it comes out in the right aspect ratio!

Well, it’s incredibly late coming, but it’s finally here. And no, it’s not really the “final” blocktest yet, but yes, it is a blocktest and it is completely rendered. In fact, I’ve had it for a few days now and just not got round to posting it up. On the whole, I’m very happy with it and (according to my semi-existent schedule) will be diving into full animation starting next weekend.

This week I spent far too long worrying about skinning, changed to fixing stuff in my blocktest and rendering it all out and then went back to skinning yesterday where I covered much more ground than I had done in the days previously. Phew. I’m off home for a few days this week (Wednesday afternoon to Friday afternoon) so I plan to have all my skinning and corrective blendshapes done by the time I leave. So I’m not just taking chunks of time out of my schedule, I won’t be taking any Maya files with me but I will be starting to work on my report.

Right-click & “Save As…” to download dl_mp_blocktest_3_web.mov (12.6mb)

So far, I’ve not had a lot of feedback for my animation dailies, but if there was ever a time you were going to post some comments or criticisms, now really is that time! Starting next Saturday, I’m planning to spend 3 weeks animating (not solely animating, but it is definitely the emphasis) and I’d like to have a final set of timings for animation and cameras down at the end of the first week (although, I think they’re pretty close already) such that my music and sound guy can start working wonders. After that it should just be a case of refining the animation to a state where I can say “OMG! Amazing animation!”

For those of you wondering what I’m doing about “the look”, that’s more or less what the last two weeks are for (and the odd occasion during animating). My main aims for the piece are animation (hence the large proportion of time allocated) and cinematic storytelling. Having spoken to numerous people, as it stands, even with blocked animation and an untextured, unmodelled scene, it still tells the story as I want it and gives me plenty of opportunities for doing some nice animation. The entire thing is also lit almost exactly as I want it, but there a few tweaks I’d like to implement here and there. At the moment I’m toying with the idea of a low-res, faceted look (as per the blocktest). I really like the way the light plays over the characters and the key elements of the environment serve their purpose sufficiently. I will be adding a bit of grain (and maybe some colour grade) to make it not look “too perfect” and I’d like to put in a tiny bit more effort with some of the key bits of scenery (the desk, for example). It will also mean the skinning and blendshaping is much less painful.

I’ve not really got much more to say at the moment! I need to get cracking with the rest of the skinning and start blendshaping! Please tell me what you think!!

A short one today guys (in both footage and description):

Right-click and “Save As…” to download dl_mp_animDaily_004.mov (1.62mb)

Description: Tweaked entering the apartment and added to the crime scene arrival.

I had a fairly slow day yesterday which now means I’m behind schedule slightly but I should have this done in time for my tutorial tomorrow. Oh yeah and the lights are a little broken - I slowed down his animation a bit and changed the camera timings, so now the “cheating lights” come on a little bit late - I shouldn’t need to point it out, you’ll definitely not miss it ;).

For this clip, I was trying to push the contrast even further and generally darken it down quite a lot. I was just looking at the frames I rendered overnight and got worried that I’d pushed it a little too far. The .tiff frames are quite difficult to make out but for some reason they’re much lighter after they come out of Premiere. Not ideal but at least I don’t have to re-render for today’s update. Check out how big the difference is:

Anyone know why this is?

I think I’ll tone the lighting down a tiny bit, but I have to try and stop it becoming more important than getting the animation down - I spent most of my time lighting yesterday - it’s good that I’m thinking about (especially since I haven’t really done it before) but I can’t afford to do that again!

Yes, I know it’s late! Please forgive me!

Right-click and “Save As…” to download dl_mp_animDaily_003.mov (1.19mb)

Description: Walking down the hallway to the apartment, entering the apartment and seeing the crime scene for the first time.

Arriving at the apartment - I’m pleased with the way it turned out. I like the movement of the camera and I spent quite some time tweaking the lighting to try and make it interesting. This involved pushing Hyde further forward, down the hallway, so that he was under the light more when he came to the relatively long pause where he is just standing, look at the door, before pulling himself together and going inside.

Entering the apartment - This section, like the hallway, can be shot in so many ways; I quite like the way it at the moment. The downward movement (and slight rotation) of the camera actually works pretty well - it was a bit of a fluke because the camera needed to come down a bit for when Hyde walks into the camera. Apologies for the slight feeling of inconsistency as Hyde walks “through the camera”, I think it feels a little odd because I’ve got very few keyframes; with full motion the screen won’t be completely black for nearly as long, but it’s something to bear in mind when it comes to more detailed animation.

Crime scene - This “walking through the camera” shot means I can cut out a couple of horrible camera moves from my previous blocktest. I wanted to do a reveal as is quite common in lots of murder mysteries/thrillers and couldn’t work out how to do it nicely - there isn’t quite as big a build-up of tension perhaps, but maybe that’s something I can add to the entry shot (have Hyde stand and observe the scene a bit longer before moving further into the apartment).

Have to get this blocktest finished by tonight, so I imagine you will be able to see the new blocktest in it’s entirety tomorrow!

Thanks for paying a visit - comments and crits are actively encouraged as always!