Assignment 2 - Jumping Animation

This is how I created a climbing up stairs and jumping animation:

Process:

Firstly, I used the walk cycle animation that I had done in part 1 of my assignment. I then deleted some frames in the back and left 4 steps behind.

Secondly, I made the character move up 3 flights of stairs and then ready himself to jump. I used the motion trial to guide me. Anticipation can also be seen from here.

Next, I created several key poses for the jump animation. This involves the lowest and highest points of the jump and the position of the hips, the legs, the hands and the spine. There were a lot of factors needed to make the animation look realistic.

Then, I made the character sustain impact from the jump caused and rebound back up into a recovery position so that the character would really seem like jumping, rather than just landing on the ground as if like a rock.

After recovery, I made the characters move two steps forward to a standing position so that I could prepare for the next part of my animation.

The final part of my animation is where the character looks at his legs for injuries and then waves his hand to the camera, signalling that he's okay and that no injuries were sustained. As you can see, there is ease in and ease out.

This is the storyboard for my jumping animation:

This is the playblast for my jumping animation:

Reflection:

Overall, this animation is probably the hardest I have ever done so far. It involves a lot of factors, such as gravity, weight shift and momentum. At first, I tried to do a long jump animation, which involves the character swinging his hands backward a few times before jumping far. However, the rig had limitations which didn't allow me to bend the legs to the way I want it to be. Therefore, I decided to go for a normal jump animation. The previous walk cycle animation also made this animating this jumping move slightly easier as I had experience with weight shift and hand movement. Overall, I felt that this animation was fun and fulfilling.

References:

I tried to use this as a reference to the long jump animation. However, the long jump animation failed. Nonetheless, this helped me to figure out the key poses for a normal jump animation.

Assignment 2 - Walk Cycle Animation

This is how I created a walk cycle animation of a character.

Process:

Firstly, I created a motion trail for my character's hips. This would allow me to refer to the motion trial for a more smooth and flowy movement of the hips and that the character moves at a standard and good pace.

Next, I animated the upper part of the body first. The upper part of the body is important as it defines the way in which the character moves and is the main focus of the animation. This made the legs stretch to a impossible extent.

I then animated the legs one by one. As you can see from the motion trial, it looks like a sine graph that you would find. It looks wavy and systematic. Therefore, for every key pose, with the help of the grid, I placed the feet at the exact same position, just that the translation of the feet is different for every grid box. This makes sure that the character's hips does not overtake the legs in terms of speed.

After that, I animated the hands. First, the shoulders, then the elbow and lastly the hands. I decided to give it a more natural feel.

Next, I animated the hips to give weight shift. This would make the animation more realistic and less robotic. The hips would then lean towards the leg that is sticking out and the weight would be focused on it.

Finally, as an added bonus, I animated the head. From the movement of the head, you can see that the character is looking for something, or he is lost and is looking for directions.

This is the storyboard of my walk cycle animation:

This is the playblast of my walk cycle animation:

Reflection

This exercise was probably one of the hardest I have ever faced. The final product seemed rushed because I redid the animation twice. Not once, but twice. This is because the first two times, the animations was too slow and the character looked too floaty and unrealistic. I was pretty much quite unhappy when i was told I need to redo because I had done all the hands and weight shift and all that effort has been put to waste. However, with each iteration, I did better work than the previous one. My final one looks better than all my previous iterations too. Also, I had at first made the hip movement very extreme by making the up and down movements of the upper body too much. Thus, by using an editable motion trail, I have made it look less extreme and more realistic. This exercise has taught me the basics of character animation and how to make a character look realistic. Overall, I think this is a good experience.

References

I found this walk cycle reference on the internet and I thought that this pretty much sums up the key poses that were needed in the walk cycle animation. I referred to this image all the time when I was animating my character.

Topic 5 - Animation

Spiderman:

For this exercise, we need to learn how to animate a spiderman rig. This rig was used to do exercise in the previous exercise for posing. However, this exercise was much simpler as it requires us to animate a spiderman rig with weight shift implied on the hips.

These are the 3 key poses of spiderman:

This is the playblast for my spiderman weight shift animation:

Big Dog:

For this exercise, we are required to animate a simple rig called big dog, which consists of a cuboid shape with four legs. It looks like a walking table to be precise. I had to do an animation where big dog is kicked by someone and that it has to regain it's balance by shifting the weight across its legs. I realised that the right front limb would correspond with the left back limb in motion. This is pretty accurate as it allows the big dog to gain balance and not be tilt over to any side. After a while of stumbling, the big dog finally regains it's balance and comes to a stand still. I also learnt how to use the graph editor to create anticipation and ease in ease out for the animation.

These are the 6 key poses for the Big Dog animation:

This is the storyboard for the Big Dog animation:

This is the final playblast for the Big Dog animation:

Reflection

Overall, this exercise was useful in teaching me about weight shift and how it can linked to real life as well as 3D animation. The idea of weight shift makes the characters look more realistic and that animating organic 3D models is not easy. Also, there are many limitations of rigs and that not all rigs can do what a normal human can do.

This exercise also helped me improve my knowledge on the 12 principles of animation, by enforcing it with the graph editor that we have learned in IN3D and teaching us the advanced version of it.

Topic 4 - Rigging

Pose 1:

This pose is a sexy pose, for a model to showcase clothes to people. I believed that this pose is good as it shows off the feminine figure of the rig.

Pose 2:

This is a battle pose. This pose shows the model stopping someone behind her from fighting and that she should take the fight herself instead. I chose this pose because it demonstrates how the rig can showcase thoughts and emotions.

Pose 3:

This is a pose which shows the model flying in the air with her super power. I chose this pose because i can show case the capability of the legs.

Reflection

I find this exercise to be extremely tedious and hard to do, due to the amount of instructions needed to follow and the time taken to rig the model. Also, It was very hard at first for me to orient the joints properly with the model's figure as viewing it from different angles may cause harm to the view of the entire model. A single mistake in orienting the joints would cause the whole rig to go totally off and I would have to redo the entire rig all over again.

I also learnt about the different kind of constraints which prevents the humanoid body of the model from moving in impossible directions or positions that is totally unacceptable for the human body. I also learnt the difference between SCSolver and RPSolver.

Overall, I learnt that rigging is truly a stressful and difficult job for 3D riggers. However, once the rigging is done, the end product would be pretty satisfactory.

Topic 3 - Spiderman and Eleven Rig poses

These are the poses done for the Spiderman and Eleven rigs that were given to us.

Spiderman:

This is the basic pose that we were given to do.

However, the pose needed to be more relaxed and that Spiderman himself should not look too strained in the pose. Therefore, I had to make several changes to his spine posture, his leg posture and his arm posture. I had quite a bit of trouble making the legs looked relaxed as the leg joints had many constraints.

I also had to edit the arms as I didn't want him to look too stressed while hanging upside down holding his rope. This was then I realised that the majority of the weight was concentrated on the arms. Therefore, the rest of the body can be more relaxed.

These are the other poses I created:

This is my second chosen pose for spiderman. As you can see, there is a little difference as the view in the reference picture is more artistic. Also, the rig had several limitations which made it impossible to move the arm in certain directions.

This is the third pose that I did for the spiderman rig. This involves a large movement of the hips and the spine to make this crawling position. However, the limitations of the legs and the foot are quiet severe which makes the leg look slightly weird.

Eleven Rig:

The eleven rig was less realistic, with a more cartoony theme to it. This time, I had to notice the curves obtained by the poses and follow them.

This is the first pose that I had done. As you can see in the reference picture, there is a smooth flow from the head to the elbow and then to the hands. I have tried to replicate this smooth flow in the Eleven rig. However, the limitations of the model does not allow me to make the arm look so flowy and that the arm proportion is different. However, the overall pose is still there.

This is the second pose that was done for the Eleven Rig. This pose was relatively easy to do. I needed to position the hip to the correct angle so that it would give off the sexy feel as shown in the reference picture. Then, I had to adjust the face and the smile of the rig.

This is the third pose I did for the Eleven Rig. It was easy overall, and the body had nice flow to it too. The legs were pretty troublesome though, as the rig had many limitations to the joints.

Reflection:

I felt that this exercise was pretty easy and fulfilling. I have learnt many things about posing, such as extremes, key poses, relaxed poses, flow of body, rig constraints and how it may affect posing.

This is the stepping stone to animation, which is the combination of several of these poses together to create one smooth flowing video. However, posing is just the tip of the iceberg and that animation still has many different factors that has to be counted, such as transitions and timing.

Overall, I felt that I had fun with this posing exercise.

Topic 2 - Cow Modelling

This is how i created a cartoon cow.

Process

Cow Head:

First, I start by creating a simple cube. From there, I will manipulate vertices and extrude untill it becomes rounded.

Then, I used smooth on the cube.

After smoothing, there are more vertices everywhere now. I scaled down the right vertices of the cube to form the peak of the mouth and moved up the bottom vertices of the cube to make up the flatter base of the mouth.

From the side that i scaled down, I extruded the faces twice. I moved out the faces as you can see. As you can see here, this creates sort of like a connector between the main head and the mouth. From here on, I go on to making the main head.

Then, I extruded 3 more times. I rotated and scaled those extruded faces to make the head more rounded as it looks like above.

Then, I used vertice manipulation and moved vertices around to make the mesh more smooth and to make the head have less sharp edges. I also made the head more rounded than before and pulled out the vertex at the top of the head to make it not so flat an unnatural.

I then moved the vertices in the middle to get ready to model the eye of the cow. Thus, I moved up the middle vertices to make the mesh look more flowing and moved the 2 center edge loops closer to each other so that the eye wont be that wide.

I then deleted the four faces needed to make an eye. Now there is a hole in the cow's head which will be modified to become more rounded and smaller to make a good looking eye.

I used the edge border tool to select all the edges around the border of the hole and then extruded them inwards to make the eye hole smaller.

The eye hole is smaller now. I then rounded up the edges by dragging some vertices closer to the hole so that the eye wouldn't look that squarish and the corners of the eye wouldn't look that sharp and squarish.

I extruded two more times to make the hole closer. Now it looks like a spider web. After that, I extruded yet again, but this time I moved the vertices inwards to make an eye socket. I then scaled in the eye socket to make it more realistic.

At the top right of the cow, there is a face which allows me to create a ear for the cow with it. Thus, i selected the edges on that face and extruded it inwards. I then moved the vertices around to make the ear a diamond shaped like face.

I then extruded the face I created and moved it out. Then, I scaled it to make it small at the ends of the ear and big in the middle. As you can see here, this is how I made the pointy corner of the ear, through another round of extrusion.

I then selected two faces in the front side of the cow and deleted in place of the nostril. I then used the edge border tool to select the border edges and to get ready to extrude them to make the nose.

I extruded the edges inwards to make the nostril hole smaller. Then, i used fill hole to fill the holes of the nostril. However, it also filled the eye socket. Thus, I deleted the extra face in the eye socket and the moved in the new face in the nostril.

Then, I moved the vertices of the nostril around to make it more rounded and more realistic. As you can see here, this is the product of my vertex manipulation.

Now for the mouth. I extruded the bottom faces on the part of the head connecting the mouth to the head. I then rotated it to shape a mouth like structure. I repeated it twice to form a longer mouth.

The front of the mouth looks too flat. Thus, I moved the middle vertices to the front by a bit and scaled inwards the edges on the sides to make a more rounded mouth.

I used the sculpt geometry tool to make the model more rounded. I then deleted the unedited half of my cow head.

I then used Mirror Geometry tool to mirror the remaining half of the cow head and form into one complete cow head. Then, I smoothed it to see how it looked like. This is how it looks like after smoothing. This is the complete cow head.

Cow Body:

First, I created a rectangular cuboid with 3 x 3 x 5 dimensions. This is long enough for the cow body.

Next, i extruded out the sides of the bottom of the cow to create two legs, each of size 1 x 1 x 4. This will give me enough size for proportion and feet.

Next, I selected all the vertices surrounding the cow and then scaled them in to make the model look more rounded. I also added the cow head to refer to for proportion.

I then moved the vertices of the body, making a rounded belly, short from neck and getting wider till hips. I also made the cow have a spine by making the back of the cow curve in and making sort of a butt for it. Then, I started sculpting on the legs. At first, the legs were very thin, so I scaled them out to become this size. I also had to take into consideration leg proportion to the body and feet too. Thus, I extruded more vertices at the bottom to make the ankle of the legs and then extruded it again to make the foot.

then, I decided to extrude yet another time, as the original feet of my cow was too small and flat. Thus, I split the bottom polygon into two parts, extruded one part at a time and then scaled them in to make them look like toes of a foot.

I then extruded arms from the top few faces at the side of my model. I extruded a few times, with more extrusions near to the joints of the cow's arms.

As you can see here, this is what my cow model looks like after smoothing. Now, I need to make a hand for the arms of the cow.

I created a new cuboid of size 3 x 3 x 1 to make a hand shape. This new polygon acts as the base for the hand.

Then, I extruded fingers from the cuboid polygon. I made the thumb curve in as the thumbs of normal people are usually curved in. I also have extra extrusions at the joints of the hand.

After that, I did some vertex manipulation and scaled the fingers in to make the fingers look more rounded and natural. I also made a sort of a palm shape.

From here, you can see that the fingers on my cow's hand are too small. Thus, I had to scale it up in order for the hand to look realistic.

I then scaled up the hand. As you can see, it looks much better than before. Then, I joined together the vertices of the hands and the arms using the move tool and then merging them into one object by combining them. Then, I merged the vertices so that the mesh is connected. Then, I manipulated the vertices of the arms a little bit to make the elbow and the wrist of the arm more defined and proportional.

Then, I extruded a neck from the top face. This is to be used to merge with the cow head that I have done earlier. Thus, the body of the cow is done.

I then used the split polygon tool to create two new edges at the two middle faces. Then, I deleted off the face that is between the two new edges that I have created.

I then used the border edge tool to select the border edges and started to extrude the edges downwards to form a connector between the head and the neck.

I extruded yet another time to make the neck more rounded and to make the merging of both the head and the neck more accurate.

I then combined both meshes of the head and the body together to form one single mesh. Then, I used the move tool to connect the adjoining vertices together and then merge them.

Then, I manipulated the vertices at the neck to give the neck a more rounded and spiny look. As you can see here, the neck is curved in both sides without much sharp corners. With that, the cow is complete.

This is the end result of my Cartoon Cow:

Learning Process

After learning the different techniques on how to model organic models, I feel more equipped in doing 3D work. The head was pretty simple, but the body was slightly harder, due to less guidance given. The head was just done with a step by step guide. However, when I finished my cow, I felt a great sense of satisfaction, due to having modeled an organic character for the first time.

Also, this exercise taught me a lot about modelling with character analogy in mind such as body proportion. All the information from the previous topic has been worth the time as it gave me more insight on how to model the cow properly so that it would look nicer.

Overall, I felt that I have learnt many things during this exercsie and hope that I can do some more stuff to this cow, such as give it poses or animate it.