In this week’s session, I fixed some poses from last week’s assignment and learned to turn my blocking animation into a spline. Here is my polished blocking play blast:
And here is my note written from the session:
While developing the tail animation, I found it important to understand how the tail can possibly follow the motion trail of the bouncing ball (body), and how the motion trail in Maya guides the movement of the animation:
In the blocking stage, I found it important to check if all the keys were not in a linear line (even for the distance):
In the end of the animation process, I can clean up the graph editor to make the curve much clear:
Anticipation is the movement before a main movement.
Anticipation is building up for force.
All movements build up by either internal or external strength.
Anticipation is the easiest way to build up an internal energy and triggers a movement to happen.
An object in motion always stays in motion, except it has been stopped by another energy.
The below screenshot shows the setting of making blocking for these two weeks blocking:
Making bottom to control the rig:
Combining with this online tutorial, it supports me to work on the blocking of the tail animation:
This tutorial mainly has 4 parts to demonstrate:
Blocking of the bouncing ball animation
Blocking of the tail animation
fixing the distance of the animation with the landing keys
fixing the rotation of the animation
The first photo below shows the graph editor of the blocking made for the body part of the rig at the beginning, which shows when the ball reaches the peak it will speed up. On the contrary, it will slow down when it’s off the floor or lands on the floor. The second photo below shows there will be a pause when the ball lands on the floor and when it restarts bouncing again, at this moment, the ball is squashing and stretching. #
There are a few main blocking poses of the tail shown through the tutorial, and I made screenshots of them. They include the tail shape when the rig is in its starting pose, the tail when it’s off the floor, and the tail when it’s on the pack; oppositely they also show how the tail rig changes when it’s landing on the floor.
This photo below shows a new bouncing circulation starts:
The z-axis in the animation graph editor indicates the distance the rig jumps in this animation (from the side view), however, there is a pause between each bounce, therefore there should be non-changed part in the z-axis as well to avoid the sliding.
In the rotation part though, we need to keep the graph in linear as this action has no pause, the rig keeps doing it during the animation.
Here is my planning draft for the blocking and knowledge learnt from the above tutorial:
In week three’s lesson, we looked at some main examples of experimental animation from the past to the contemporary centuries.
The scanned pictures below include the notes I have taken in the class, at the weekend I will be reviewing those short films and taking contextual analysis from them by relating back the structure of my draft essay:
Over the weekend, I concentrated on the fourth paragraph of the book Experiment Animation — from Analogue to Digital to look at different forms of animation that appeared within experimental animation, and took some notes. Also, I have analysed two short pieces created by Balazs Simon, reviewing the journey written by Len Lye and Oskar Fischinger from Experimental Animation — an illustrated anthology:
In this blog I will be showing the progression of my ue5 assignment within 2 weeks and a few of my reflection.
First of all the rigging inspiration I have been taken to start working on my robot is shown on the video below:
By understanding how the author used the advanced skeleton to do the car root I have tried the similar logic to add joints in to my creation started with the root to its top:
I have given weigh painting into each specific part of this ‘tattoo robot’ as I have mentioned before, to make sure it can be walking and rotating needle in my film later.
As I was mainly working in Maya for blocking my scene and UV wrapped my model, or keying the blocking camera– the biggest thing I have learnt in the progression is to understand how to import the exact same thing in to the game engine, supported by this video below:
I noticed the main difference between these two software is the units and scale, therefore I need to scale up the mesh I want to import into UE5 by following the system indication.
Therefore, I successfully imported my rough scene and camera into UE5 as shown below, and soon will moving on to adding more models to match the look I want my project to have:
To save time, I have used Udim for my model and enabled the virtual texture in the ue5 setting to allow me apply using udim in this engine:
Here is the outcome of the main building after I had built its simple texture in substance Painter and applied it on top of the engine, I used the material as layers to separate different main parts (for example the transparent window and the building itself) of each model:
In my reference to the cyberpunk building, there are a lot of simple geometries included in the building such as squares and rectangles, therefore I have kept my mesh simple in subdivision level 1 in the scene while adding emission to the necessary parts. Also, this is a 12 weeks project, hence I won’t make them so complicated:
In the week 3 session, there are also a few notes before it has been disturbed by the VR promotion:
G is the short key for seeing all icons.
In the animation sequencer in UE5, there are some updated features with imported meshes:
possessable mesh: won’t disappear by closing the sequencer.
spawnable mesh: going to disappear when closing the sequence, easily to control, having a small icon with it in the sequencer.
During this session, we have been introduced 12 principles of animation:
timing and spacing
anticipation
appeal
squash and stretch
exaggeration (pushing the motion)
overlapping ( e.g. moving hairs, jewelleries)
arcs ( for animation looks organic instead of robotic)
slow in and slow out
staging
straiht ahead and pose to pose
secondary action (how the secondary action giving meaning to the shot)
solid drawing
We have been concentrated on making overlapping animation through the pendulum, as there are mainly three parts of the pendulum and they will be working in different time:
As I noticed, the more frequent pendulum is shaking the less strength it will get in the end, and the slower it will become in the end with more key frames. Also, the energy of the secondary and third pendulum main joints should always be transferred by their primary joint on the top, they should.t be more powerful by the latter.
My working interface in Maya:
At the end of the session, I also developed my bouncing ball animation from the first week by fixing some squash and stretch issues:
During the weekend, I have planned out my own pendulum animation through sketch and supportive videos:
Also, I have been to Tate Britain to do some life drawings:
This week’s session talked roughly about the brief and the structure of writing an essay with 1500 words, before picking up a topic it’s essential to think of a research question first. As the critical report needs to be straight, it’s always important to refer to or quote from other resources or authors to support ideas. Also, it can be essential to add movie clips or illustrations to support my topic, and then put my word into context.
There are several types of the resources:
the primary: film festival, gallery, exhibition
the secondary: paper, books, news
Several sites are good for finding resources, by learning from them, I can paraphrase the content and adding into my own essay:
When structuring a report, there are some important parts:
Title/Subtitle
Acknowledge – optional
Abstract
Key words
Contents page
Introduction
Literature review (how does the journey or book support our report)
Main body of the text
Conclusion
Image list
At the end of the lesson, the lecture challenged us to find an old animation that displays the animator’s hand inside, the French animated film Fantasmagorie (1908) below shows the animator’s hand drawing the first character in the first few shots.
In my free time as I am reading the book Understanding Animation by Paul Wells and aiming to produce an essay comparing abstract animation and orthodox animation, here are my notes from learning the second chapter ‘Notes towards a theory of animation’ and the third chapter ‘narrative strategies’.
Meanwhile, I am trying to review and summarise main points through what I have read to construct the structure of my essay:
Next week, I plan to look at more case studies of each orthodox animation and experimental animation, as I will be able to indicate the difference between them through specific media.
In this week’s session, we have overviewed some fundamental things in UE5. Started by creating a new project and building up fundamental lighting through an environment lighting mixer as shown below.
While building up the light, we have been taught that pressing control + L and then holding the control bottom is the way to directly set the sunlight direction.
After the lighting, we opened the material. The material panel has different nodes, mainly we use constant to build up the colour and other passes.
As we want to import some models into the workshop, the quixel bridge in the engine is a quick way to grab them with existing materials.
While we were playing with models, we were taught that Nanite can support the quality of a big scene, to make sure the camera captures a specific amount of geometries instead of rendering all of them.
There is also an extra way of adding content to the project, for example, some additional models after a project has been created in the engine.
In addition, we have been mentioned the targeted shadow in UE5 project should always keep as SM6 in the project setting.
We are allowed to add different levels to a projects to build up layers:
Generally, there are a few important settings in each UE5 project: world partition, world setting and levels as shown below in my screenshot:
We can create multiple sub-levels in unreal engine 5 to put different types of actors in them:
We can drag everything from the sublevel to the main level, and when we change the position of the object in the main level it also changes the position of the object in the sublevel with the corresponding blue level name.
In the end of the session, I have also received some feedback from the lecturer with my assignment, tattoo robot idea:
I could think about an aim or dream of my main character, for example, it wants to open a tattoo shop based on it wanting to be rich in the cyberpunk world, therefore it keeps practising on different dummies while destroying most of them.
I could think of the effect of showing how the tattoo robot destroys most of the dummies in its working flow, as there can be more interaction between my main character and all the props. And showing how dummies suffer from its plan in my story…
For this blog, I will mainly discuss how I set up the concept of my assignment in this unit and its blocking in Maya. Regarding I have old experience of using UE5 to work on my own film in the past, I will reuse those pipelines in this project as well.
This story I constructed is mainly inspired by a cyberpunk tattoo robot I built in the past in a DNEG masterclass run by Bournemouth University during my bachelor’s course. I was trained to do tattoos several years ago in Romford, in a tattoo academy for several weeks. I have finished the 3D model and the texture of the robot in the past based on my experience, but I found it would be fun to extend the journey with it and structure a scene for it to tell stories.
The picture below is my mood board showing how I have been inspired to create this robot and its additional environment. I am planning to finish a minimum 30 seconds animation showing how it works in a cyberpunk studio, and tattooing with its needle on some human dummies.
I plan to have these elements in this project:
multiple female/male dummies in cyberpunk style for my robot to tattoo on.
my tattoo robot is the main character, which is called D.O.R., name given by the DNEG company.
rigging of the tattoo robot.
a designed studio in a cyberpunk style.
an environment of showing the extreme long shot of the city with models from quixel bridge in UE5.
animating the tattoo robot D.O.R. tattoos on the human dummy and selling this wacky design is my main goal.
The baked camera from Maya can be imported to UE5 and used in the sequence.
As I prefer doing my conceptual work and blocking in 3D more than 2D, so I set up a project in MAYA directly. I made a proper studio by carefully measuring its scale through the measure tool in Maya and building up the position of some furniture inside.
Meanwhile, in Zbrush, I block out the proportion of the female dummy through learning the course ‘Female Anatomy Tutorial’ ran by Raf Grassetti online.
I also finished blocking the camera movement in Maya to generate a 3D animatic for me and others to review, or add new stuff into it. The video below is one of the play blasts to show the progression of this scene, I plan to bake the camera from Maya and then import it into UE5 when everything is ready.
In the following week, I will mainly focus on the robot’s rigging development by using the Advanced Skeleton in Maya and polishing the model of the studio set with all those objects inside. Also, getting feedback on the animatic from my teacher and peers. the screenshots below are showing my slow progression on its rigging.
In addition to the structure of the studio, I have been highly inspired by some structures of the architecture from real life. below are some primary photos I have taken to bring me reference in this project.
In this week’s session, George taught us some basic knowledge about animating a bouncing ball in Maya and how to refer to the rigged ball file in it after setting up a file project. By following his demonstration, I have finished a rough version in his class to understand the pipeline of keying the ball in spline, and the way to create a quick selection of all the NURBS curves.
There are some knowledge points I found were interesting in the session:
animation in Maya should be always 24 frames per second, games can be 25 frames per second.
animation is about 60% of planning, and 40% of doing the work.
we should keep our animation simple and stupid during practive, as K.I.S.S.
there are two useful YouTubers for animators, one is called ‘3D Animation Internship., and another one is called ‘Frame by Frame Animation’.
animation should start with referencing my rigged file, in case there will be changed to the model and the rig.
curve 1 explanation:
curve 2 explanation:
the gizmo in Maya always shows X, Y, and Z directions, meanwhile, they are in red, green and blue.
when we are animating something, always animate it with x, y, z order.
work in spline with arc is important for the bouncing ball, and work in blocking for the character animation.
rotation of the ball after timing and spacing, and then adding squash and stretch in the end.
never touch the main controller during animating of a rigged object.
can set quick selection or bottom for keying the ball rigs.
To plan out this week’s prep– plan the animating bouncing ball from left-hand side view in Maya, with 100 frames and 24 frames per second. I downloaded Kinovea and did some research on how to use it, using the references I grabbed online to assist my animating work.
Below is the reference I used for my planning and the demonstration of using Kinovea.
Here is the short bouncing tennis ball I cropped in Kinovea:
I made marks on every low and high point when the tennis ball is reaching in this video to plan out the arc of its movement:
Here are two more videos I learnt before I move onto maya with the graph I made above:
Eventually, here is my final outcome of the bouncing ball referring to the bouncing tennis video above, and my working interface from Maya:
