Wendy's Animation Blog

Category: 3D Computer Animation Fundamental

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3D Computer Animation Fundamental animation

Week 2: Pendulum planning + feedback of the bouncing ball

During this session, we have been introduced 12 principles of animation:

  1. timing and spacing
  2. anticipation
  3. appeal
  4. squash and stretch
  5. exaggeration (pushing the motion)
  6. overlapping ( e.g. moving hairs, jewelleries)
  7. arcs ( for animation looks organic instead of robotic)
  8. slow in and slow out
  9. staging
  10. straiht ahead and pose to pose
  11. secondary action (how the secondary action giving meaning to the shot)
  12. 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:

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3D Computer Animation Fundamental immersion

Week 2: Overviewing UE5 + Assignment feedback

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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…

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3D Computer Animation Fundamental immersion

Week 1: Building my UE5 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:

  1. multiple female/male dummies in cyberpunk style for my robot to tattoo on.
  2. my tattoo robot is the main character, which is called D.O.R., name given by the DNEG company.
  3. rigging of the tattoo robot.
  4. a designed studio in a cyberpunk style.
  5. an environment of showing the extreme long shot of the city with models from quixel bridge in UE5.
  6. animating the tattoo robot D.O.R. tattoos on the human dummy and selling this wacky design is my main goal.
  7. 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.

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3D Computer Animation Fundamental animation

Week 1: Bouncing ball learning

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: