Semester 2.2: 3D Visualisation and Animation!!

1st Work for 3DVA is creating a cow! Initially I thought it was a Hippo and I even named the maya file Hippo.mb. Anyway... this tutorial have thought me how to model a basic head, body and hands through rotation and extruding.

Even though I have learnt these skills from IN3D, I did not know that they can be used in this manner. I have encountered quite a few problems with the model whereby vertices merge without me noticing and having a hidden extruded face. The picture below shows what I got when I smoothen an extra hidden layer of extruded faces.

This is solved by deleting the faces, filling up the holes, split-ing the polygons and adjusting the vertices. I then finish off by smoothening the whole cow. Another problem I encountered was modelling the hand.

Thinking that I could just mirror the hand, I finished the entire hand which includes moving the vertices for the knuckles and the palm indentation. THAN I realized that the placing of the thumb was different for both hands and I had to model another hand to go with it.

With this tutorial, I have officially started 3DVA and I look forward to upcoming work as this is a subject I have more interest in compared to the others. =D

SELF-CRITIQUE!!

I find my animation to be quite well refined besides some improvements which could be done. My animation in overall is not a fast-paced animation. Toby is reluctant in doing his job and this affects his movement heavily.

One major improvement that could be done is the movement of the head WITH the box to give more emotion in the animation. I have tried for literally hours, even with help from my friends who managed to do it and yet still failed. I have tried parenting it, using both orient and parent constraints and changing the pivot point of the box, but to no avail. That is the part of the animation which I felt can be improved on.

The most difficult part in my animation is the last part where the crane becomes dizzy after spinning. Since I could not move the crane head with the box, I have to coordinate my arm control and swivel base to make the dizzy movement. A LOT of time was spent on the graph editor smoothening the movement and that part alone was a killer. But I still made it =)

Now for some animation principles….

Squash and stretch

I did not use squash and stretch as everything in the animation is solid. The crane is metallic and I COULD give the box a squash and stretch, but I want it to have a “heavy” feel.

Anticipation

Anticipation can be seen in my animation when the crane prepares to hit the boxes. We can see that Toby builds up a momentum before hitting the box.

Follow through and overlapping action

This principle is important when it comes to giving something a personality. I have applied this principle when the crane smashes through the boxes and becomes dizzy. I do not want my animation to have an overwhelming ‘mechanical’ feel.

Timing

I find timing to be the most important principle to make animations human-like. A character that is frantic will have their keyframes closer than a character with a sad “aura” around it. Timing can be done more precised with the help of the Graph editor. I have used the Graph editor extensively for many principles besides timing.

Storyboarding

Character Description:

Toby is new to this line of work. He is usually at the back moving infinite bulks of metal scraps about. Life was simple and easy over there but he was then abruptly transfered to another department. Stacking boxs is what he does now. It might seem simple but one minor hiccup can cause his boss to loss hundreds of thousands of dollars. The pressure is piling up and Toby begans to work carelessly........

Toby Thoughts..
Before transfer:

"You know what? I can NEVER get bored of this job! I mean it is so simple to just fling metal scraps around and PLUS.... I get to have free weekly oiling! Nothing can be better than this!

After transfer: "WHY?!?!?! WHY ME!?!?!?! DAMMIT JOHN STOP VOLUNTEERING ME FOR STUPID CRAP! And this time it's PERMERNANT! Arggghh..... This job is stupid man.... having to do everything so precised. FML man I'm soooo gonna get dismantled and inspected on if i screw this up. Zzzzz.....

StoryBoard

1) Toby picks up the box

2) Toby stacks the box on top of the other boxes

3) He goes back up and realized that the box is stuck!

4) He desperately tries to drop the box but to no avail.

5) Toby then tries to use the boxes on the floor for leverage.

6) Unfortunately, his excessive strength blew all the other boxes away!!

7) He then goes spinning and spinning uncontrollablely!~!~!~!

8) Dizzy Toby eventually comes to a stop and then the box drops lightly

Week 13: Mech Arm

ARRRGGHHH!!!! Apparently the school computer had a virus in it that transferred into my thumb drive and when I went home, my anti-virus detected the virus and deleted all the file that contained the virus. Which was practically EVERYTHING.

Luckily, I had backups stored on my laptop for all my files....HOWEVER... the screenshot of the process of making the animation were lost zzz.

Anyway, this week lab was the animation of the crane. The final outcome was to pick up the box and move it to the platform. I found this lesson to be a huge step forward as we learnt how to use skeletons and constraints. These skills are the stepping stones to creating a realistic or at least a human animation model.

There were a few problems when I was doing this exercise. I did not know how to use the Constrain -> Set to Rest Position function and my box teleported around when i used the constraints. Another problem i encountered was that I thought that we had to parent the cargo box to the arm control for it to move but apparently a constraint was needed. It took me awhile to complete this exercise and i had to ask around for some help regarding the problems. Eventually though, I completed it and I have a good feeling of the assignment ^_^

1) Do you need to be able to draw well to create good 2D animation? Explain your view.

Yes, I do believe that we need to be able to draw well to create a good 2D animation. I find that we need to be able to draw the frames to be as smooth as possible compared to the previous frames

2) Do you need to be able to draw well to create good 3D animation? Explain your view.

On the other hand, I do not thing that drawing affects 3D animation THAT much. You still need to know how objects and living thing move and react to other objects and that affects how you animate 3D. However, you do not need to draw in 3D (or at least not now) and hence a lesser importance of it compared to 2D.

3) What do you think would separate a piece of poor animation from a piece of good animation? In other words, how would you go about deciding if a piece of animation is good or bad?

I would see the distance in each frames and how realistic they look like.

4) In 2D animation, you need to be very aware of timing at a frame by frame level, using timing charts and other techniques - but for 3D animation, this is handled using the graph editor, which is more concerned with manipulating rates of change over time.

Personally, I find the graph editor to be of better use as it is more "clear". Editing on the graph editor is much easier than frame by frame checking.

Does this affect how you approach your animation work? Explain.

It would make working on animation much easier and precise.

5) Give a brief critique of Maya as an animation tool. Don't just say Maya makes animation difficult, or easy, or that you need to learn a lot of stuff to use Maya - explain what Maya does well and not so well in terms of creating animation.

I do not know how to answer this question as I have not used any other 3D animation platform and cannot compare. I am personally fine with using Maya now ^^

Week 12: 3 Balls Bounce

This video shows my work for the three bouncing balls. The grey ball is a regular basketball, the orange ball is a ping pong ball and the shiny metal ball is a .......... shiny metal ball!

This animation was particularly hard and I don't know why! I think it was probably the weight and the timing of each ball that makes it difficult. I guess this was a good workout exercise =p

Week 11: Squash and Stretch

First i created the ball and the squash handle. Then i dragged both of them under the translate_ball_gp.

I then locked all the other values which will not be used for safety pre-cautions. These is done to all objects in the group.

The Factor of the squash_handle affects how the ball is squashed or stretched. A positive value stretches the ball while a negative value squashes it.

Set the Frame Per Second to Real-time[25fps] .....

Adjust how to ball hits the ground and bounces up at the Graph editor and after other changes....

VOILA!!!

Another great exercise to improve our animation skills. This exercise is an essential part in animation as it teaches us how to create one of the most important principle of animation. Of course this alone it not alot compared to the industry but still... alot learnt from this exercise ^^