Maya Evaluation

3D animation. I may have finally come round. I started this brief having no interest in creating animation in 3D, and a fairly strong dislike of watching 3D animation in general. Initially I completely hated Maya, it just seemed like a total nightmare, a thousand hidden menus, loads of concepts I hadn't come across before, and a pretty steep learning curve. I really thought I would never make it anywhere with this project. After struggling to come up with an idea for the animation, I finally just knocked out an idea in a couple of minutes, and amazingly it ended up working out pretty well for me. My character, a snowman, turned out to be really easy to manipulate and animate. I initially chose a snowman as I had no confidence in my modeling skills, and it would be easy to assemble from a few spheres and cylinders. Once it was parented together and had deformers in, the range of motion I could get from it was surprising. My first idea was the snowman meeting a hot waterbottle, falling asleep with it and waking up as just a pair of eyes and a top hat in a melted pool of water. The idea I actually ran with involved the snowman starting without a nose, then discovering a carrot and sticking it on his face as a nose. Following a thoughtful pause, he was going to remove it from his face and place it in a phallic position, and end with a sly wink and a Fonze-esque 'eeyyyy!'. Timewise, with the 30 second maximum length, I found I couldn't achieve this without it all feeling too rushed, so I cut it at just placing the carrot on the face and smiling. The snowman has quite an emotional rollercoaster in his 26 seconds of existence, beginning looking forlornly around, before being startled by the sight of an unfamiliar object on the ground. After bounding over to it and picking it up, he scrutinizes it before before reeling back in surprise at the realisation of what he has in his hand. Finally he cracks a happy little smile at being complete with his new nose.

The graph editor was one of the hardest parts to get to grips with. Making the snowman look like he had weight when he impacted on the bounce was quite tricky. There are some parts where the movement could definately do with smoothing out more, particularly after he's picked the carrot up and is waving it around in front of his face.

Lighting wise I tried seting up 3 point lighting, but it didn't really look that great, it wasn't producing enough shadow. In the end I settled on using a single spotlight, which created a nice sun rising, early morning sort of look.

Rendering ended up presenting a few unexpected problems. I foolishly decided to render out in 720HD as it looked so good, but it took an absolute eternity. After spending an age rendering out a section, I found the texture on the tree trunks was moving around as the snowman did. They'd somehow been parented to the snowman at some point, so after correcting that I had to render it out again. As it was all taking so long, I left a long section rendering overnight. Coming in the next day I'd made the schoolboy error of rendering through the wrong camera, so all you could see was trees. So I sacked off the HD nonsense, and quickly rendered it out in 640x480.

I had wanted to add sound to the animation, but I didn't want to use audio from the internet. I was planning on recording the effects for it, but ran out of time in the end, so I decided to leave it silent instead of just cobbling any old bits of audio onto it.

To sum up, suprisingly, this has actually been the project I've been most pleased with. I've pretty much hated everything I've produced so far, but I'm almost kinda happy with this one simply because at the start of the project I felt like I'd never get anywhere with it. There's a lot of refinement that could be done to improve it, but it stands up as a fairly complete piece as it is. So, the good thing is I think I'll continue using Maya, and considering I'd have sworn blind I'd never touch it again at the start, that's a pretty big deal. Im less interested in using it for character animation, but creating assets to composite into video or flatten into flash is pretty appealing, I can see a lot of potential there.

Maya brief. Done.

Good and Bad Animations

The first animation I'm going to look at is Bernard the polar bear. Now, I've been unfortunate to come across this 'character' on TV a couple of times before, and couldn't have been much less impressed. This is the exact kind of aesthetic that in general puts me off 3d animations, the overly smooth look to the characters. Combined with this that there is something about the characters that is totally unappealing, the way they move, their facial features and expressions. It's not even saved by interesting or amusing storylines. Poor show Bernard.



An animation I like is Robert Crumb is in the Woods. I like the aesthetic of this piece a lot, nice combination of hand drawn elements and bitmap looking graphics, and the flat 2d depth look, which I'm really into at the moment. Short and pretty random story this, but it's enjoyable to watch.


Robert Crumb is in the Woods from joseph Pelling on Vimeo.

Fleischer Animation Studios

Max Fleischer was an early pioneer of animated cartoons. He invented and patented the rotoscope, a technique for creating realistic movement in animations by tracing over images of live film projected onto a frosted glass panel, frame by frame. This method is carried out by using computers nowadays, but the basic principle remains the same. Fleischer was also the first to synchronise sound with animation. Fleischer Studios (formally Out of the Inkwell Films), set up with his brother Dave Fleischer, produced many well known classics, such as Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor, and the Superman cartoon series.

Maya Nose Picking

Having gotten to the point of the snow man picking his nose up, I had to try to find a way of making it move up from the floor with his hand, then detach from the hand and stay on the face. I tried out the idea of having a carrot already in the hand, and one already on the face with the visibilities switched off, then toggling the visibilities between them during different parts of the movement to create the illusion of one carrot being picked up and placed on the face. As the carrots hadn't been parented to the snowman at the point of his creation, they didn't move properly with the bend and squash deformers. The first attempt to solve the problem involved creating a new locator in the hand, and using a parent constraint on the carrot to attach it to the new locator for the duration of the movement. The carrot came up with the arm, but drifted out of the hand sideways as it did so. The next solution was using a piece of script called Rivet. The Rivet locator was placed in the hand, and the locator for the carrot was aim constrained to it. This succeeded in keeping the carrot in place as the arm came up to the face. The next problem occurred when trying to detach the carrot and leave it in place on the face. When the parent constraint was turned off, to allow the carrot to leave the hand, it snapped back to its original position on the ground. The solution to this was duplicating the carrot when the arm had it in place on the face, deleting the constraint in the duplicate, and switching the visibility off in the carrot in the hand. There you go. Putting a nose on a snowman. Easy as.

More Maya

After messing around timing the squash/stretch of my character to his points of impact and peaks during his bounces, I had a go at using Set Driven Key to set the high factor of the squash to the peak of the y translation, and the low factor of the squash to the low point on the y translation, instead of just keying it on the timeline as I had been. This produced a better looking result, and is in fact much easier. It would also means that if I changed the timing of his bounces, the squash would automatically change with it. Bonus. However, as I already had some squash and stretch keyed in on the timeline prior to using the set driven key, I found I was having a few problems when I was trying to set the squash back to zero when he'd finished bouncing. He was moving upwards on the y axis as he became less squashed. So it's back to the timeline keyed version I had been using. On the plus I managed to use the graph editor to move the keys for the bounces closer together to speed up the movement, as it had been rather slow and floaty before. I'd planned on just speeding it up in after effects after I'd rendered it out, but there'll be no need for that anymore.

More Maya

I've added snow texture to the body and a wood texture to the arms, looks a bit rough at the moment, I'll probably go back and refine it when I'm finished animating. Also added a mouth and eyebrows with bend and squash deformers in to the basic model I'd made, so he'll be able to convey his emotions better, y'know, really get in touch with his feelings. I rendered out a section to have a look at, and it looks completely wack. The arms are black for some reason, so they get lost in with the background, and the mouth and eyebrows disappear and then come back as the head turns. I've got no idea why, but it needs sorting out.

Maya Character

I've got my basic snowman character assembled, everything's parented together nicely with the bend and squash deformers in place, and it all seems to move as it should. Things are starting to make sense in Maya now, after initially being totally lost. The amount of different menus makes it seem pretty overwhelming to start with, but now I've got the snowman assembled properly getting it to move with some character seems a lot more achievable.

Rotoscoping

I decided to have a go at rotoscoping in flash, drawing over some old footage I had. I knocked it out fairly quickly, and was using the touch pad on my laptop to draw with, so the graphics are a little on the sketchy side, but it still produces quite a nice effect. It's running at 24fps, and I've only drawn over every other frame, which is still 30 frames of drawing for this 2.5 second animation, so it would be pretty time consuming to create anything detailed of any great length.

Final Marvel Animation

Marvel Digital Comics promotional animation from Tom Thiel on Vimeo.

Here's my final animation for Marvel Digital comics. Although I'm by no means disappointed by my finished animation, there's is a lot more I would've liked to have done to improve it. The animation has a lot of scenes cut from the ones I lined out in my original animatic. I think losing a few of the scenes was a positive thing, as it helped prevent the animation being too drawn out, but there are details I would have liked to have included that didn't make it into the final piece. Things I would have liked to have added to the animation include rain falling diagonally across the screen in the scenes outside the building, as not only would it have been a nice visual but it would've allowed for the sound of rain drops falling to be added. As i didn't create the rain, I used the sound of wind howling down the street for these scenes instead. I'd have liked to have added an illuminating glow effect around the candles flame. The silhouette of Doom in the doorway and his shadow could have done to have his cape rippling slightly as if catching a slight breeze. The bookshelf flickering into sight, which was supposed to represent tube lights flickering on after the switch is pressed really need the tk tk tk sound that occurs as they start up, but I was unable to find or create this sound. That whole scene is different from how I originally intended it to look as all the perspective involved in my original idea, and the gradual lighting of the room from the back to the front proved to be a bit beyond my abilities. In fact a lot of the perspective in the first scene isn't quite right, but its not noticeable enough for me to be able to get away with it. I would have like to include a proper full blown walk cycle at some point. The Dr Doom in the doorway after the archive room is illuminated would have looked better if it were a more detailed graphic, rather than just a lighter version of the earlier silhouette. And the computer screen and the information that appears on it at the end are a little on the unattractive side, I'd have liked to make them a lot more polished. The sounds in the animation are fairly minimal, and I didn't really want to have music running in the background, but I'd have liked to make a bit better use of sound to create the atmosphere. And the whole thing could've done with a lot more tweening.

Now that I've finished picking apart what's wrong with it, I have to say I really enjoyed this module, and I've learnt some useful things in Illustrator and Flash, but I've still got a whole lot more to learn about them both before I'm able to create work up to a standard I'm really happy about. Now that I have this animation in place I'll probably go back over it and add in extra elements to it. It'll provide a nice testing ground for different effects and ideas I'd like to try out.

I've re-uploaded my animatic as the one hosted on blogger looks frankly awful. I've tried hosting it on youtube and vimeo, but the same thing kept happening on both, the first scene kept getting cut off and the sound ending up out of sync inspite of the original quicktime movie playing back fine. I've gone back into final cut to tweak the begining so the first scene shows up, but when uploaded the sound still doesn't sync up. Weird.


Marvel Digital Animatic from Tom Thiel on Vimeo.

Animation Techniques

I've been experimenting with a couple of different animation techniques during this module. I've tried a little bit of stop motion animation in the past, and I thought I'd try some different approaches within the technique. The first style I tried was 'claymation', which is stop motion animation made with plasticine. I used a very simple idea of a stalk growing up from the ground and then flowering.

As with all stop motion animation, producing a clip even as short as this was time consuming, and fiddly. Plasticine is definately a harder medium to work with for animation than id anticipated, even for something as simple as my video. All in all, it seems like quite a lot of hard work for a not particularly great result. You would definately need to invest a lot of time to produce any halfway decent results, so hats off to all the people who've made some of the incredible claymations out there, they must never leave their basements.

The second style I tried was a drawing on method, gradually building up a picture line by line, and erasing parts as they change.

This technique clearly has its limitations, and a shadowy after-image of the erased parts remains behind after. There is an amazing animation that takes this idea much further, onto a massive scale using different mediums.

Just the scale of it is impressive, and the action going on in it is trip-out craziness. I can find no wrong with this work, I absolutely love it.

Flash Animations

I thought I'd put up a flash animation that I like, and my thoughts on it. One thing that's become clear to me over the period of this brief, and I'm sure it's applicable across a much wider sphere of things than just animation, is that if you've got some good content then you dont have to go all guns blazing trying to make it look as jazzy as possible. Im talking substance over style, but not completely letting style go out of the window. If you can acheive the right 'look' for the content and feel of an animation, it doesnt have to be all bells and whistles so long as its distinctive and memorable. Another thing I keep realising more and more as this course has progressed is the importance of sound, and I'll go into this more in the animation I'm going to talk about.

Salad Fingers, created by David Firth, is an animation that's received a sort of cult status, I dont know many people who haven't loved it if they've seen it. The story revolves around the character Salad Fingers, and the strange things he gets up to in his grimy little world. The character models and backgrounds are by no means complex, but they do have a very distinct dark and grimy aesthetic to them, with the characters in particular being very strange, mishapen looking creatures. The thing that really make these animations is the sound. There is always a piece of music by Boards of Canada in the background, and this gives everything that happens visually an underlying feeling of uncomfortableness. Secondly the character voices/sounds (not many of them actually speak as such), especially combined with the way the dialogue appears in a sketchy, handwritten looking format as Salad Fingers speaks, create the weird and unsettling atmosphere. Not to be overlooked of course is the actual content of the dialogue, which leaves you hoping you never actually meet David Firth on a dark night. I do really love salad fingers, I find it equal parts hilarious and creepy. This is the first episode:

Shadows

For a scene in my animation I wanted to have a shot of a door opening from inside a pitch black room, revealing a silhouette of Doom in the doorway. I made the graphics and then animated the door sliding open, with the motion reflected in the shadow on the floor. After having made it and watched it back, I realised it didn't look right. I didn't know exactly how it should look, but the shadow moving across sideways in time with the door just seemed wrong.



Not having any sliding doors around the house to check how the shadow should move, I knocked up a cardboard model of a wall and a door. I placed a lamp directly behind the door space and filmed the cardboard door cut-out sliding across, so I could observe how the shadows movement.



Watching this back allowed me to see what was wrong in my first attempt. The shadow pivots from the bottom corner of the door as it moves across, making a straight line with the door edge when it reache the halfway point of the doors movement across the doorspace. After a few unsuccessful attempts I managed to get my animated shadow to move in a more natural fashion, and it definately looks about 100 times better than the initial version.

Animations, historical and modern

The historical animation I decided to research is The Adventures of Mark Twain, which was released in 1985 and directed by Will Vinton. Its a stop motion animation, more specifically Claymation. The term Claymation was actually registered as a trademark by Vinton in 1978 to describe his animated clay films. The principle is the same as with any stop motion animation, a single still shot is taken, then the positions of elements within the scene are manipulated slightly, and another shot is taken. This process is then repeated over and over, with large numbers of still frames being required for even a few seconds of finished footage. This sort of animation works around the flicker threshold of the human eye/brain, though was previously thought to work on the theory of persistence of vision, which was debunked in 1912 by Wertheimer. When run together at a certain frame rate these still images appear to move fluidly from one to the next, without any gaps in the movement.

The film is a very enjoyable tale of Mark Twain, and characters from his novels such as Tom Sawyer, traveling aboard an airship on their way to rendevous with Halley's Comet. The film is an absolute masterpiece of claymation, aside from the tale being interesting, you can simply sit back and marvel at the ammount of detail present in all of the scenes. The ammount of work and time that must've gone into its creation is staggering. At first glance the film could be judged to simply be a colourful kids film, but a lot of the content is actually quite dark. This is my favourite scene from the film. The visuals are creative, and moreover its pretty disturbing, I wouldn't want to be left hanging out with 'satan' for too long, he's a right tweaker.



The modern animation I have researched is a music video for the song Young Folks by Peter, Bjorn and John, released in 2006. I couldn't find any sources concretely stating it, but im pretty certain this video was created in flash. The thing that really strikes me about this video is the simplicity of it. The video works beautifully with the music (pretty key concept for music vids, I know), its a simple and mellow song and the visuals complement this perfectly. Coming back to the simplicity again, this video shows me that above all else if you've got a good idea and some basic skills you can create something amazing. When I watch this video I think to myself 'hey, i could create graphics that look as good as those', and even with my rudimentary knowledge of flash I could animate them to the same standard of this video, which to date has over 8 1/2 million views on youtube, so it's really inspiring. Naturally the fact that its a great song that was very popular at the time of its release contributes to the video being so heavily played, so I guess its a good idea to make friends with people who might make some good music.



The comparisson of the two is quite surprising, in that you would probably expect an animation that's 23 years old to be a lot less complex than a modern one, but in this case the greater visual complexity lies with Mark Twain. There is actually very little animation in the Young Folks video in comparisson to Mark Twain, in which there is always some extra nice touch of animation in the backgrounds or outside the main action. The fact that this comparisson is between a 3 minute music video and a full length feature film has to be taken into account, but again this is kind of surprising as music videos, due to their short length, tend to be an area where people go to town, making it as much of a high-tech effects extravaganza as possible. Nevertheless, both animations styles work very well for the respective purposes, their visual aesthetics suiting their contents nicely

Learning to walk

To work out a walk cycle for the Dr. Doom character in my animation, I took two series of photographs of myself walking, one side on and one from behind. This was so that I could see the key moments of movement that occur when walking, so that I could translate them into my characters movements. I wore a green hooded coat during these shots, to be as similar to Dooms cloaked hooded figure as possible.




Then I spent a bit of time walking backwards and forwards trying to time how long it took me to take X no of steps over certain distances, and noting at which point during my steps my body dipped or raised, so I could time my characters walk with this to ensure it had a natural rhythm.

I decided to trace over the images of myelf and modify the length of the coat to make it look like a cloak to use them for the actual walk cycle. I wasn't too concerned that it wasn't going to look exactly like Dr. Doom as I was happy for him to be a bit incognito until his identity's revealed at the end. After getting halfway through creating the walkcycle however, I decided to pull the plug on the idea for two reasons. Firstly, I found I actually didn't like the look of the character, and decided I'd be better off using actual images of Doom from the comic books, as the character simply looked too unlike him. Secondly, the walk wasn't working out quite so well. I'd created the body in seperate sections: a main body, an upper and lower arm section for each arm, an upper and lower section for each leg and seperate feet so they could pivot onto the ball of the foot as the leg came up for the stride. Testing the cycle halfway through its creation, I found strange things were happening, one foot was leaping away from the lower leg and reaching its destination before before the rest of the leg, then snapping back onto it, and the right arm was shortening and lenghthening through its swing, making it look pretty weird. So, for these reasons I decided not to waste anymore time on it, and to go back and have a fresh start with a new character graphic. Below is the half completed walk cycle I abandoned.

Building the city

For the architecture in the street of my animation I headed out into the city with my camera and took photos of various buildings, so that I could pick between various elements of them and combine them to make my own building. I wanted the Marvel building itself to have an archaic quality about it, to emphasise the old way of doing things, and to contrast with the modern towerblocks beside it. I found an archway in Leeds uni that I really liked as the main door to the Marvel building.















I took the above pic into illustrator and turned it into a graphic using the pen tool, then added it into my building front.

























I wanted to have glowing lamposts in the street as it's supposed to be night time. Rather than tracing out one from a photograph I made my lampost using illustrators 3D tools. I was really impressed how you can make a 3D graphic from a single line draming using the revolve effect.

























I created the main post and the head of the lamp seperately so I'd be able to lay the glowing light between them. I'm really pleased with the final result, and the lamposts add a nice bit of atmosphere to the street.



As for the buildings themselves, I've now realised I went about their creation in a rather backwards fashion. I transformed some rectangles into 3D objects using the extrude and bevel effect, and then created graphics for the building fronts. I created arched church style windows for the marvel building to keep with the ancient look I wanted, and they juxtapose nicely with the billboard style Marvel sign mounted on the top of the building. I then used the map art option to add them to the faces of the 3D towers. Afterwards it became clear to me it would have been much simpler, and would have looked slightly better, to just use the extrude and bevel effect on the building front graphics I'd made. Still, learning the long way round's better than not learning at all.

Animation Brief

For the animation module is was initially drawn to the Marvel brief, as I felt it offered a lot of interesting possibilities. I was slightly unsure of the limitations of having to use their pre-existing elements for the animation, but I had an idea pretty much straight away so I decided to go with it. My initial idea was to be aimed at a younger age group, using characters present in recent successful film adaptations of Marvel comics, namely X-Men, Fantastic Four, Spiderman, The Hulk and Ironman. My idea was influenced by the intro to the original X-men animated cartoon.

It was to involve key major characters bursting from the paper pages of comic books, e.g. Wolverine slashing out of the page, Spiderman swinging through the page, and to then have them all racing towards a point from different directions, converging at the same time as in the end to the X-men cartoon intro. Here's said intro, just because its a great start to a classic cartoon.




Though I really liked this idea, and spent a lot of time searching for suitable images from various archived sources of Marvel comics, I decided not to use the idea, as I felt it wasn't going to turn out as I wanted due to the difficulties of finding and modifying the images I'd need. So after going back to the drawing board and kicking around a few ideas, I settled on something completely different. The idea I decided to use involves a very minimal use of character, with the identity of the character (Dr. Doom) only being made absolutely clear at the end. This idea is aimed more at a slightly older audience, people who have been collectors of comics for years, who either have vast collections of old comics and like to keep them in immaculate condition and are reluctant to read them and/or have missed certain issues of their favourite comics at some point in the past. The idea is to show how the vast back catalogue of comics produced by marvel is now easily available in one place online.

Style-wise I'd had the idea of everything being very greyscale until the end when the shot moves out to reveal the computer screen, at which point it would transition to colour. I was interested in having the look of old, uncoloured comic books for the first section as its supposed to represent the old way of doing things. I toyed with the idea of having everything purely black and white with single touches of colour in a Sin City style, but in the end I decided to stick mainly within shades of grey and use colour for a few important elements, such as Doom himself and the Marvel logo. Here's the animatic for my animation:

I've just noticed the sound is out of sync on here, it runs fine on the original QT movie i made, so I can only assume its something to do with bloggers video hosting.