Another Big Hero 6 Study... Last One!

Okay, so I know I've done so much Big Hero 6 study. This is the last one, I saw a really cool weight shift and natural looking movement that I wanted to try and copy.

So I was going for a direct copy. I liked how he shifts his weight from one side to another. In the time-lapse you'll see that I scale up his hands, it was only to account for the gloves Hiro wears in the movie. Also this is the first time I've animated eyes, I wasn't sure what exactly to do. I figured eyes don't really slow-in/slow-out, so I made them dart and put it into linear.

The reference is from this lovely scene. I also had to account for the fact that Hiro in the movie is standing on something that isn't flat, but it's pretty close.

The head is a bit snappy and the arms need some overlap. Maybe I'll add those later. The things you notice after you upload!

What I Learned
The biggest takeaway from this is to break up movement. At one point I delete keys because I confused myself and added so many. One thing I learned is the you can find your poses and key those in, then adjust timing and offsetting afterwards.
I'm also teaching myself facial animation right now, just started with the eyes. So any tips on that would be awesome.

The time-lapse is three different recordings. I started one at my coffee table, so that's why the ratio is 16x10. The last recording is on my Cintiq screen so that one is at 16x9.

Big Hero 6 Animation Study Part 2!

Another study early this week, I won't do any more studies until my next assignment is completely finished. I feel like I've learned a lot from these and I'll keep doing them, but I want to apply what I've learned to my assignment now.

My study is from Big Hero 6 again, here's my final video:

I wanted to do a stillness study. What happens in animation when someone is more or less still. The arm rotation really stood out but what else goes on?

Not much apparently, mostly just offsetting keys... But here's the reference I used!

Mostly what happens on the still part of the shot is arm movement. I also made his torso straighten and uncompress from the previous poses, but that doesn't take long. Something else that I started implementing was something my mentor Jon said about rotating arms, don't just move around the rotation selection in all axis, it could cause some problems. The problems can be fixed, but they're a pain. So going forward I've been trying to use a specific axis on the rotation handle. Another big thing I learned is to look at your curves. At one point while animating there were some weird looking movements. I figured to check in the graph editor and there it was! Weird curve problems.

Here's the time-lapse video of the animation process. It took around 42 minutes to finish but the video is sped up to be around 15 minutes. I hope you enjoy and learn something!


I won't post for a little while while I focus on animating my own scene, so see you next week!

Also, here's the .mb file and the eleven rig download: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B01q5eoTgo3ZQVUyYmxXNGtmMlE Extract the eleven rig and open the .mb file, when it tells you to relocate the rig go to: ElevenRig_v1.2/Scenes/ElevenRig_V1.2.ma

Big Hero 6 Animation Study

I've been having a lot of trouble with my current assignment. The weight hasn't felt as great as I want it to, and the character doesn't seem to feel alive. So I decided to do a weight study this week. I downloaded some new rigs and really wanted to try it out, so here it is!

So here's the study and what I've learned from it!

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. It's not perfect at all, I don't think I'll fix it just because it was supposed to be an in-the-moment study. It still feels a little floaty, the landing after hitting the wall doesn't feel quite right and something about the kick still doesn't feel right, and I should have made the arc nicer on the last step of the run and I should have fixed that floaty animation in the end. But enough with the bad, let's go over what I learned!

Here's the reference I followed. In case you don't already know, it's from Disney's Big Hero 6. I chose this one because it's a full body shot and it was easy to follow because the camera move is so general.

So let's examine my animation from the beginning forward. I won't go over the running sequence in the beginning because it's so short and basic, so I'll start right when he jumps into the wall. The text will be above the picture that I'm going over, just to clear that up now.

He comes down from the apex of his last step and crouches pretty low and leans forward into an off-balance pose. The weight at this point is pulling him forward and he's preparing to slam into the wall, so he brings his arms forward.
His screen left arm is the first to contact, you'll notice his foot isn't rolling like it should be... I actually just noticed that. But it happens pretty quick so it's not too big of a deal. I could have pushed this pose further, he's kind of just a straight line as far as his line of action goes, but it's kind of an in-between pose of two extremes.

Here he's completely contacting the wall, it happens I think two or three frames after the last picture. He does cushion himself with his screen left arm so that he doesn't hurt himself so it's not a SMACK kind of hit. His screen right foot/leg bounces off of the wall, that was really fun to animate, as well as his screen right arm sort of slapping the wall.

After the slam against the wall, he lands in a semi-crouched position. He really absorbs the weight into his feet. And he holds that absorption for his step back and just into the jump.

Here he is at the top of his jump, this part took the longest. I played around with him jumping straight up and a little bit back, but it kept looking horrible. So I made him jump toward the wall, very slightly, and brought his arms all the way up, following my reference.

As he kicks, his arms come to his side and he falls onto his screen right foot again. It took a little while adjusting my curves to get him to look like he gets pushed by his leg. But the reference was there, so it didn't take too long.

Here are the last three, the hops. His arms were really fun to animate in that circular motion. The foot placements took forever, but I realized they're KEY to making this animation look lifelike. Without realistic foot movements, the animation would have no life at all.

So, I learned with this assignment that it's really helpful to have clean curves, delete all of those extra keys that play no role. Move out the tangents to match what the keys were doing. It really helps the smoothness overall. Watch Victor Navone's Spline Tutorial for more information on clean splines.
Another thing I learned is that foot movement is an absolute necessity to realistic animation. People are constantly moving their feet around. They're always shuffling, just check it out next time you're in a public place.

I hope I could share any helpful tips, next test I do I'm going to record my screen and make a time-lapse or realtime video to upload here.

Here's an extra video I did of a new rig Animation Mentor released called Sarge!

Workflow

Jon's Workflow
*I took these notes during class, so it's kind of a mess!

Visualization. When getting a dialogue shot, put it on repeat and listen to it over and over again for about an hour or so. Try to find different shot ideas in your head. If you come across something you like, take a pause and draw thumbnails. Keep them fast and efficient, get the essence of the pose and idea. You want to keep momentum going, so keep it brief. These thumbnails will allow you to pitch the idea to somebody. Now clear that all out of your brain and start again. Do this at least three times with completely different ideas, don't keep them too similar. Don't get married to an idea. Sometimes people could have feedback that could add to the idea. If you're too closed off on one of your ideas, you could be limited in how accepting you are to ideas. Believe in yourself through ideas, don't feel like you're doing what somebody else wants to please them or because you're not confident in your own idea. Only add them if you want to, you're the one doing the shot.

Reference. Using two cameras can be useful. Recording a few takes from multiple angles gives you a lot of variety to sift through. Don't skip on this phase, it's very important. Hit ideas and poses, but continue other variations. Try not to redo the same thing every take, try more. Get out of your comfort zone. If your reference looks robot-y, your animation will too. Get loose, study acting, and practice! You'll get better over time.

Blocking. Use stepped if you can, get the key ideas in. Now you can play around with how you move through poses. Showing really rough things is okay at certain studios. It works best to get core ideas into stepped. Don't over-breakdown the shot in stepped, it's easier to get the finished result in spline where everything is smooth. Instead of taking a lot of time figuring out in reference, put rough poses in the blocking to pitch with. You can easily see what's going on in the viewport than what you're doing in person. If you overcomplicate, though, it could lead to deleting frames in the future, which results in a waste of time when you added those frames. Keep it simple.

Spline. Ignore the arms. Focus on the hips/root in relation to the footfalls. Look at the pacing on ones. Think about repetition in shots, break up evenness, and involve variation. Watch root from start to finish, if it's 90% right, the rest of the animation will be easier. Now look into offsetting keys, overlapping actions, and follow-through.

Polish. Make sure the root works and look into all of the details. Arc track your points. Brows and eyes are done before the rest of the face because it's much easier to handle. Work through the facial animation in spline, stepped will look bad and will be harder overall to figure it all out.

Glass Half BC2015 Review

Another Blender Conference 2015 video. I've been learning a lot watching some of these. They're not all targeted towards animation, but most have useful information. I really liked this one. Early key points for me were that writing a script for a short idea isn't always the best approach. It's not nearly as funny to read something that's visual, like Beorn Leonard said, "Get drawing early!"

The talk is based off of the short film Glass Half made for NPR.

It's a great film. The style is super cartoony, which I really like, and the animation matches pretty well. Again, this has a hand in animation from Hjalti Hjalmarsson. I was also interested in what Sarah Feidlaufer said about how she drew some of the storyboarding like a comic book. With different panels. The short definitely plays like a comic, I didn't notice the first time around.

Something surprising they did was render the short in real-time. That's pretty amazing. It's easy connect the dots of Pixar or Disney movies having fur breakthroughs, or water breakthroughs, or clouds. But for this small team of artists to think like that and have breakthroughs while under contract was really cool.

This is more of a post that interested me rather than being focused on animation. But I still learned about keeping things simple and drawing story ideas early on!

Trailer Study

Here I am following through on a trailer study I mentioned earlier! :)

I really wanted to track arcs. This is the beginning of the Secret Life of Pets trailer. I forgot to mark spacing, but I just did this really quickly. Biggest thing I noticed was that the arc isn't a C kind of curve, like I was expecting to find. Instead it's almost an S curve, followed by almost a figure 8 shape. It looks like the curve moves straight up like that because of the body of the dog projecting itself upward. 

Very small study, but there'll be more to come! I've downloaded the Sing trailer, the Kubo and the Two Strings trailer,  Storks trailer, and the Trolls trailer. I'll try to find different principles of animation shown through a clip in there. That's my challenge for myself this week and next!

Study

So, I've been watching lots of YouTube videos and tutorials and stuff on animation. I've come across an excellent talk by Hjalti Hjalmarsson, a wonderful animator, rigger, and more who works on Blender open projects.

It's super informative and made me rethink posing for camera or natural posing from all angles. Especially how resizing legs, like in the video, can really benefit you. But it could make the rig look off or weird in general.  Also, Hjalti must be an incredibly patient man... How on earth can you work with constraints like that?! I definitely need to do more studying with constraints.

It's pretty awesome how Hjalti shoots reference. Using lots of people doing the same task to find general ideas as well as personality. And something to remember always remember the fulcrum point. Center of mass can help animation look more natural instead of the floaty, newbie look. I really need to remember this. I love how he shoots detailed reference. I have an iPhone for a reason! :)

Another key thing that caught my attention is anticipation. Without anticipation, animation could just move from one place to another. There's no life at all in that, and it looks really, really bad. 

Talking about life... make things human. It could be little accidents that happen during reference that catch attention, maybe something you see from a random dude outside. I love how Hjalti points out he liked how the voice actor almost thought that cigarette was already lit before he grabbed his matches, then checked his time. That really stuck out to me, character is everything. I mean, this is character animation after all! :)

His point nearing the end was great, even in Disney's Tangled there is a small error that nobody noticed, but it functioned. The shot wasn't completely perfect frame by frame, but it looked okay in camera. However I'm not going to fall into, "Well, hey, Disney doesn't make everything perfect!" :)

Something I'm going to try to do is study some animation, I downloaded some trailers from YouTube, and I want to start looking into how the animator behind that scene got it to look so lifelike. 

Introduction

Hey, I'm Christopher Wright! I'm not the best with introductions, but here goes! I'll just give a brief-ish history of me!

Animation
This is really the only important part. I've known since before I can really remember that I wanted to make cartoons. Toy Story was for sure the movie that made me want to become an animator, but the TV show Jimmy Neutron is the show that made me actually start looking into it... with my dad, because, like the commercials on Disney and Nickelodeon say, "ask an adult to go online!"

I don't remember the name of the first animation program my dad found, I know it was paid and it looked complicated. The first program I used was a lovely program called Anim8or. It was a strange little program, but I loved it. I followed all of the tutorials. 

For nostalgia's sake, 

Obviously very rough. Very rough. But I was so proud because I made a sort of script, drew concept art, modeled, rigged, textured, and lit everything. I won't say how old I was out of embarrassment...

Moving on, I found Blender. This is really the program that made me realize I could make high quality things on my computer. I started using version 2.49, but was really bad at it. When version 2.5 was released I got into it. I followed all of the tutorials from Blender Guru, Blender Cookie, and the official Blender tutorials.

After some modeling and texturing, I realized I wasn't very good and it wasn't very fun for me. I knew animation, character animation specifically, is what I wanted to do. So, after trying college and changing my mind, I found Animation Mentor! I'm currently enrolled in Class 3 with Jon Collins. Class 2 was with Joe Antonuccio, who was super inspiring, and Jude Brownbill, who was super inspiring and it was her first time teaching!

Who I Am
I was born in Montana, but I was raised in a bunch of places. I currently live in South Carolina, but I love moving and I'd be happy to be almost anywhere. And as of January 2nd, 2015 I've been super happily married to my best friend Emily.

Things I Like
As far as movies go, my favorite of all time is The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. But the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy is the best. After that is Harry Potter, any Pixar or Disney movie, especially Toy Story, Big Hero 6, and Tangled. I love every Laika movie, most Dreamworks, Illumination, and Blue Sky movies. And I love a bunch of other science fiction movies and dramas.

For music I'm really into soundtracks. Any Ghibli soundtrack or Lord of the Rings soundtrack will get me animating. Also the Steve Jobs soundtrack by Daniel Pemberton is incredible.

For hobbies, I like to draw, play Lord of the Rings trivia, watch movies, study animation, watch TED talks, watch Crash Course videos, mostly the Big History playlist, watch old shows from my childhood, and on occasion play video games.

So, in conclusion, those are the highlights that make up me!