Intro/Brief
In this unit I will be producing quality character animations to industry standard. I will be introduced to all of the essential principles and technical skills to create my animation.
Animation principles
Appeal - This principle can really come down to adding more appeal in many different areas of your animation, such as appeal in posing.
Staging - Staging is how you setup your scene, from the placement of the character to the background and how you use the camera angle.
Solid Drawing - In 2D Animation, solid drawing is about creating an accurate drawing with volume and weight, and thinking about balance, and the anatomy in a pose. With 3D animation, animators are less likely to rely on their drawings, but the idea of solid drawing is just as important.
Timing & Spacing - Timing and spacing in animation is what gives objects and characters the illusion of moving within the laws of physics. Timing refers to the number of frames between two poses. The spacing refers to how those individual frames are placed.
Straight Ahead Or pose to pose - Straight ahead and pose to pose refers to the two different techniques that are used when animating. Straight ahead is a linear approach, creating one pose one after another. Pose to pose is more methodical and planned out. You do the key poses first and do the in between afterwards.
Arcs - Everything in real-life moves in an arcing motion so the animation should have some principle of acrs in it. But the only time you should use straight line if you're going for robotic animation.
Secondary - Secondary action is a support for the main action. It can breathe more life into animation and creates more convincing animation. For example, a character is tapping is foot while talking to another character. Foot tapping would be a secondary action.
Overlap and Follow through
Exaggeration - Exaggeration is used to push movements further to add more appeal to an action. It can used to create cartoony movement or if it used with a little more restraint, can create realistic movement.
Anticipation - Anticipation is used in animation to set the audience up for an action that is about to happen. For example character might wanna wanna move back two step before a jump. Its way to prepare the audience, it is also required to sell a believable movement.
Reference - http://blog.digitaltutors.com/understanding-12-principles-animation/
Staging - Staging is how you setup your scene, from the placement of the character to the background and how you use the camera angle.
Solid Drawing - In 2D Animation, solid drawing is about creating an accurate drawing with volume and weight, and thinking about balance, and the anatomy in a pose. With 3D animation, animators are less likely to rely on their drawings, but the idea of solid drawing is just as important.
Timing & Spacing - Timing and spacing in animation is what gives objects and characters the illusion of moving within the laws of physics. Timing refers to the number of frames between two poses. The spacing refers to how those individual frames are placed.
Straight Ahead Or pose to pose - Straight ahead and pose to pose refers to the two different techniques that are used when animating. Straight ahead is a linear approach, creating one pose one after another. Pose to pose is more methodical and planned out. You do the key poses first and do the in between afterwards.
Arcs - Everything in real-life moves in an arcing motion so the animation should have some principle of acrs in it. But the only time you should use straight line if you're going for robotic animation.
Secondary - Secondary action is a support for the main action. It can breathe more life into animation and creates more convincing animation. For example, a character is tapping is foot while talking to another character. Foot tapping would be a secondary action.
Overlap and Follow through
Exaggeration - Exaggeration is used to push movements further to add more appeal to an action. It can used to create cartoony movement or if it used with a little more restraint, can create realistic movement.
Anticipation - Anticipation is used in animation to set the audience up for an action that is about to happen. For example character might wanna wanna move back two step before a jump. Its way to prepare the audience, it is also required to sell a believable movement.
Reference - http://blog.digitaltutors.com/understanding-12-principles-animation/
Process of animation
- Keys - First keys are step - so you get the key poses. Max key poses should be around five no more then five. Turn off the auto-animation.
- Extremes - Contract position, eg. While walking when your foot touches the floor or when you touching something.
- Breakdowns - Passing positions
- Straight Ahead animation - The in-betweens and favor key
Different Types of Animation Techniques and Styles
1 - Traditional animation or Classical 2D animation : Traditional animation involved animators drawing by hand for each and every frame.
2 - Digital 2D animation : Creating animations in the 2 dimensional space with the help of digital technologies is known as digital 2d animation.
3 - Digital 3D animation : Digital 3d animation characters are much faster to create and they are quite popular in the movie making industry.
4 - Stop-motion animation : Stop motion animation has been around ever since the evolution of puppets. There were many movies created using the stop motion method, some of the finest examples are “Fun in a bakery shop” created in 1902.Edwin Porter directed "The Teddy Bears," which was one of the earliest stop-motion animation films.
5 - Claymation : Clay are moulded to create characters and based on the imagination of the animator, a story is unfolded. Clatmation is best forms of stop motion.
6 - Cut-out animation : Cut – Out animation is probably one of the oldest forms of stop motion animations in the history of animation.
7 - Flipbook Animation : Artists used to carry a small flip book or flick book and draw a series of images, with little variation to the pictures, so when the book is flicked rapidly, you can see the series of images in a fluid motion, trying to show a scene.
Reference : http://webneel.com/different-types-of-animation-styles
2 - Digital 2D animation : Creating animations in the 2 dimensional space with the help of digital technologies is known as digital 2d animation.
3 - Digital 3D animation : Digital 3d animation characters are much faster to create and they are quite popular in the movie making industry.
4 - Stop-motion animation : Stop motion animation has been around ever since the evolution of puppets. There were many movies created using the stop motion method, some of the finest examples are “Fun in a bakery shop” created in 1902.Edwin Porter directed "The Teddy Bears," which was one of the earliest stop-motion animation films.
5 - Claymation : Clay are moulded to create characters and based on the imagination of the animator, a story is unfolded. Clatmation is best forms of stop motion.
6 - Cut-out animation : Cut – Out animation is probably one of the oldest forms of stop motion animations in the history of animation.
7 - Flipbook Animation : Artists used to carry a small flip book or flick book and draw a series of images, with little variation to the pictures, so when the book is flicked rapidly, you can see the series of images in a fluid motion, trying to show a scene.
Reference : http://webneel.com/different-types-of-animation-styles
Research - Digital Character Development Theory and Practice - By Rob O'Neill
This is a book that I found in the library which I found interesting. I think this has some amazing tips into animation and creating a digital character. I have read a few pages on study of facial expression. I think this will help me with my animation.
Here are some some of my notes that I taken when reading. Emotions through face shape To see a clear emotions human babies are the most useful. The simple face shape can describe whether the person is showing happiness, sadness, anger, fear or disgust. As all face shape the idea is to create a complex shape from a smaller or discrete ones. |
Happiness
Happy expressions convey messages related to enjoyment, pleasure, a positive outlook and friendliness. Is it sad that one can train yourself to depict happy expression, so these are often use to mask the true emotions. Here few things people do when they are happy.
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Surprised
Surprised expression are short and difficult to detect. It's most always occur in respond to event that is unanticipated. It convey message about something being unexpected, sudden or amazing.
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There are many more complex emotions that we have experienced in our life including shame, suspicion, grumpy, flirty, bored and annoyed. The basic ones described above should give the character something to work from and also something that my character can achieve.
Visemes and lip syncing
- [p, b, m] - Closed lips.
- [w] & [boot] - Pursed lips.
- [r*] & [book] - Rounded open lips with corner of lips slightly puckered.
- [v] & [f ] - Lower lip drawn up to upper teeth.
- [thy] & [thigh] - Tongue between teeth, no gaps on sides.
- [l] - Tip of tongue behind open teeth, gaps on sides.
- [d, t, z, s, r*, n] - Relaxed mouth with mostly closed teeth with pinkness of tongue behind teeth (tip of tongue on ridge behind upper teeth).
- [vision, shy, jive, chime] Slightly open mouth with mostly closed teeth and corners of lips slightly tightened.
- [y, g, k, hang, uh-oh] - Slightly open mouth with mostly closed teeth.
- [beat, bit] - Wide, slightly open mouth.
- [bait, bet, but] - Neutral mouth with slightly parted teeth and slightly dropped jaw.
- [boat] - very round lips, slight dropped jaw.
- [bat, bought] - open mouth with very dropped jaw.
Lip Sync - 'How to make lip sync animation easy'
Here are a few things that I nated from this video which I think will be useful for my final animation.
1. Foundation
1. Foundation
- Research
- Getting the audio file - Know what they are saying and how they are saying it? Know everything about it. Say it how your character will say it
- Don't do the details before you have the structure
- Stop Staring: Facial Modeling and Animation Done Right - book by Jason Osipa
- The structure is only open/closed and wide/narrow
- Open/closed - Use your arm put it on the table and put your fist under your chin to find the structure - Say it fast to get it correct. DO NOT SAY IT SLOW
- Wide/narrow - Place the fingers on the corners of the lip to find out if its wide/narrow
- You might need to shift 2-5 frames forward because we produce the mouth shape before we make the sound - you can do this at the end then shift it but it is recommended to do it now
- Forget about the mouth and focus on the eyes - we are adding emotions
- A. Do the eyebrows
- B. Eye gaze and the direction of the eye
- C. Then add the basic emotion like is the character happy or sad
- D. No fine details, just a simple details of the finer details - Rough details
- Adding the fine details, adding the character personality like does the character have a lazy eye? or a crooked eye?
- Adding the weights
- Use the 12 principle
Research - Existing animations
Here are a few animation that I have found interesting.
I think the facial expression works very well. And also the character goes with the voice, it works very well. But I do not like how the hand moves, the animation doesn't look good in my opinion. It's his fat arm it feels like feel like there's no weight to it.
This uses great animation principle amusingly like exaggeration, squash and stretch, staging, arc, timing, appeal. This gives the character more life to it, goes beyond what we accept. I think the creator should add some colour to it, it would be great because it will get more people looking at it. From the thumbnail you can't say will it be a good price on animation.
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I love the secondary animation on this, how his whole body moves on the chair, it works very well. I also like how his one hand is busy playing with small balls. lol
I really like how the expression on the old man's face changes, worried to angry. I am thinking of having variety of emotion in my final animation. I think there's something off about the boy. Mayabe be there's not secondary animation on his face. His mouth moves but his eyebrow don't move. His eyebrow doesn't have any reaction to his voice.
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Research - Actors
I will be looking at these two actor to influence my character in my animation.
Rig Experiment - Character Poses - Sacha Baron Cohen
Character Pose with life drawing
Here are some few poses that I did with my life drawings. I have choose the best of my life drawing that I did and posed my 3D character to it.
This was a 2mins test where I had to capture the models pose quickly.
I had to capture the pose in 30 second so had to just get his position done first.
I have just drawn the action line to capture the pose. I think this technique is very useful because I can capture the pose in 2 second which will help when I am storyboarding.
Here I have spent longer time to capture the pose. The poses can be replicated very easily in 3D.
Here I have use different shapes to capture the pose. without any details on. I am experimenting different way to capture the pose.
Here I have wrote how the character might be feeling.
I have created a character sheet with different poses.
The Jump
I have created this simple storyboard to help me animate for my jump animation.
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I have not spent much time on the jump so, did not come out as I planned. I think because due to my reference being terrible so the outcome was terrible.
Next time I need to record from the side, that will help me animate better. And it will make life much easier. |
First Lip sync - 'Hey wait for me'
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In this task the objective was to lip sync the my character. I am very proud of the outcome, it looks realist. This was my first time lip syncing something like this. I have added some fine details to my animation like blinking and also at the start added a little nose blow.
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Audio's
Here have few audios that I broke down to 10 - 15 second. the plan was to choose one from there to animate. But there was no emotion variation, so I decided with the audio from 11 second club.
Final animation
To make me animate easily I have created a table with mouth position. This allow me more time to animate and less time to waste.
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This is a reference that I did for the first character. It will help me animate and replicate it in my animation.
For my second reference I was going for a father like character.
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I have also made buttons on my shelf for lipsync. This was a great help, made it so much easy to animate the lips.
Here are a few drawing that I did for my final animation.
Here are the processes that I went through to create my animation. I started with the Lipsync which made it easy to animation I didn't need to worry about the lips as I animated the body.
This is my final animation.