Old Skool...

Um.... so after doing that last post, I saw how cool it is that you can embed video in these posts. Here's an older animation I did about 2 years ago when I was still back in school, doing Juggles. This was for the 10 Second Club competition. Unfortunately the club wasn't all that up-to-snuff back then and this entry got lost in the paperwork somewhere :( I'm hoping that after this dance animation is done I can do some more of these for the new 11 Second Club (http://www.11secondclub.com). Enjoy!

She Dances!

Edit (3/04/2008): The foot movement is removed from the beginning.

Rigging is done and it's on to animation! This is a short piece so far, still in progress. This is just a Maya playblast - no fancy rendering (no hair!). It's at about 20 seconds, with 10-15 more seconds to go. Once this is done, it's on to hair simulation, then fx (fire and embers), then lighting and rendering, and then finally putting it all together.

Rigging

So the model is pretty much finalized. There will be slight texture changes, and the hair will need to be done in post since it is driven by the rest of the model. The rig is also done, and is equipped with a fancy inverse foot, IK spine, shoulder/head/wrist locks, and a bunch of other features that should make animating the dance much less of a headache (it is more or less a modified version of the Package Man rig that is floating around the net - I've found it to be pretty robust and well-suited for detail-oriented animation).
The next post will likely be a prototype for the dance animation.

New Pictures

Here are some new pictures of the rest of the body:

The Latest

Here's the most recent picture of the face up close. I'm working on jewelry and other stuff now but the rest of the body is done as well. I'll put up more as I go, but I'm pretty sure the face still needs lots of work to match it more closely.

She's coming along

A lot more is done now. I'm just trying to set up shaders and stuff now to get the look right. Here's a new picture of the head alongside the reference (the rest of the body is modeled as well).

What's next?

I finished Juggles a while ago. The final render is done. Once my friend Troels does music for it, I may consider trying to enter it in different film contests, or just post it on YouTube.

On to new things! I went through a Photoshop primer book to get the basics on texturing. By no means would I say I'm great, but I know my way around Photoshop now at least.

I'm working on a new project now. It's for a friend of mine, as well as just practice for myself. The goal is to make a female character from start to finish, finish being a final 10-15 second animation. The character is a dancer, and meant to be a likeness of an actual person. I'm trying to learn the maya hair and cloth modules as well for this project, so I can integrate them into this character. The actual girl this is meant to be patterned after is here:

http://www.salsawithpantea.com/

Here is a 'preproduction' image of the head thus far:

Sample Render

This is a sample render using Mental Ray with Final Gather. There's no GI... it won't work with the skin shader. I don't think it's necessary though. I'm in the middle of rendering and doing touch ups, and will hopefully have the final render in a week or so, ready for sound design and music. I'm not a fan of this rendering stuff... takes way too long. I'm rendering at 720p with pretty high settings, and it's looking at about 10-15 minutes a frame on my laptop. Granted they're mostly all done now, but there's so much sitting around. Now if only I knew how to texture well I could create cool characters from scratch...

Current status

Wow, it's been a while since I posted. Guess I should document what's been going on. I finished the 1st attempt of Juggles for my final semester at CMU. I played it for the first time for a mass audience for our final presentation. I think it was pretty well received! 5 months of work paid off, I guess. Since then I've kind of been off it, doing other stuff I suppose. I just started back into working on it about a month ago in hopes of getting it into Siggraph for 2007.
I spent much of last month working on lighting solutions. I know it's pretty simple as it is -- it's just a boy and a mirror. I want to light it as best as I can though. The previous solution was straight up Maya 3 point setup. No GI, no final gather. Simple shaders. I'm still sticking with the simple shaders for the most part, though. Lamberts for the clothes, and I'm pretty happy with the hair. I'm rerendering in Mental Ray though, and it has a wonderful shader for skin that looks like it'll be a viable alternative to what I'm currently using.
I looked into GI, but it won't work correctly with the fast skin shader, so Final Gather with HDRI is going to have to be the solution. And I can't complain -- it's a vast improvement over what I was using before.
Anyway, hopefully this will be done soon. And with any luck, I'll get some original music to go along with it for the Siggraph submission.

Now to finish it off (at least for now)

I just finished the (temporary) lighting, and am now going to go back to clean stuff up. The lighting's a little blown out... for some reason I have that tendency. I think I just like bright colors. As far as animation, there are many places I just forgot about, and I didn't realize until I started doing reflective renders with the mirror... You can see the entire other side of the boy! So I have to go back and make sure those look right from pretty much all angles.
I say this is temporary because it's specifically for the R&H computer graphics competition. The final, final render of this film won't be done at least until the end of summer. I still have to materialize/light/render the room, plus figure out what I'm going to do for audio. Right now I'm going to have to use temporary stuff.

Other fun stuff besides animating

I'm starting to add in the little touches that help with animation now, mainly dynamics for the hair, shirt and pants. I'm trying to be careful though... I don't want to add it in just for flair. I'm trying to hit the point where it complements what's already there vs distracting from the animation.
I'm also having a little fun with the hair shader... I'm not one much for shader network stuff, but it's nice messing with the pretty colors. Nice break from animation too. Quick post for reference:

And so the Polish Phase begins...

Now that animation's complete, it's on to polish. Since I'm pretty much the director here, I usually know exactly what I want, so I'm able to polish pretty heavily as I go. Hence, there's not an overwhelming amount to clean up. Lots of camera fixes for things that just aren't making sense cinematically (such as the boy falling out of frame). There are animation things I've noticed that I've always just been saying 'Yeah, I'll get it in polish', which, I guess is what I'm doing now. I have a list of about 15-20 things I need to tackle, which shouldn't take too long.

I think overall doing this short was a good idea. It's a good indication of my current skill level, and doing it has also shown me that I have a long way to go. It will be a while before I do another one. I'd like to focus more on short dialogue pieces for a while, and really break down what makes a good performance. I value that this was a silent piece -- it's helped me realize how to show a character's thought process without the use of dialogue.

Juggles is Animation Complete!

Well, 1st pass, anyway... but still... major milestone!
There's still tons left to go back and polish, which is the next step. I'd like to be able to do some preliminary renders so I can submit what I have to scholarship competitions before I'm out of school.
This is finally starting to come together. I can't wait to see how it comes out in the end.

Ice Age 2

I just saw Ice Age 2. It's amazing what those guys can do. I hear the film was done in under 8 months. I see things in their animation that I haven't even attempted to do yet. At least I can see it, I guess.
There's an exercise I've always wanted to try... take a really, really good piece of professional animation and just try to duplicate it, frame for frame. Though it'd be completely worthless as a reel piece, it might get me to sort of get in the head of what the animators were thinking when they did it... we'll see. One animation at a time.

Arcs

People talk a lot about arcs. At first, I was like, why? What the hell do they have to do with animation? Isn't animation just an imitation of real life? Where do arcs fit in? To some extent, I still wonder that, at least, for realistic animation. If the intent is to simulate real life and the real life motion doesn't arc, then why animate using arcs? If I can make it look real enough without caring about arcs, why the hell should I start?
I think the whole arcs thing trails back to traditional 2D animation. I haven't studied this stuff, so I'm hypothesizing, but I'm beginning to see the value of it in animation. It's just more visually pleasing. Seeing someone move in arcing motions is just more appealing than seeing linear interpolations. The question then becomes, well, what do I arc? Keith Lango has a good tutorial on this, and he says the most important part is the hips. I think I agree. If you arc the hips, you indirectly arc everything that is attached. From there, I think overlapping through time adds more, as well as paying attention to your appendages - the arms, legs, and head. I tend to pay particular attention to the wrists, since I think a lot of the time people keep their eyes on the characters' hands... what are they doing? So I focus a lot on that. Plus there's a lot of negative space around the arms so if they're moving fast, the eye is naturally drawn toward them.
It's funny... the more I pay attention to arcs, the more anal I get about them. This is a good thing, I think. I wonder if you can overkill on them...

Juggles Pace is Slowing...

It's not a bad thing. I'm spending time with family. I've kind of decided to not kill myself anyway. The animation is very close to finished, actually -- I only have about 10 more shots to animate, most of which are facial closeups. There's only one technically challenging shot left, and I'm on it right now. After that, smooth sailings :) I wanted to get done with the animation completely by the time this semester's over, but it looks like it's just not going to happen. I'm going to have to tweak the facial structure of the boy (he just looks creepy when he smiles), set up dynamics, textures, lighting, sound... there's just no way. Better to take my time with it and make it really solid than to rush it. I'd still like to try to submit it for R&H's animation scholarship, though. That's not due until May 16th or so, though.
I worry about the story... I think I worry more about my sense of humor and that people will buy into it. I hope it's well received. I also hope that everything -- the animation, the style, the textures, the lighting, the sound -- will make this piece add up to more than the sum of its parts.
Once the animation's finished, I'll post a playblast of the 1st animation pass (sans cloth/hair dynamics and additional cleanup).

And the hardest part is.... Blocking!

Blocking is so hard. You wouldn't think so, because basically, it's just crappy animation. I'm referring to thoughtful blocking -- blocking that is detailed enough to the point where you can see all the intricate details in your head, they're just not there yet. It's hard because I think it's where I tend to put the most thought. If I screw up this phase, the rest of the animation may not be as good as it could have been. And I hate moving forward until I think I have my blocking just right. I find that when I'm doing an animation where I just don't care how it turns out, I block quickly, hence I animate quickly. On the other hand, if it's an animation I genuinely care about doing the best I possibly can, I block very slowly and thoughtfully, so the animation takes forever. But then I wonder if the outcome is any better than if I did it quickly. I can't tell. Sooooo.... what's the moral of this story? I dunno. Maybe it should be to block quickly and then think about what you've done. Reevaluate if necessary. I think it causes procrastination more than anything else. I need to just bite the bullet and dig in more often. Or just stop caring about my animation, I guess.

Random Maya Animation Tip #347

Don't be a slave to the 'snap-to-frame' option in the graph editor. Yeah, sure it makes nice, clean keys. Use it most of the time. All I'm saying is, that when you're adding in overlap and that kind of stuff, consider turn it off so you can fine-tune the look as you're shifting keys left or right. Get real-time animation playback if you can, and see what's going on. I just tried this today for adding overlap in the neck/head, and... viola!

Word of caution: Whenever I give any sort of animation tip whatsoever, use caution: I'm quite sure I don't know what I'm doing half the time.

Why is it so loooooong...?

As I animate this short, the time keeps creeping up and up... it's now clocking out at around 3:50. Originally, it was 3:00. It just seems like the scenes get longer as I progress, like I naturally have to add more time. I guess this is ok - either it's genuinely needed, or I'll cut it in the editing phase. We'll see. In any case, it's lowering my morale, because it seems like this thing is never going to get finished. I just want the animation pass to be complete. Then I can take a mini-vacation :) If only.
Guess I should just keep cranking... it's at about 2:40, by the way. It's spring break right now, so this week I should be able to push out a lot more than I would normally. If only I could have it done by April...

Animation Techniques For Different Styles

Something I've been thinking about... As of now, I've done mostly realistic, humanoid animation. I guess The Big Surprise wasn't really, but I didn't really know jack about animation when I was working on that short. I was using what I guess is the layered technique. Essentially I would start by animating the root node, then work my way outwards until the entire character was finished. I find this method provides more realistic (physically accurate) results, since as you move down the chain, each bone dictates how the next bone will move. Consequently you end up with animation that, if you do it right, will look "physically" correct. For the most part, I used this technique on Tombraider: Legend as well.
I've found, though, that using this method limits the complexity of your animation. "Cartoony" animation tends to be very complex, I think... jumping from one pose to the next, sometimes with only a frame or two inbetween. You can't do this with the layered technique. Plus, doing cartoony stuff, you often throw anatomically-correct physicality out the window.
I'm trying to strike a comprimise between the two methods. For the short I'm working on, I'm trying to use pose-to-pose as a guideline -- essentially, making sure there are a few specific poses I hit, and layering from the root node out as I go. I think it's working pretty well, especially for the more complex scenes.
I'd like to try something in a more cartoony style after this, strictly pose-to-pose and see how it goes. Never really done it before.