Applied Animation Techniques
Project 1 - 3D Character Crash Course
Milestone 1 - Character Model
While many of the other class members were creating their own characters from scratch I decided to make the minion style character from the SAE provided video tutorials so that I would have less problems with my character because I wanted to spend more time on the rigging and skinning side of things since rigging has always been my biggest challenge with 3D animation.
This turned out to be a good idea as I quickly got the model done and also added a top hat as an extra accessory then moved on to rigging straight away.
Milestone 2 - Character Rig & Skin
Adding the skeleton went well and I didn't have any major issues with it. I added an IK system for the legs and left the arms as FK then moved onto skinning.
Usually I hate the skinning process as it has caused me a lot of frustration in the past but the SAE video tutorials showed me a lot of great tricks for simplifying the process such as selectively flooding parts of the mesh to the bones then using the hammer tool to average out where they needed to smooth out the skin binding between bones. Using these new tricks I managed to skin the whole character in only a matter of hours.
I did run into trouble on the hands where I realised I needed to add some extra edge loops. I knew that I wasn't supposed to edit the mesh once the skin was binded but I decided to do it anyway to see what exactly happens. What I found was the skin binding for the entire mesh was shifted around slightly which meant I needed to fix some areas that were now causing problems. I think if I had done any major changes the skin would've been completely unusable and I would've needed to start again but luckily it was only minor and I could quickly fix the issues and continue.
Once the skinning was done and the character looked good when moving around I started working on blendshapes for the face. I added the ability to make a smile, frown, open the mouth wide, close it entirely, and also some phonemes: A, E, O, U and F. I also did a blendshape for the eyebrows to give him an angry expression.
For this milestone once I got the hang of skinning I actually started enjoying the process of rigging instead of despising it like in the past. Blendshapes were particularly fun to play around with and I think mine came out fairly well although I think the phonemes would look much better with some teeth.
Milestone 3 - Lip Sync Animation
ANI174.1_21T2_MAYER_John_Project.1.mp4In the week leading up to class I started working on a lip sync animation with my character model. I decided to use an audio clip from one of the voice actor Luke Correia's YouTube videos where he reads a line that says "Time for another week. I am not prepared, but I will do it." with a hesitant voice.
I did a rough animation pass of the eyelids and the mouth blendshapes then started refining them using the graph editor, deleting redundant keyframes and adjusting the timing of each animation channel one by one using weighted tangents.
Once the face was done, I animated the upper body to the audio clip as well. I wanted to shrug the shoulders but it did not look good with my rig so I just swayed the arms back and forth slightly.
The eye's didn't look right to me with how they were staring perfectly still so I added some eye movement by taking the eyeball gaze controller and keyframing it in different positions then setting the keyframes to step tangents to simulate how an actual eye moves.
I also wanted to place my model in a scene that would suit the voice clip so after some thought I decided to have the character looking in the bathroom mirror as if he is preparing for his day. Creating a bathroom environment in Maya would take too long and be way too much effort for this project so I decided to take a background plate with my mirrorless camera in my own bathroom.
An initial problem I foresaw was that the viewer wouldn't be able to see the context of him looking into the mirror if I just showed the character's face in the bathroom and if I showed him from behind you wouldn't see his face properly unless it was directly through the mirror and the camera angle would be tight because of how small the bathroom is.
To solve this issue I split the scene into two shots. The first is an establishing shot that shows the character looking into the mirror and the second is a shot from under the mirror with a clear view of the character's face which is where the lip sync animation will start.
I started work on shot 2 first since it will have the lip sync animation in it.
After taking some clean plates I put them into Maya and created a box with the same dimensions as my bathroom to assist with lining up the clean plate.
For lighting I placed Arnold area lights in the location of my bathroom lights and a light below his face to simulate light bouncing from the white sink.
When I lined up the scene with the box I found that my character's model didn't fit the room very well and wasn't tall enough to sit properly in the shot so I cheated a bit and raised him off the ground. The camera can't see his feet so as long as it looks right I don't think it'll matter.
I rendered out the shot with Arnold which took two hours then started work on shot 1.
I wanted the mirror to reflect his face but from the angle the camera is at it wouldn't actually see his face so I also cheated this a bit by taking a cube, making it a mirror shape, positioning it in front of the character and changing it's angle to force the camera to see his reflection. I then gave it a fully reflective shader.
I knew layering this on top of the plate would require some trickery so I added some AOVs to render out so I could isolate the reflection later when I got to compositing.
I added some basic movement animation for his upper body and right arm.
I rendered it out in Arnold overnight then the next morning I started compositing the shots in After Effects and did some work in Nuke as well. I combined the shots in a master composition the rendered out the final product.
Post Mortem
- What went well?
In general, almost everything went without much issue. I created a 3D character model very quickly, although this was due to the fact I followed the tutorials instead of creating an original character like many of the students in my class. However, I did this on purpose so that the modelling process would be done quickly so I could focus more on rigging.
The rigging process went much more smoothly than I was expecting because when I have previously done rigging, I ran into a lot of issues and found the weight painting process to be extremely tiresome. This time around, where I followed my teacher Michael and the SAE video tutorials, I found rigging to be much more streamlined and significantly less frustrating. Painting the skin weights only took me one night to finish thanks to the tips and tricks I was taught. The rig moved well and I became very quick at making new blendshapes to make my character more expressive.
Compositing was fairly easy as I have some experience in Nuke and plenty of experience in After Effects. I am very happy with my result.
- What didn't go well?
The only things that didn't go well were Maya crashing on occasion and me trying to adjust to the newer changes to Arnold since I last used it about three years ago. This project wa focused on creating the character and animating him so my rendering issues are for me to personally deal with in my own time.
- Now what can I do differently in future?
Now that I am more accustomed to rigging in Maya I would like to attempt to make an original character and spend time on it to improve my modelling and rigging skills since the character in the tutorials was very simple by design and didn't provide much of a challenge other than for people learning modelling and rigging concepts for the first time.
- Now what do I need to learn now?
The next project is going to be focused much more on animating character rigs so I'm going to be focusing on learning how different rigs work and the best practices for animating them.