Animation Progress/Rant
This week I have mostly been animating or should I say tweaking graphs.
This is really an update regarding the animating process.
Actually come to think of it there is a lot I could be talking about here, I'm going to make a cup of tea (wink wink!!!!!!!!!!!) then come back...
Anyway I'm back now.
where shall I start? Well the first thing is that I quit my job in October to focus on learning animation, I think I've used my time as productively as is possible, I feel my character animation has got better but I still feel as though I'm not quite there yet, will I ever be? well only practice will get me closer. (I've also become very good at not leaving my bedroom! It's like a minefield of empty bottles of water, hall full-cold cups of tea, and a lot of empty packets of chocolate digestives!)
One of the things that I've learned is that animating is not quick, it's an arduous task, the method by which I have been working with is something I learned from an animator called Keith Lango (http://www.keithlango.com/). This guy has some fantastic tips on the process of cg animation. No matter how much I'd learnt about the principles of animation (secondary motion, key poses, followthrough...blah blah blah) I still hadn't put it into practice; this project has been
great to practice with but as I come to the final week I still feel as though I'm not seeing the kind of final product that I might feel good about watching.
I've animated about 8 scenes with Igor, and one of the things I've discovered is that Igor is not
very flexible as a rig but saying that he was never supposed to be jumping around or performing any complicated actions. But even for the simplest of actions I've had to be very careful of where I shoot the scene from so as not to show an awkward glitch in the mesh. One of the things this has led to is shooting him from above the waist alot because it's the legs that are a bit of a problem, in all honesty I think they look horrible somtimes! But in certain scenes I haven't had a choice. The good thing is because of his shape, he always looks sad so that has led to a lot less animating in some circumstances because that's what he is supposed to look like.
The general process of animating I used was pose to pose, this is where the character jumps from errr-pose-to pose! I start with key storytelling poses and watch that back to check the timing is good.
Here's an example from Keith Lango
http://www.keithlango.com/tutorials/old/popThru/moses01_popThru.avi
What I then go and do is change all the keys so that the character moves in with linear motion through each key. Here's where the trouble starts...
It's at this point I have to disapear into a world of the Graph editor. This is a representaion of my animation from the point of view of all the animated objects in my scene (still with me?). I feel as though I'm getting very good at reading these graphs (like learning a new language!) One of my faults is being lazy and I tend to not think clearly enough about how I want an action to take place. Or.... It may also be possible that I think too much about the actions trying to tweak every key from the movement of the hips to the motion of the finger tips. Nevertheless a lazy animators motto..."if in doubt ease it Out!"
So far I have rendered about 6 scenes, I have a week left to get the final product in. I have one more scene left to finish animating; graph tweaking awaits that scene. It's kind of like ironing except I take much more time on graphs than I ever do at the ironing stand. I check every key (well almost). I then go in and work out if the action will be snappy or slow.
Once all this is done what I try to do is rearrange the keys so that I bring more life by creating secondary motion and overlap. Sometimes I think I have been overanimating; when I said this process is like ironing what I meant was that once all the key poses are set up you then have to go in a iron out all the glitches, which is why I spend hours infront of the graph editor in Maya working out really stupid things like if the hand should rotate 5 degrees or 6!
Anyway the reason I am going into so much detail is just to give people an idea of what is actually going on when I'm animating. It never really ever feels finished and I think I'm learning now that this is somthing that just takes a lot of patience; when you click on render there's no going back!
It's now friday, but on Monday I had animated 6 scenes and I knew I had to get rendering but I still had to go in and fix the lighting in all the scenes. I spent about a day setting that up, then on Tuesday I went about thinking about rendering. What happened was that I looked at my first scene and still wasn't satisfied so I began to tweak, then I started rendering and what has happened since then is that I've pretty much done the same with all the other scenes; tried to clean up the animation, fixed the lighting and rendered... Now I have one last scene to do and I must go and face it!
I've learnt a lot about process of and I have lots more to learn....
This is really an update regarding the animating process.
Actually come to think of it there is a lot I could be talking about here, I'm going to make a cup of tea (wink wink!!!!!!!!!!!) then come back...
Anyway I'm back now.
where shall I start? Well the first thing is that I quit my job in October to focus on learning animation, I think I've used my time as productively as is possible, I feel my character animation has got better but I still feel as though I'm not quite there yet, will I ever be? well only practice will get me closer. (I've also become very good at not leaving my bedroom! It's like a minefield of empty bottles of water, hall full-cold cups of tea, and a lot of empty packets of chocolate digestives!)
One of the things that I've learned is that animating is not quick, it's an arduous task, the method by which I have been working with is something I learned from an animator called Keith Lango (http://www.keithlango.com/). This guy has some fantastic tips on the process of cg animation. No matter how much I'd learnt about the principles of animation (secondary motion, key poses, followthrough...blah blah blah) I still hadn't put it into practice; this project has been
great to practice with but as I come to the final week I still feel as though I'm not seeing the kind of final product that I might feel good about watching.
I've animated about 8 scenes with Igor, and one of the things I've discovered is that Igor is not
very flexible as a rig but saying that he was never supposed to be jumping around or performing any complicated actions. But even for the simplest of actions I've had to be very careful of where I shoot the scene from so as not to show an awkward glitch in the mesh. One of the things this has led to is shooting him from above the waist alot because it's the legs that are a bit of a problem, in all honesty I think they look horrible somtimes! But in certain scenes I haven't had a choice. The good thing is because of his shape, he always looks sad so that has led to a lot less animating in some circumstances because that's what he is supposed to look like.
The general process of animating I used was pose to pose, this is where the character jumps from errr-pose-to pose! I start with key storytelling poses and watch that back to check the timing is good.
Here's an example from Keith Lango
http://www.keithlango.com/tutorials/old/popThru/moses01_popThru.avi
What I then go and do is change all the keys so that the character moves in with linear motion through each key. Here's where the trouble starts...
It's at this point I have to disapear into a world of the Graph editor. This is a representaion of my animation from the point of view of all the animated objects in my scene (still with me?). I feel as though I'm getting very good at reading these graphs (like learning a new language!) One of my faults is being lazy and I tend to not think clearly enough about how I want an action to take place. Or.... It may also be possible that I think too much about the actions trying to tweak every key from the movement of the hips to the motion of the finger tips. Nevertheless a lazy animators motto..."if in doubt ease it Out!"
So far I have rendered about 6 scenes, I have a week left to get the final product in. I have one more scene left to finish animating; graph tweaking awaits that scene. It's kind of like ironing except I take much more time on graphs than I ever do at the ironing stand. I check every key (well almost). I then go in and work out if the action will be snappy or slow.
Once all this is done what I try to do is rearrange the keys so that I bring more life by creating secondary motion and overlap. Sometimes I think I have been overanimating; when I said this process is like ironing what I meant was that once all the key poses are set up you then have to go in a iron out all the glitches, which is why I spend hours infront of the graph editor in Maya working out really stupid things like if the hand should rotate 5 degrees or 6!
Anyway the reason I am going into so much detail is just to give people an idea of what is actually going on when I'm animating. It never really ever feels finished and I think I'm learning now that this is somthing that just takes a lot of patience; when you click on render there's no going back!
It's now friday, but on Monday I had animated 6 scenes and I knew I had to get rendering but I still had to go in and fix the lighting in all the scenes. I spent about a day setting that up, then on Tuesday I went about thinking about rendering. What happened was that I looked at my first scene and still wasn't satisfied so I began to tweak, then I started rendering and what has happened since then is that I've pretty much done the same with all the other scenes; tried to clean up the animation, fixed the lighting and rendered... Now I have one last scene to do and I must go and face it!
I've learnt a lot about process of and I have lots more to learn....
posted by nanimator at 11:48 pm
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