unitba1b-Mystery Box animation

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I managed to get an extension on my submission deadline and so felt a lot less pressured and also manged to reach out for help.

I had already managed to finish the motion when my peer stepped in to help and initially we couldn’t get any of the lighting to work for some reason but we managed to get the directional light to finally work. Luckily this scene only took about 2 hours to render and then I managed to composite the video on my own at home using Adobe media encoder. Overall this is definitely a case of ‘finished not perfect and at this point I was just more focused on getting this animation finished and ready for submission. 

I’m not happy with the finished product and I know it’s about 2 seconds too short but at this point it’s better than not having anything to submit for this project. Getting some help really, really made this so much easier to tackle though and I feel like I would have been much worse off without my peer who so graciously helped me out. 

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NOT OFF TO A GOOD START...

I did a quick playblast while messing around in Maya and trying to cover some of the things that I had missed in the lessons but just felt very disheartened by this end result. I think it perfectly reflects how much of a hot mess i was with regards to using the software properly. I especially started to panic as the deadline drew closer and closer. 

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Summary - February 18th - March 21st

At this point. I definitely am not feeling to strongly about my mystery box animation or ability to use 3D animating software in general. That overall panic has fed into a wave of procrastination the likes of which I’ve never experienced in my life. I have been doing every part of the the process except actually animating the mystery box animation and I can feel the increasing pressure of the approaching deadline looming over my head. 

The more that I fall behind the harder it is to catch up and the harder it is to ask for help as I feel like I really had no excuse to let this happen. I really let myself be dominated by my feelings of inexperience and I never want to let that happen again because I ended up making the process unnecessarily extra difficult. 

I feel as though no matter what I do I can’t get my animation in Maya to be anything but horribly stiff and as such just feel generally very discouraged about the whole process. I feel especially stupid because I know that the staff is there to help and they expect us to all be inexperienced but there’s something about asking for help at this stage when I’ve already fallen so far behind that just makes me so anxious. 

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EXPLORING POSING BASED ON REFERENCE FOOTAGE

I had a lot of fun analyzing my reference footage to try and pull out key-frames to use in my mystery box. In general I’ve found that one of the most fun part so of the course is breaking down a motion in order to understand how to convincingly replicate it in an animation. I feel like after doing this I realized that I need to be a lot more open with my posture when acting out reference footage so that my overall silhouette gets broken up a lot more and it’s a lot easier to tell what’s going on in a scene. 

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ONE OF MY MANY FAILED ATTEMPTS TO FAKE A FALL

I’m sure there’s a much more effective way to do this but I tried and failed many, many time at faking a fall. In the future I’ll probably use some sort of cushioning or have someone push me to get a more realistic result. I feel as though I’m too stiff to convey things like this believably. 

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FILMING MORE REFERENCES 

I’m definitely going to stick to filming references alone when I can. I’m not comfortable having to perform in front of others and even when alone I fell like I still manage to be pretty stiff. Overall I feel as though this reference footage was a lot more useful than the first round of reference footage that I shot.

I also feel as though it was kinda hard to effectively remove my more feminine features when considering the movement of the max model in maya seeing as his figure is more masculine and lanky. It wasn’t a huge issue but it was definitely something that made me stop and think.  

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DOING MY ANIMATIC AND PLAYING CATCH UP

So this animatic is actually based on a combination of the footage above and the footage filmed in the first acting class related to the mystery box.

I didn’t really like the camera angle all that much so I ended up changing it in my actual final mystery box animation but overall I really enjoyed making it. I really enjoy working in tvpaint and just getting to draw in general so I’m definitely leaning more towards focusing on 2D animation in my second year or at least a combination of 2D and a little bit of 3D. I really liked the timing of this animatic and feel as though it captured the emotions I intended to convey well.

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Falling off track

I began to really struggle to adjust to using maya and I feel as though a major part of that was because I became very critical of myself and felt I was too incompetent to grasp the software properly. I know a big part of my struggling just lied in my overall hesitance to try new things and being too hard on myself.

Instead of asking for help I really withdrew into myself and dropped the ball on much of the 3D portion of this unit. I don’t think it’s because I don’t enjoy working in 3D but something about the process definitely feeds into a greater sense of anxiety for me. I tried to follow along the lessons I missed in my own time but ultimately this only added to my sense of frustration and ineptitude and made it harder and harder to approach animating in 3D. 

I didn’t expect anyone to hold my hand and I understand a big part of just growing artistically in general is learning to figure things out on your own but that also means that you have to allow yourself room for mistakes.

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February 28th - beginning to explore animating in Maya

Having already been introduced to the basic features of using Maya, we then took an open source model from the 11 second club, Maya and began exploring animating in Maya. 

We first went through the various features of the max rig and then began by setting him up in various key poses and having him switch between emotions to get an understanding of how timing and transitioning works in Maya. I feel as though I was really slow in picking up these principles and felt really clueless the entire lesson. 

We then were told to use our animatic as a guide to begin plotting out the keyframes of our mystery box animation which we could then go back into and refine. I ran into lots of little issues at this point such as Maya resetting max to a T-pose in between two key frames for no reason and having to delete half my animation and redo it as a result. 

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Weely Summary - February 11th - 15th

This week we were given the brief for our mystery box project and encouraged to think about what sort of animation we’d like to carry out.

I decided to do my mystery box animation in cg as that is still an area that I’m very unfamiliar in but would like to expand my familiarity with.

We discussed thoroughly planning out the emotions of our mystery box animation in an acting class and I can definitely say that I’m still uncomfortable with being in front of a camera of just acting in general. I definitely don’t posses and innate aptitude for it and am very stiff and bad at communicating emotions visually. 

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FEBRUARY 15th - STORY BOARDING MASTERCLASS 

I’m definitely finding that I most enjoy the early planning stages of animating in terms of story boarding and designing as well as 2D animation. I could definitely work on learning how to illustrate more communicative key poses but overall I fell like I manage to quickly draw clear draft work quickly. I know it probably looks like I took a long time to draw all this because of the colour switch but it’s actually the opposite. I find that first working in a light coloured pencil takes out a lot of initial hesitance and overthinking while I’m working and then I can quickly go over key details in pencil. So the light pencil helps cut out a lot of initial hesitation because even if I mess up my initial sketch lines I can amend them with the pencil that I go over them with. 

 Once I get a better understanding of how to convey emotions in a drawing I feel as though overall my story boarding/drafting ability will be one of the strong points of my skill set.

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MY HORRIBLE FIRST ATTEMPT AT ACTING OUT MY MYSTERY BOX ANIMATION

Honestly, I’m so uncomfortable behind a camera and a horrible actor. It doesn’t help that we had to perform in front of our peers. I know I’m being really harsh on myself since we’re all just first year students trying to figure it all out but I still feel like I’m really stiff and bad at expressing motions. In general I fell like I have a hard time communicating with others and I feel like that most manifests when it comes time to convey specific emotions or messages.