There were some problems with this animation, mainly the lip sync; I had no problems animating the jaw up and down, but I did have problems with the other controls for the facial animation i.e. when I animate 1 keyframe, it wouldn’t let me move the plus button up/down/sideways on the next keyframe, meaning that I couldn’t make an accurate lip sync which was very bad because this meant that I was limited/forced to only have jaw movements as my lip sync animation.
I checked online and it wasn’t only me who was having these problems with the rig on 3DS max (e.g. http://www.11secondclub.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=28262) and I couldn’t ask my friends because they were all animating in Maya so they didn’t have the same problems I did. The creator also stated that there were some problems with the facial rig and that “the rig is a w.i.p. and I’ll probably never finish it” (http://www.3dluvr.com/clisk3d/).
If there was something I could improve in the future besides the lip sync animation, it would be that I could perhaps improve the secondary animation, mainly the hand/finger movement when he plays the piano because it still seems a bit robotic even though I used multiple keyframes. I would also make the general movements more fluid to make it look more lifelike which would improve the overall quality.
In the future, it would be nice if we could use our own audio clip from e.g. a movie/video/song or maybe add sound effects on top of the audio recording and perhaps have a longer time frame to work with as we were a bit limited with our options for this project.
Overall, the assignment went well because even though this was my first lip sync animation and there were some challenges involved, I still learned a few things and enjoyed working on this assignment.
To animate my animation, I started by animating the basic jaw movements and I did this by watching the video above to see their method of mouth/jaw movement and apply it to my own animation.
Once I finished animating the jaw, I then animated the head movement to make it look more natural because if the head doesn’t move slightly from side to side, then it would seem very robotic so I made him look around slightly.
I then animated his arms to make it look like he is playing the piano and besides from animating the arms, I also made him move his fingers to fit with the animation.
Most of the arm/finger movement was repeated/looped because it fits with the song/audio used in the animation; the piano keys used for most of the animation were constant so there was no need to move the arms/fingers at different locations as that wouldn’t match the keys in the animation.
The next step was to animate the eyes and the eyebrows to coincide with the emotions he feels on certain parts of the animation.
The final part of the audio clip was a loud slamming of the piano and I thought that I could use this to create a dramatic ending where after he slams his hands on the keys for the first slam, then he would put his hands on his head and then slam his head on the piano at the end.
We were given an .obj file of a robot and we were meant to practice rendering/lighting/camera using this model and use the Arnold renderer and lights.
I added two Arnold lights, a cool one on the left and a warm one of the right as well as a simple, plain background to show the shadows of the model. I also added a simple material (Arnold standard surface) and played around with the settings to give it a metallic finish.
I then created another material (again, Arnold standard surface) but changed the colour and also the value of specular reflections.
These are the Arnold renderer settings I used for the renders; the default values for all of them were 2 so I had to increase them, otherwise there would be a lot of noise and the render would be too grainy.
As the values of these settings go up, so does the render time so I had to keep that in mind when setting the values to make sure there would be a balance between quality and render time with my lip sync animation as that would have hundreds of frames to be rendered.
As a practice, we were asked to play around with the facial rigs and create an ‘emotion change’ animation as an experiment, which I then rendered but without any lighting or environment/background/cameras.
For the research, I decided to look into the musical and different piano play styles so that I could get a nice secondary animation with the hands and slight body/head movements to make the animation look more natural.
This was the video I looked at to see how her fingers moved as she played the piano and see if I could apply that to my own animation.
This was the main video that I looked at since he was playing Hamilton so I could at both the jaw/head movements as well as the hand movements while he played the song.
I also looked up the lyrics to the song (http://www.themusicallyrics.com/h/351-hamilton-the-musical-lyrics/3706-alexander-hamilton-lyrics.html) because in some part of the audio clip, I wasn’t 100% sure what word(s) was said.
My animation would be a simple one where the character would be playing the piano; the audio has someone playing the piano and the notes were repeated so the hand movements of the character for that part would be repeated and somewhat similar but then in the ending, he would place his hands on his head and lean on the piano keys which I think would match with the ending of the audio because in the clip, it ends with the keys being slammed.
I drew some quick sketches of different angles featuring the rig and a piano to visualise the scene and get an idea of how it will look.
Angle 1 was the first and main idea I had in mind for the camera angle as it showed showed all of the piano as well as the character and during the animation, the character’s movements should be easily noticed at this angle/distance.
Angle 2 was the next angle that I thought of; I thought that I might try using more than one camera so the animation would start off in this angle then cut to a camera in front of the character and the piano to show the lip sync.
This angle would show all of the character’s movements but the other angles were better because those two would have static cameras and the audience would be able to focus more on the lip sync of angles 1 & 3 better than this one.
Angle 3 had an angle where the camera would be placed on top of the piano keys and point towards his face. This would be another good angle because it would clearly show the facial animations/lip sync as well as the hand/finger movements while he plays the piano but the camera might be too close and it might not be obvious at first glance that he is playing a piano.
I will most likely be using angle 1, but I may reduce the distance and move the camera closer to the character (the full piano would no longer be in view, so some of the bottom part/feet would most likely be out of shot) so that the facial movements would be more recognisable.
After deciding which audio and rig to use, I thought of how I would make this short animation and I imagined that it would feature someone playing the piano since that was the instrument used in the audio clip and I imagined him playing it on a stage since the audio is from the musical called ‘Hamilton’.
So i looked online and compiled some images of pianos and camera angles and other references that I could look at as well as looking at most of the entries from the August 2017 competition (mainly the 2nd placer).
Modelling wasn’t a requirement in this assignment, so I didn’t make any 3D models, instead we were asked to go the 11 second club website and find a pre-made rig (http://www.11secondclub.com/resources) and I chose to use the ‘Max’ rig created by Peter Starostin and James Hunt.
I chose this rig because I wanted to use this rig because I wanted to animate in 3ds Max due to having a lack of knowledge/experience in Maya and most of the rigs from the resources only had Maya rigs whereas the Max rig had rigs for both software.
As for the audio, I looked at the previous entries from most of the recent competitions in the Archives tab of the 11 second club website and was mainly interested in ‘Hamilton’ which was the audio used in the August competition (http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/august17).
I liked this audio because most of the other audio was just people talking normally and this one stood out and was more interesting to me because it was from the musical and featured singing as well as a piano.
We started the new project by going over the assignment brief and it said that we have to create a short animation that used audio from the 11 second club website (http://www.11secondclub.com/).
The animation we had to create was a lip sync animation where we would match a character rig’s movements with the audio; the main focus of this assignment would be the facial animation as well as secondary animation e.g. body movement but other areas would also be marked e.g. environment, lighting, render quality, etc.
This was my first organic model and I found it to be very interesting and challenging at the same time. I enjoyed doing this project most of the time I was working on it and it was a good learning experience for me as I was still new to 3-D modelling as a whole.
I was very pleased with how my character looked in the end, considering that I was still new to ZBrush, my model looked better than I expected. I would consider this assignment to be a success because I was able to recreate my original 2-D concept art in 3-D and being able to keep most of my initial ideas.
The modelling process was slow at the start due to me being new, but as I spent more time modelling in ZBrush, my workflow started to improve and so did the quality of my work. The tutorials that I’ve watched helped me a lot during the creation process and they taught me so many new things about ZBrush that I will be applying in my future projects.
My weak point in this project was mainly the rigging; I spent so much time trying to rig properly and had some frustrations when I was posing my character and it was mostly trial and error, which didn’t end up with good results most of the time and even when I had a decent rig, I still had to do a lot of cleaning up and resculpting/adding details to ensure that nothing was lost in my model. Since rigging was my weak point in this assignment, I would like to improve on that in my future work in ZBrush and be able to create more dynamic poses and also hopefully be able to create more complicated models/rigs.
I haven’t done hard surface modelling in ZBrush before so I was unsure on how to approach it since ZBrush is used more for organic models but I decided to give it a try by appending shapes and then scaling them to see how it would look initially and I really like the Gear3D mesh so I decided to use that as the dagger’s hilt/pommel instead of a cylinder/sphere/ring that I would’ve added details to.
I then tried making the blade and the guard by using ZSpheres once more and it started to look like the dagger in my concept art (with a few small changes such as the hole in the middle of the blade and mainly the Gear3D pommel).
However, after a few hours of trial and error with the different brushes that are meant to be used for hard surface modelling (planar, hPolish, trimDynamic, etc.), I was unable to make it look like an actual blade and instead ended up looking like a dull/blunt object.
I really didn’t like how my dagger was looking, so I decided that I should probably scrap this version and work on a new one, but this time, watch a tutorial so that I would end up having a dagger that actually looked sharp.
I checked Pluralsight and found a tutorial by Justin Marshall (https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/game-assets-zbrush-1063/exercise-files) and in the video, he shows a step by step process of creating a very detailed model for a dagger, but I didn’t watch all the videos since I didn’t want/need a dagger with that much level of detail but I did apply some of his work to my own.
He started his tutorial by making this dagger with a tri-blade design and it caught my interest because it looked very unique and interesting, so I thought that I should create a dagger with that same tri-blade design instead of a normal looking dagger.
I decided to keep the hilt and handle from my previous attempt as I really liked the look of the Gear3D mesh on top of the dagger. I also added some grooves to the dagger’s handle, while still following Justin’s tutorial since at this point, our daggers are looking very similar, except for the dagger’s pommel.
I liked the look of my dagger, but there was still something missing, so I tried adding some rings to the dagger’s guard and adding gold materials that I downloaded from the Pixologic website and I chose this colour because I thought it would be a good source of contrast from the overall colour scheme of my model. I also added minor details to the handle by using a combination of the standard brush and alpha 58, which gave it a somewhat worn out look.
I made her wing membrane by appending a cube and then scaling it and thinning it into shape so that it would look like actual wings. I got this idea while looking at dragon wings and saw a video on YouTube of someone sculpting dragon wings (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9RACCo4noc) and he used the method I just stated so I applied it to my own work, which was very helpful as I wasn’t too sure how I would approach the creation of the wing membrane.
I had to use the move brush a numerous amount of times to get the placement correctly, along with the ZRemesher to fix the stretched out polygons. I then applied a lighter shade of the ‘Gorilla’ material which I really liked as the colour scheme and wing structure resembles a bat wing in my eyes.
I will also be adding holes and cuts/tears to give her wings a more rugged/damaged look and I have been looking at a few references but the main ones I looked at and liked were the wings of Illidan Stormrage, a character from World of Warcraft. I also found a picture of a dragon wing drawing that had that same look that I wanted, so I will be using this as a reference alongside Illidan’s wings.
I found a 3-D model of Illidan’s game character that is used in Heroes of the Storm and I will most likely be using a combination of the dragon wing and Illidan’s wing in this image to use in my own model.
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