Discover Top Posts Tagged with #animation exploration

Module - Animation Exploration

Aspect Ratios are an important consideration when creating animation, as you need to know how much of the frame you need to create. The most common aspect ratios used for screens are 4:3 and 16:9.

It’s important to keep the aspect ratio in mind when storyboarding, as well as stating what type of shot you’re using (Such as Close Up, Medium, Wide etc.). When creating a storyboard, you also need to state what scene & what shot each panel is for (Shots are different camera angles set up in a scene). It is common for storyboards to feature arrows that show character/object movements and camera movements, such as panning shots. Every action depicted in a storyboard should be dynamic and clear.

Storyboards can then be turned into animatics, which help lock-in the timing, how long an animation will be/take to create, and how much it’ll cost, which is helpful when creating work for industry. No change dates are important when working professionally, as you need to have enough time to meet deadlines. It’s also a good idea, when negotiating a deadline, to add a week or two to your estimates, so as to give yourself time to work through problems.

We ended today’s session by doing a Retroboarding activity. Retroboarding is when you create a storyboard based on a finished piece of work, trying to figure out how the original storyboard looked like. It’s an exercise that puts professional work into perspective. It has been a while since I produced storyboarding work, so considering that I am rather pleased with the work I produced. I chose to collaborate with a friend who doesn’t do much storyboarding work, which may have slowed me down in hindsight, but the exercise gave me a better idea of how professional work emerges through the same creative processes we use. We chose a scene from The Incredibles (2004). I also start working on some preliminary anatomical sketches!

#ma #ma animation #masters #masters degree #storyboarding #animation exploration

Module - Animation Exploration

During this week's lecture, we held a tutorial for Unreal Engine 5. I've never used this program before, so it was interesting trying to come to grips this program. Given that this engine was created by Epic Games, their store has many different objects, rigs, game elements, etc. available. For example MetaHumans, which allows you to create realistic-looking humans for use in Unreal, or Valley of the Ancients, a digital recreation of a mountain range that looks realistic, given that it was partially created using Photogrammetry. Game engines such as Unreal are revolutionising rendering, given that game engines can render high-detail models in a shorter time frame, foregoing the need to rely on environmentally & monetarily unfriendly render farms. Other ways game engines are helping save the environment is with the use of LED screens, replacing green screens and chromakeying, which involves prolonged render times, or location filming.

When we finally opened up the program, I found that in many ways using Unreal Engine is somewhat similar or using Maya in some key ways. The way you move & rotate objects, as well as the camera controls, are similar between both programs. In Unreal, you can add a skyline to the background, allowing you to quickly create a sky box that can automatically generate clouds, with different options for different times of day. Similar to Maya, you can place light sources and move / rotate them around. A feature that can be useful for moving objects is the ability to turn on Snapping, which only allows you to move objects in increments of 10.

One thing you can't do in Maya, but can in Unreal is exploring the environment like a video game, using the WASD keys to move. The equivalent of creating a new scene, as in Maya, is creating a new level. We also learned about normal mapping, an optical trick that uses texture to create the illusion of depth. This is the first time I've ever used Unreal Engine, so it was interesting to me just how similar this program is to Maya, as I couldn't help comparing the two as I used it.

#ma #ma animation #animation exploration #unreal engine #unreal 5

Module - Animation Exploration

I recently had to deliver the first draft of a presentation we need to have finished for the end of this module, presenting the work we’ve done so far and what our plans are going forward. I received some feedback, starting with the observation that my project lacks focus. My project so far has been operating under divergent thinking, essentially the ideation & experimentation. But that from here on, and this needs to be clear in the final version of my presentation, I need to find some focus for my project, employing convergent thinking & whittling down the number of animals I intend to focus on to a select few. I’ve given thought to possibly focusing on just dogs, cats & birds, although I would like to incorporate a less obvious choice, like cows. My project also needs more visual research, mainly observational drawing & in-depth anatomy research. A great resource for this would be more medical references & research. I need to make a critical decision, are my animations going to be realistic or cartoony? Fictitious or scientific? I could greatly improve my observational drawing by visiting a zoo or animal museum, or sitting outside and drawing animals I see. One idea that was suggested was creating a chimera animal, a mixture of two or more animals into one being.

#ma #ma animation #animation exploration #presentation

Module - Animation Exploration

(Link to Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/768612708) During a recent lecture we held a tutorial on biped walk cycles. I've done walks in Maya using 3-D rigs before, so this was a familiar task for me. However, I did find working with a different rig difficult, even after having previously tried posing the rig. Having to learn how the control nodes for this particular rig worked was a minor challenge for me. One feature I got to try out that I haven't used before was Auto-Keyframe, a feature that allows you to move the rig, then move on without having to manually set the keyframes for each node you've moved. It allows you to get work done quickly, but with less control over correcting mistakes. Something we were taught that I tried to implement were slight turns of the hips with each step, as well as the shifting of weight on the hips, with the shoulders following suit too. For a quickly put together, relatively unpolished exercise, I feel like the walk I produced here came out alright. Comparing this lower effort walk with the first Maya walk cycle I created as a first year undergraduate, when I was trying my best at the time, it's night and day. I feel that the walk is too fast and stompy, so if I was to redo this walk I would like to create a more casual, relaxed walk.

#ma #ma animation #animation exploration

I attended a life drawing session for the first time in a while. Trying to come to grips with using charcoal, a medium I’m not accustomed to, made for an interesting challenge. We were given different amounts of time to draw each sketch, so some are 1 minute sketches, sons are 10 minute drawings, and some are 15 minute drawings. Some good advice I received was to try drawing using up more of the canvas, producing larger drawings which would allow for finer detail. I think life drawing sessions can be an immense help to my work, given that it can help improve my ability to translate the proportions of an animal into a drawing, as well as accurately transcribing details. The work I produced today was rough around the edges, and I struggled to portray accurate proportions at times. But I feel I improved as the session progressed and I got more and more practice.

I also began working on creating a quadruped leg, based on a dog, in After Effects.

#ma #ma animation #animation exploration #masters degree #life drawing

Module - Animation Exploration

We began this week's first session by watching an animated short called MAN (2012), which represents man-made climate change through striking imagery. It was also animated using a program called Adobe After Effects, a program I have prior experience with. We held an extensive tutorial on this program, taking a deep dive into the program. We learned how to animate an image sequence, depicting a boy walking, in the program, animating them, then looping the footage so that you can then drag the asset across the screen, making them walk. We also learned how to place pins into different assets, attaching them together to create a puppet with separate articulated parts that move together.

One major difference between After Effects and Premiere Pro is that with Premiere Pro, you have to build up the timeline/length of the production as you go along, whereas with After Effects you have to set how many seconds long the sequence will be when you begin working, and it's generally a good idea to give yourself an extra second of leeway. From here we began discussing backgrounds. When designing backgrounds, especially multi-layered or parallax backgrounds, it's important that you fill in the parts of the background that you would think are hidden behind the foreground, as it allows you a greater range of movement without the edge of the background's bottom becoming visible (This is called underpainting). Once a 2-D background is put in After Effects, you can create a 3-D space within which the background layers can move around and scroll.

#ma #ma animation #animation exploration #after effects

Module - Animation Exploration

In the past week my class held a seminar on using character rigs in Maya. Given my previous experience with Maya, I found this task to be a good refresher for working with models in Maya, given how long it’s been since I used this program to animate rigged characters. While this exercise didn't involve actually animating the rig, being able to practice moving a rigged model again was immensely useful to me. I also got to try using a new rig, with somewhat different controls to the previous rig I used, Buckid. One way that this new rig is limited compared to Buckid though is its lack of a face, even a simple one like Buckid had.

Later in the week we experimented with XR (Extended Reality), a term that refers to Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) & Mixed Reality (MR), discussing the uses of these different but related disciplines towards creating animation work. This builds off previous discussions we’ve had about VR and animation in the past, such as discussing ZBrush, but with us actually getting to try out the technology for ourselves this time. Getting some hands-on experience with a type of work I'm generally unfamiliar with was interesting, seeing new possibilities for hybrid work that can encompass a wider range of different disciplines, including virtual workspaces too.