#y3a2

[crossartanistudio]

Conclusion

There were little bits of the cat which I did not get around to animating - the collar and the bow. Mostly I did not touch the collar as it was underneath and not often seen and I had little time left.

I did not animate the bow because of the above. The sides were attached - unevenly at that - at the points where I would animate them.

The above is as far as I could lift the bows on either side without any weird effects, so it was quite limited. I could have done this, but with the exaggerated jumps and such of the cat, I think it would have looked underwhelming. 

Regardless, in my ILP I said I would animate the cat and the item it chases, not ‘the cat, its accessories, and the item it chases.’  I do feel that the animation worked out quite well and pushed my limits to do better, as I could not have done something like before, but it could always be better. I feel it gave me a push to be more interested in 3D animation in general. The rendered version is a massive disappointment to me, and perhaps it is my fault for not communicating more, but I felt so put down that I did not want to communicate anymore after submitting my work to be dealt with, and I feel my thoughts would have been dismissed with more ‘don’t tell me how to do my own job role’ again. It is either that, or the ending was deliberately tampered with to make it appear as if nothing happened from that angle, and as if I were lazy with it, which I was not. It was a quickly wrapped ending, but the plot ending is there, which is not shown from the back angle Anisha chose. The facial expressions and pivotal moment where the cat calms down are not shown. I wanted that moment to have a feeling of wonder and it does not translate across whatsoever from the back. I feel this will be blamed on me at the showing, if we have one, and I cannot do much about it.  Overall, I am happy that I learned more about animation in this project, but the group work ruined things a great deal. I would have been able to wrap things up better and faster if I had not been waiting on Anisha, and I regret asking for others’ input into the plot change after the squirrel rig was found to be broken. Perhaps that sounds unfair, but as I animated everything, I could have avoided a whole lot of trouble if I left the plot of what I was animating as my decision as well, which is why I did not ask for input in the final change and said I would wrap it up as I could on our short time. 

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Cat Breathing As in the beginning, I thought it would be a nice touch to animate the cat’s breaths, making it so that they are heavier at first right after chasing and shaking off the leaf, but slowly calming down. I did this by spacing out the keyframes.  The blink the cat does at the end at the leaving leaf was supposed to be a way of her saying they are ‘good’ now in response to the kiss, as cats tend to blink as a way to show you love. That would have been the cue to fade to black after this point if the camera had chosen to stay with the cat at the ending. 

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Leaf Flies Away Apologies for the horrible quality at the beginning of this video. What I am showing here is how I set about animating the leaf to fly off after kissing the cat. I wanted there to be two ending options for the camera - watching the cat watch the leaf leave, or following the leaf as it floats away, which is why I animated it this way. I animated it to fly off for a quite a bit, so that there was enough footage for this to be an option, and to ideally fade to black. Cat Expression Change

As seen here, I wanted the cat to ‘soften’ when the leaf kisses her, losing her glare.

I started to add final touches to the cat’s movements, as here she rearranges her feet/shifts her weight after shaking off the leaf. I also thought it would be a nice touch for her to lift her paw as the leaf kisses her, in surprise. I wanted the ‘pressure’ of the kiss to move the cat to the side in a comedic way but settled for a softer version of it.

As I wanted two types of possible endings, the cat watching it or following the leaf, I tried to make it more interesting for the ending where we watch the cat, so I added in little movements like a curious head tilt as she watches. 

For the kiss, I then added in little touches like how the cat’s ears go back in surprise here for a second. 

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Leaf Alone Once blocking in the leaf positions, I turned off the Display layer for the ball and worked more on the leaf movements. I had some minor difficulties with the leaf animations, as I wanted to have one animation layer for their overall translatory movement, and one for how they twirl around, so that their keyframes would not get tangled. This backfired a little and the layers ended up overwriting the positions of the other a little.  Eye Movements I had to move around the eye positions of the cat after this video, as the leaf was positioned a little differently to the ball and floated around more, so I wanted her eyes to follow them as they do. 

As seen above, I sorted the eye movements and I am pretty pleased with how those turned out, as it feels more like the cat is transfixed on the leaf. Leaf On Back

One of the trickiest parts of the animation was this, ‘attaching’ of the leaf to the cat’s back. I am sure there is an easier way to do this, such as parenting the objects to each other, but I did it manually as I was running out of time and could not waste it on tutorials at this stage.  The above is a WIP version of this, but this proved trickier than I thought it would be. I had to use two perspective views for this - top and side, as I found when I looked from one of the other angles after being in the first, the leaf was not as close to the cat as it should be. 

I next wanted the leaf to fly off realistically, so I had to set it to go off at the correct angle if it were to fly back around to sneak up on the cat to kiss her. 

I wanted the cat’s eyes to look around suspiciously in this part while the leaf sneaks around her after being thrown off. The leaf rotation here was a bit of a pain, more than I expected it to be. I believe the twirl around the top I did there maybe would have gone more smoothly if I had researched into the Graphic Editor more and its animation settings, but manually it turned out fine. 

I next animated the head of the cat to search around for the leaf, wanting the leaf to sneak past her vision a second before she looks to our left, as in the beginning of the animation when she slept. The head movements are still stiff in this version. I was considering this comedic type of end, where this time she looks around quickly, as if to say the leaf cannot fool her this time.  Leaf Personality

Throughout the animation here I felt like I wanted to add a playful element to the leaf, like it knows it is annoying the cat. It made me think of way back when I did flour sack animations to try and give them personality and life, I wanted to think how I could apply this here. Such as in the above, I thought it would be effective if I have the leaf ‘wiggle’ with the cat, so it is as if they are both gearing up to pounce, then it deliberately jumps on her head to tease her before running off. I wanted to have this element throughout and for the cheek kiss at the end to feel like ‘thanks for playing with me, I was just teasing ya’ and for the cat to be a little taken aback by it.  Leaf Kiss Progress

I wanted somehow combine the ‘you can’t fool me’ element where the cat finds where the leaf is with the kiss, so the above is the first version of this, where she finds the leaf and it immediately kisses her. 

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Leaf Research I looked into leaves and how to make the leaf animation ‘floatier.’ I used the following references when animating. 

I looked into different ways to animate them. They tend to fall slowly, twirl around themselves and shift side to side. 

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Environment Inclusion

At this stage, I asked for the environment to be given to me, as I was to animate the cat running into the tree at the end and so I wanted it to be accurate. The final environment could be swapped out and cylinder trees were set in for the time being. 

I was confused at this stage, as the storyboard showed that the environment would be shown first, slowly zooming onto the sleeping cat. However, the environment had been created the wrong way round. 

If we were to do the things the way we planned, we would either be zooming onto the cat’s backside, rather than their front, or we would be seeing the back gate, as above. 

I asked Anisha to rotate the environment so that her work would be seen, she agreed but after a week I asked her about it and she claimed she didn’t understand what I was saying, although others in the group clearly did and helped to make it clear. She then became argumentative, claiming I was speaking to her badly and I shouldn’t be telling her what to do with her job role. However, my work at this stage directly interacted with hers so I needed to know how things would be set. I had figured she would be rotating it in the time she had said, and had gone about creating another tester tree cylinder, as above on the right, her original on the left. I did this so that I could set for myself exactly where the tree would be once rotated, using the Channel Box to set it exactly in reverse of the first tree. It later became news to me that she meant for the cat to be further to the right on the grass, nowhere near the first left tree. I had asked her earlier on which tree I should be crashing the cat into and she had no qualms about me using that one, which implied to me it would be near to it in the first place.  End Plot Change Things took a bad turn with the argument and she became so horrible to work with that I stated that I would be changing the ending, wrapping it up as fast as I could, and that the cat would not be interacting with the environment and that this would be best for everyone. This was so that our roles would not have to interact and so that I would not have to ask for her help, as I would not receive any if I did. She replied normally to this only for me to later find out that she never understood what I was saying, again, and apparently that was too vague for her. I am not sure what she understood ‘best for everyone’ to mean, in that case, but I was trying to state that it would be best if our roles stopped crossing. I could not work with her past that point and she proved with her backlash at me for changing things that I did the right thing.  I changed the ending so that instead of the cat crashing into a tree after chasing the leaf, the leaf instead kisses the angry cat on the cheek and she calms down, then it flies away. She claimed I was being ‘immature’ about changing this, and that my work affected others roles, but no one else complained at me about it. I had already stated the obvious that this would happen. This happened over a week after I had posted my final version, with an accompanying video - which she never bothered to watch - for everyone to see how it ended, but mostly for Chandi’s sound reference. Furthermore, she had already stated much earlier in the project that she would be animating the trees to sway, so if I ‘affected her job role’ by not having the cat crash into the trees, she could very well have gone ahead and still done this, but chose not to. I thought she understood what I said when I said the cat would no longer interact with the environment - which was not planned to be in any way other than the tree crashing. I tried to say it in a tactful manner. She could have asked if she did not understand my meaning.  I could have informed the group in more detail how I was changing things, yes, but having to deal with her was affecting me mentally. I said I would wrap things up the way I could and wanted to move on from dealing with her. It only became a ‘group issue’ when it was someone other than her doing something ‘out of line’ yet she could not see her own faults and how awful she was to work with. 

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Ball Leaf Replacement Once the leaf was done, I set about blocking in its movements as in the above, animating it to follow the movements the ball had followed.  In the final version, having the ball as the reference placement may have made the leaf movements look a little strange. As I was setting the ball as a bouncy item, I had to then go back and adjust the leaf’s sequence into something floatier. 

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Squirrel Glitches At this stage, the squirrel rig was ready and given to me to work with. However, there was one big issue with it. Pia reckoned this may have had something to do with the grouping of squirrel parts in the Outliner, but they never found a fix for it.  As seen, the squirrel can be moved with the Translate tool just fine, but for some reason, when this is keyframed and played back, the rig glitches inside out itself badly.  I was rather relieved, in fact, that the squirrel did not work. I had asked the 3D modeller to create the squirrel in such a way that it would be bouncy, such as the ball, with a rig control in the centre for squash and stretch. That is the only control I required and she did not do this, even after I had already stated I did not have any plans to animate the squirrel realistically. This was how I planned to animate the squirrel. I had stated this from the beginning and yet she created a realistic rig which would have forced me to change the style I was going for. 

Plot Changes Due to the squirrel breaking, we had to move on from the squirrel idea and onto something else for the cat to chase. We were quite a way into the year and at this stage I should have just told the others that I would continue with the cat chasing the ball and that would be it, but I asked for their input instead of what they would like for the plot to change to. The ball idea was presented, and we thought over having the cat asleep, dreaming of chasing a magical ball, for its movements to make sense from so far of what I have animated. However, another idea was presented, of the cat chasing a leaf.  Anisha stated she would create this leaf, which took her a week, which would have taken anyone else a day, and did not update anyone on it, getting snappy when asked where it was by the end of the week. When Pia volunteered to quickly create a leaf instead, Anisha stated it would affect her job role and the arguments became worse from there later on.  I sincerely regret letting any of the others have any input on the plot at that stage. If I had just animated the cat chasing a ball as I wished to, things could have been gotten done much quicker. This is why I stated much later that I would be changing the ending and dealt with the how of it myself, although I did state what it would affect.  Meanwhile waiting for the leaf and idea changes, I continued with animating the third jump sequence for the cat.