Oktober Animation Test Day 4

Hey Everyone!

Welcome back the last post and the last day for the Oktober animation test! I will basically go over what I did on the last day of the test, which involves animating the lip sync and adding in the polishing touches to the animation, to add that cherry on top of a already delicious animated cake :).

The last day of the test, I pretty much had everything in place, the animation should feels good with overlaps, offsets and the timing were spot on to my liking. The one thing that I haven't done yet is the lip sync, and it is something I always felt that you can't really block out, and the reason for that is because the dialogue itself is not blocked out, so you can't really get that sense of timing with the lip movement through blocking, and it would just look really weird. You can potentially block out the lip sync, but I think you would need to block out the poses on every second frame to really get a hold of timing in my opinion. Before even starting to pose the lips, I would listen to the dialogue out a few times, sometimes even take video references of my lips to get some new fresh ideas on how to pose the lips. I would then write out the words on paper, and I would write down the words in a phonetic sense based on the dialogue, with the words written down I would then note the areas where the mouth would open or close, there is more to it then that of course, I just don't want to go into details on that, at a later post maybe :P. I would basically pose the lip position in spline, and as I pose the lips I will also put in the eye brown positions. The thing I love about lip syncing is that the timing for the mouth is already in place for you, and you really only need to position the lips in interesting and convincing ways :). The tongue is something I don't really concern too much, and it really depends on how close your character will be to the shot, the closer the shot is to the character's face, the more time you will need to spend on the tongue. Blinking is probably the easiest thing to add to any character, the trick with it, is that you have to make sure that there is at least three frame hold when the eyes close, this will make it fast enough to be a blink and long enough for the audience to feel the blink, anything faster will start feeling really awkward. When animating the face and the eye browns you don't want it to be too animated, you want to have more holds in between poses, then have poses for every word, if you video yourself saying a dialogue, you will notice that you don't tend to change your eye brown position a lot, there maybe subtle and quick changes, but never large movements.

With the lip sync all in place and the animation looking "oh!" so fine~, I moved onto polishing the animation, at this stage you should be happy with the overall animation, as a matter of fact you can pretty much start rendering it out. The thing that I think a lot of starting animators don't quite understand, (especially me when I was told about polishing) is that polishing is just about adding the small little touches to the animation, there should be no changes at all to the core animation. Polishing is all about, adding the little compression in fingers, the little staggers and shakes that happen in a angry person's hand, the squishes in the cheeks as a person touches their face, the follow through that can happen with a character's jaw, subtle small things that makes audience feel that softness in the animation. Polishing to me is like that last little scrape off a already prefect sculpture, and that scrape is the difference between perfection and godlike. So don't panic about polishing, if anything it should be pretty mindless fun :).

So that was pretty much the four day test, I could go into a lot more details on what I did on those four days, but what I really wanted to give everyone was a general idea of what could be done in four days time. The one thing to come out of this is the importance of planning, I don't think I would have managed to get the animation done, if I didn't spend the time in planning, throughout the four days I wasn't really stressing out about the time, and I wasn't panicking or struggling with the body mechanics, and I think that is all due to good planning on day one. I really had a lot fun doing the test, and I was happy with my outcome, I am of course disappointed that Oktober didn't invite me into their internship for "Aliens Vs Monsters", but I guess they had their reasons ( Might have been the tie and vest in the interview that threw them off).

I hope these posts has been kinda helpful, again what I am writing in these post, are not from a professional background, they are more from experience, things that I have come across during my animation study, and my study of life itself. So I hope you enjoy the end results, it could still do with a lot more work of course :).

Cheers,
Meng the Hobbit

Oktober Animation Test Day 3

Hey Everyone!

Welcome back to my blog, and today we will be continuing on with day three of the animation test, in this section I will be talking about what I did in the "Splinning" stage of the animation, the kind of routines that I get into whenever I head into this stage, and explaining the pitfalls that may happen during the course of animating at this stage.

I find that there is a lot of animators who hear the word "Spline" and they would panic and freak out! Or they would shake their head in dismay, and I wouldn't blame them, it is probably the most frustrating stage of animation, especially for animators like me starting out and still working out the kinks in body mechanics, but I do find that if you had a really good plan that lead towards good amount of blocking and inbetweens, coming to this stage of animation work won't be too bad.

The thing that scares a lot of animators about this stage of animation, is that all the timing efforts they put into blocking, getting it right, making it snappy, goes down the drain. That's why I mentioned in the last post to not put too much effort into getting the timing precise in blocking, the "Spline" stage is where you will really feel the timing. So with everything in 'Spline' the animation will be all smoothed out, and you will see all your timing off, don't panic! What I do at the start, is fix the timing, start moving all the key poses closer to each other if you need them to move from one pose to the next a little faster or if you want poses to take longer move them apart a bit more, if there is a key pose you know you want to hit at a particular frame, just create a hold from the last pose a little longer before hitting that pose. Play with the timing and get it right before even thinking about getting the arcs and overlap into the animation.

After getting all that timing correct and sorted, comes the arcs. This is very important to get a hold of, it took me a long time to understand the importance of movements working in a circle, and the very first thing you want to smooth out is the character's core movement. The character's core movement is the body itself, if you study enough motion in life you will notice that everything moves in a circular fashion, even the body, though it maybe the world's most subtle movement. The core is important to get right first because it effects everything else, from the head, arms and legs.When I first learned about that I thought "Wow! That solves all my issues!", so I started to make everything move in a circular fashion for example even when I want the body to move straight up and down I would try to add a circular movement for it, which was good, but I did it too much! I exaggerated the circular movement, and the animation ended up looking really choppy, because the core would be circling in large movements in the smallest frames. So what I am trying to say here is, yes! Put arcs and circles in, but know when to exaggerate and when to use it subtly.

As I am putting in the arcs and getting the core right, I will also be refining the timing between poses, working out the ease in, and ease outs, and changing the spacing between poses as I go. Spacing was again another one of the many animation principle that is easy to learn, but very hard to understand, I am only now just starting to understand spacing believe it or not. The trick with spacing is that you have to understand that it works in conjunction with the number of frames you are working with, for example you can still make a movement feel slow within a small number of frames, by making the spacing between each pose closer, and at the same time I can still make very fast movement with a large number of frames by making the spacing between each pose further apart. So I would play with the arcs and the spacing between poses until I get to what I want from pose to pose, it's very important to remember to get the animation to the way you like, don't let the computer do it and accept it because the computer knows best, the computer doesn't know what's best and what you will end up with is evenly spaced poses, and that leads to very boring smooth animation.

Once all the smoothing is done, this is where I will start offsetting things, making the hand come out of pose later or earlier, always in the back of my mind that the body leads the way in every movement. Majority of your offsetting can be done during your the blocking stage which can save you a bunch of time here, but I will try to explain how to do that in a future post :). The offsetting I would be doing here is just making things land at different times by either two or at most four frames, anymore then that can start looking strange, you just have to play around with it until it feels right to you. At this stage, there is really no turning back, if you are still making decisions on changing the poses, then you are better off scrapping everything and starting again, believe it or not that will actually save you more time, then trying to fiddle around with what you have and frustrating yourself out. There will be times of course when the directory changes the shot, or has a new idea for the shot, and you will need to change it, the best advice I have heard and have tried, is to do what I have been told is "Surgery Animation", I will again explain that at another time :).

With the smoothing, arcs and offsetting all done, I can really start seeing the animation come to life, the character really feels he has weight, personality and the timing is to my liking. The next stage will be adding in the lip sync probably my favorite part of animating (but seems to be hated but most animators) is polishing! So stay tuned and join me for my final post on the test, and I will also upload the outcome of my four day test.

Cheers,
Meng The Hobbit.

Oktober Animation Test Day 2

Hi Everyone,

Welcome back to my four day animation test overview, so in the last post I was basically talking about what I did in the first day of my animation, and the time I spend on planning, which is the MOST important thing :), if you are interested please go back to my previous post for details, there maybe some interesting information there.

Before I get started I forgot to mention in my last post that the animation piece was actually for a 12 second dialogue that was given to me by Oktober beforehand, and before I started even planning I have been listening to it almost everyday until in was in my blood system, by the time I finish my animation test, that 12 second line is now embedded into my memory banks forever! OK so onto day two!

The second day in my animation test I started to work on blocking, now blocking is really where the guts of the animation start to happen, for me it is also a great time to play around with the timing, I do however feel you don't really get the timing until you start splining (smoothing out the animation), but it's always important to put down the timing as early as possible, even if they are rough. When I am blocking at the start, I don't worry about what frame the key poses are to be at, at this point I am just more concerned about getting the poses right, and making sure the character is well balanced from all angles, I usually set each key pose about 10 frames apart for the time. Another thing to note, is to make sure your poses are clear for your camera shot, this is something I forgot to mention at the planning, but make sure you have your camera shot sorted before blocking anything out. If your planning was successful, you wouldn't need to think about the poses while blocking and it saves a heap of time, of course the initial planned poses will not be set in stone, little adjustments will occur as the translation from your 2D drawings to a 3D model can be different.

Once all the key poses are set, I start moving the key poses in the time frame to get a rough sense of timing, making sure to playblast as often as possible, especially working with a low end computer, or working with a really heavy scene, but if you have a meaty computer that breathes fire, or a really light scene, working without playblasting can save a bit of time, as long as you make a playblast at the end to be sure. Now it is up to you whether you want to put the 'inbetweens' as you are plotting in the key poses, or after you added in the key poses, all I know is that I always end up putting in more 'inbetweens' when I am animating a more complex scene, and less so when it's a more subtle scene, the more 'inbetweens' you add, the more you will get a sense of the flow in the animation and you gain more control over the movement, because of the luxury with computers filling in the gaps between poses, we tend to let the computer do the work, and that is a big 'no no' with 3D animation, as taught by my mentors, you are animating the character not the computer :).

So at this stage you really want to lock down the poses, if suddenly you had a great idea or the directory wants you to change something, this is the best time to change things, you can change things at a later stage, and mind you it will happen from time to time, it's going to be like climbing up a steep mountain of sharp knives, painful and the end result will not be what you hoped for, that's why it's so important to show the work to your director once you have things blocked out, and it's the best time to get criticism from people at this stage too. The next step after this is smoothing, probably the most dreaded thing for most animators, but if you blocked well and had a good plan to begin with, you will find that it can actually go "Smoothly".

So stick around for my next post as I talk about what I did in the smoothing at day 3 of my animation test.

Cheers,
Meng the Hobbit.

Oktober Animation Test Day 1

Hello Everyone!

So as promised yesterday, I would start basically recording down what I did for the four day animation test for Oktober, a lot of this stuff you guys and gals probably already know if you are experienced animator, and most of it is just common sense I guess, but I hope it can enlighten you a little bit or it's pleasing to read :).

Planning, that is where it's at, I spend the whole first half of the day planning, not animating, not even touching Maya. I can't stress how important the planning phase of a animation piece is, the more time you spend on the planning the less time you will be spending trying to get the movement right or the mechanics correct, and it always amazes me how fast I seem to animate when I have a good plan. Of course there will be times when there is just no time for planning especially if you are in a deadline or crunch time for a animation studio sweating to get the last few shots in, but it's always good to do a little bit before hand, even if it's a quick sketch or two. So what I did was take my camera with me to the office where I am currently working (Because they have huge open spaces in the boardroom, and I just shove tables to one side :P), take as much video references as I need. I think it always a good idea to do some video references, even if you have a rough idea of what your character is going to do, not only will you feel the movement and understand the weight and balance of the animation, you yourself will start doing these very natural secondary actions without thinking, and it's those little things that can break cliche poses and movements.

After spending a good amount of time recording myself,  and making a fool of myself (Luckily it was a Saturday, where no one was around), I would go back to my laptop, and start studying the video references. As I watch through the reference, I will start picking out key poses and draw them down on my sketchpad, I will usually end up with a few key poses that relate to the overall animation piece. Now here is the bit that I think you don't pick up when you are learning to animate, and it's the most obvious thing in the world, once you have the key poses down, stop and start thinking about how the character will go from one pose to the next, seriously! I mean act it out if you have to, start thinking about where the foot will land, how will the arm swing across to the next pose, and this is the best time to experiment with things, experiment with inbetweens, and start thinking "Oh! What if I have the hand here how will that flow through", start drawing in the inbetweens and experiment!

Once I had the planning down and at this stage I will have pretty much my key poses and inbetweens, dictating the overall movement from pose to pose, I will also have frame numbers in for each pose to pose, it helps by giving me an idea of the timing for each movement. When I first started, it was really confusing for me how animators understood what the number of frames meant, and I am only now starting to figure it out, what I understand now is the following:

• 1 frame, yeah you don't really want to have anything moving at 1 frame.
• 2-3 frames is really fricken fast, snappy speeds.
• 4-5 frames is actually close to being normal speed in most cases.
• 5-10 frames is actually really slow

Again these are just rough estimates to give me an idea of the speed in the movement.

So with the planning sorted, I was ready to start animating and I will leave the details for that on the next post :). Before I leave you guys, I do have one more thing to pass on, I think this is also a very important thing to understand, once you guys get into the industry (With more luck then me :)). When you are given your shot to animate, remember to look at how much time they will give you and plan your time accordingly, it won't always go to plan of course, set time stages in between the time you have, this way you will learn to finish what you need to do and not get carried away in certain stages of your animation, again this is why its important to plan your animation first. The most important thing of all is to animate within the given time, if you have one day to animate a shot, you don't want to start letting your imagination go wild, and think up of crazy things the character will be doing, the times set for shots are always appropriate, if the director gives you a day to do one shot, chances are it won't be a dance shot with 600 characters, it will be a character standing there with maybe a short dialogue, and if that's the case, just animate that, don't make the character start pulling of kung fu moves, so you can prove to the animation director you can animate, remember there is a difference between animating hard and animating smart, you want to be animating smart, especially with a time pressure industry like animation.

So I will leave you guys and gals with that until next time, where I will go over my blocking!

Cheers,
Meng the Hobbit.

Animation Test!

Hi Everyone,

OK OK so it's been really long since I posted something, and I was planning to post everything I have been doing at Animation Mentor, unfortunately I have let that go on the side so badly, that I can't remember all the details of the classes, only the important stuff of course ;). But I can say that I did finish the course and got my diploma! Wohooo!

Since I finished the course, I have been looking for a job in the animation field, and I applied for Oktober, which is a local New Zealand animation studio doing great stuff for Nickelodeon cartoons. I got a interview with them and they got me doing a animation test, but unfortunately I didn't get the internship :(. But that's not going to let me down, if anything it has really given me some confidence in my own work, I was just happy they liked what I could do, just that there were probably people with more talented and experienced out there. Well all the best to them and their projects, maybe some day I will get my chance :).

So what I thought I would do with the following series of post is basically talk about the animation test they got me to do. So I only had four days to animate this 12sec dialogue piece, and I didn't try to work on it for the whole four days without sleep, because what they were looking for was how well I would do in a normal day to day situation, to see what speed and level I was at.

In the next few posts on the blog I will be going through my planning stages, and video references, and finally I will post the result of my animation, so stay tune folks, there might be some interesting things to read up on :), well I hope interesting :P.

Cheers,
Meng the animated Hobbit.

(Class3) Week 6 - Advance Body Mechanics

Greetings again!

So we come to week 6 of class 3, this week I made more progression on the shot, started to smooth the animation out, I could really see the animation coming to place and I am getting the sense of the timing a lot better it seems, it's strange but I can see the timing a lot better when I start putting the animation into spline, it was always hard to work out the timing during the blocking stages. There is definitely a lot of areas that need work, I notice some kinks in places, which I hope to fix in the next few passes.

My mentor however did give me some very kewl advise, the most interesting thing I learned was getting that extra impact on the hammer when it magnetizes on the top part, he told me to add a bit of a squash and stretch on the hammer head to help emphasize the impact.

Again thank you for stopping by, and I keep posting :)

Meng The Hairless Feet Hobbit.

(Class 3) Week 5 - Advance Body Mechanics

Hello again fellow animators!

So we come to week 5 of class 3 in advance body mechanics, this week I started to block in the animation, in the complex parts of the animation I decided to add more inbetweens to get the flow of the animation and movements. It's funny how much we can see and dictate the movement when more inbetweens are put into place, it seems the more complex the movement, the more inbetweens one should add into the animation to really feel the flow, again when I am talking about inbetweens, its more like break downs :).

From here you can tell that I made some pretty dramatic changes to the animation, I had to cut this shot and take things out, cause the initial idea I had in mind took a little long :(. So instead of having him pull the hammer when it gets magnetized on the bottom, he is just going to land on his family jewels, when he attempts to pull the hammer from the top :), and roll off screen to the bottom, which should lead nicely to the third shot.

It's really hard to keep to your frame limit when you have great ideas, but I think I need to discipline myself in this area, as I am sure when working in a studio, the director is not going to let me have an extra hundred frames, unless the director is myself ;).

Again thanks for dropping by and will keep updating as we go.

Meng The Hobbit