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Womball's senior thesis animation, WIP thread

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#1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iL803-8zlJ4

This is my first animation test of my main character for my senior thesis. He’s a spaceman arriving on a planet, and he jumps from his space suit into the foreground to spring into action. Although he is pretty flashy, so he has to strike some heroic poses first.

Let me know what works, doesn’t work, what should be removed. I’m all ears. I’m aware of the drifting of the feet, and slight floating, I will take care of that next render.

In a moment I will post up my zbrush work I have done on the face. I’m open to suggestions in all aspects of this, and I will answer any questions as best I can. Looking forward to some tar and feathering. :evil: :lol:
[zbrushedbullinkusstep1.jpg](javascript:zb_insimg(‘49086’,‘zbrushedbullinkusstep1.jpg’,1,0))

#2

Its lookin cool so far :slight_smile: . Its a bit choppy in places but i figure hes doin the robot, so that should be fine. What is the backing track going to be, I mean, is it going to be in time with music?

#3

Ok, I’ll be honest. Needs a lot of work. Your poses aren’t held, thus not noticeable. The camera and position of your character hurt the shot. Each contortion is distorting your mesh significantly. The jump has no explosiveness to it, no hang time, no weight on landing. You are not involving us in the action. Grab ‘Character Animation with Jeff Lew’, the DVD will really bring you forward. Trust me, I watched Jeff go from zero to hero over the years and he gives some of the best explanation for people getting stated and he is very fast and fluid. This DVD will take what you have and help you add those things that will make it POP! :wink:

#4

I will order that DVD tonight. I will be shooting video reference this weekend so I will redo this scene again. It was a test of the rig and I have seem to found some limitiations which could be funny to exploit. I’m not sure if I need to do that much weight painting, but I may have to smooth some of the weights, especially in the shoulders. When I have my storyboard redone again (second time), would you care to look at it Jason? I will not post it on the forums, since I want the story to remain largely a mystery until the final animation is posted. Don’t want to give away all of the jokes you know!

I am aiming to have the animation done in the next 5 weeks. This will allow me to give my sound design guys and composer enough time to create I think a decent soundscape and soundtrack, and me to have enough time to edit effectively.

I think the deadline is mid April, not positive yet.

Patience with the stars! Don’t know if its going to flop or sail yet. I got a ton of work cut out for me, but now I’m motivated to work really hard, so I think it can be accomplished.

#5

Hey man, I can take a quick look at anything you would like me to see.

By weight I was in no way referring to the geometry, but the character. I assume you’ll fix the geometry to allow stretchiness that you are going for. A key hint, especially what we use in features is not to actually connect the bones. Gives better control. Depending on the software this may be tricky for you, although some apps have the functional capability already. You may need a dummy rig that is conencted to make life easier, with the unconnected version scripted to it, depends on what you have and your overall knowledge.

For what you have, at your level 2 days max to fix. If I ws paying you, 1 day - just so you get an idea of where you would be in the real worls. :wink:

Click on my name and send an email, I’ll respond so that you can reply with the file attached to avoid getting hosed by the SPAMKILLER servers I have. Or provide me with a link. :wink:

#6

I will see what I can do about 2 day. I don’t know about stretchy limbs though, this is my first time rigging in XSI. I may be able to add it via an expression to the bones. I don’t think stretchiness will really be needed plot wise.

I figured out how to reference model, which allows me to update one model/rig file, and the changes propogate to all scenes with this file linked to it.
I will try this floating bone trick for my second limbed character. I have three characters, but one is rather primitive, besides Bullinkus. :smiley:

#7

Fixed the rig, by Sunday. I may have to experiement with weight painting further since I Haven’t animation tested it yet. I will be collectiing source material today from a live victim/classmate. He will be wearing tights and hopefully a fishbowl over his head. I have been redrawing my storyboards from scratch and am about halfway done. I’m using 5x8 index cards and a 2 pencil blue color erase and one 3b to create pretty simple readable cards. Clarity takes time though. :confused: I think it will be awhile before I’m a storyboard artist though, I need to work on speed in this area.

Here’s a new rig test quick render. No textures yet.

rigtest2.jpg

#8

Hey Womball,

I’ve been watching that Jeff Lew Character Animation a few times its pretty nice. I’m new to this 3D genre so I can’t tell how it stacks up to other DVD’s but I gotta say it has a lot of good concrete information. The principles and concepts come across very smooth and well done I thought.

Hope your project turns out well, will check out the updates. Keep up the hard work!!

#9

womball, I was wondering if you had sent the boards. Guess not, I was worried I would have to go a bow down to the SPAM Gods to let you go! :wink:

As a tool of choice I used to recommend MotionBuilder to do up your storyboard/animatics, very fast, gets you basic poses, camera worka nd lighting in real fast. However with the acquisition process from Kaydara to Alias to Autodesk, I’m afraid the price has become prohibitive to any but large companies. And many are balking at the new proposed pipeline from Autodesk. :wink:

AngelJ, many great pieces have been made to help with animation. I feel Jeff Lew has a wonderful ability to get you to the heart of things an aid you in fixing the common mistakes very quickly. You can do a search of the web for his early stuff like ‘Killer Bean’, ‘Johnny Puma’ and of course that ‘Matrix’ movie which I think was a hit. The fact he wasn’t an animation guy to start with and self taught seems to help people who don’t come from the proposed backgrounds.

#10

I would love so much to be able to use a program built for storyboarding! But learning the basics is cheaper and I can use After Effects to attempt to mimic camera moves. It won’t be as pretty as a program will be, but only costs about 5 bucks for the index cards and pencils. :smiley: I figure if I can learn it the old way, I will know it really good when I get to use some ultra expensive programs!

My goal is to get the storyboards done this Friday, so I can turn in a shot list graph. I also have to finish the first 2 scenes and give my second character a spine. I can’t wait until I can use Sophmore animators as flunkies to get things like textures, sounds, food for me, and reference images. I might be able to get them this week if I’m lucky.

#11

Hahaha, I gave up killing trees years ago. Work totally digitally, but I really don’t know that many who do. Whatever works for you man. :wink:

#12

Well you do live in Canadandia now, it might have made you a hippie. Don’t hug too many trees, they can have sappy diseases. :smiley:

#13

Jason,

The fact he wasn’t an animation guy to start with and self taught seems to help people who don’t come from the proposed backgrounds.

Brings me hope that seems to sum me up pretty good hehe which gives me HOPE! :slight_smile: A friend recommended that DVD to me a while ago and I have had the opportunity to watch it a few times, I enjoyed the material. Now that i’m actually trying my hand at this stuff I’ll need to review it tons more once I get to that point and knocked out more models.

#14

I forgot to post this last week. Here is some new rough animation. I think its on its way, although timing will need work. Still not sure how to get my character rotate correctly. I will have to struggle with that tomorrow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fjYqznyRNc

newsuitmaterial.jpg

Here is a new suit test render and a skin test.

#15

just watched both animations… the first one I liked. I know what he was doing but at first I thought he farted in his suit…the only crit would have been when he bent over and you could see his head wasnt really attached to anything…I know it was just a trial…

The second one was much cleaner.

looking forward to more…not only am I a zbrush junky, I have unfortunately become a youTuber as well…lol

Ron
[email protected]

#16

I hope to have another done tonight. However there will be a big pause in the animation so I have room to add additional animation in that spot later. I have run into problems with my characters feet not rotating on an X-axis. If anybody knows of a way I can host the .scn file I would host in on cgtalk and xsibase for quick help. Storyboards are 94% complete! I changed the ending, and I think its more effective. My teacher and a classmate like it a lot.

#17

Storyboard is done! I think I’m going to get this DVD first Jason though.

http://www.digitaltutors.com/store/product.php?productid=2567

I have a walkcycle coming up, and any speed techniques for doing this will be helpful I think. Animatic will be done sometime this week, I need to do voice recordings for part of it to figure out the timing. And perhaps set up a date with this girl. :cool: More animation has been done, and more to be done this week as well. I hope to resolve this foot issue I ran into though. This week is going to be rough with my other classes though. :confused:

#18

Storyboard is done, its needs a few corrections (card flipping) and I’m waiting on a voice actor (this tuesday hopefully) to sync up the talking part (non lip sync, muahhahahaha)). I’m using premier to composite the storyboard together, for speed purposes. The only issue is I’m not sure what is a good compressor to use for the video. I would like to keep the file under 20 mb if possible. When that is done I will email you that Jason.

I am building an alt rig (basically its this rig http://3dquakers1.com/webroot5/review.php?id=10 with some additions) for later cleanup animation. Check out the demo on the website to see all of the features of the rig in action. I can still rough out the animation with the current rig, however I can not easily fix the problem with the foot rotation and arm flipping. The new rig will be stretchy and easier to animate.

The animation currently will be about 3 minutes.
I have roughed out the eyeball monster and have done more work on the characters textures. I’m not going to post those quite yet.

#19

Grab ffmpeg and if you really want good/excellent compression with quality use h.264 (codec for HDDVD and BlueRay). If you have issues, let me know I can walk you through a few things. :wink:

#20

Heya, animation is tough nut to crack even for the most experienced artists out there, so taking the bull by the horns like you’re doing is commendable. My bit of advice to you would be concentrate alot on your poses and push yourself to think about strong silhouettes.
I’m sure the DT stuff is good, their stuff usually is, but this man would wake up that animator in you :wink: http://www.keithlango.com and his tuts http://www.keithlango.com/wordpress/?page_id=226

Good luck

CHeers!

~t