Personal development summary

The aim of this project was to explore how exaggerating realistic movement in character animation can influence a character's performance and believability using a combination of traditional and emerging animation techniques.

In the process of creating this project I had to research and learn new techniques and how to use some new technologies. This is a personal reflection of my personal development over the year.

To begin the first thing that I learnt about was the rotoscope technique which was rather surprisingly something that I had not known about before this project. This is where in 2D animation an animator would essentially trace the live action movements of an actor frame by frame. I discovered this through my research into Gollum from the Lord of the Rings trilogy due to the fact that they used a 3D variant of this technique in the creation of Gollum's animation which they named roto-animating. This is where instead a 3D character is animated over a live actor to imitate their performance.

This naturally led me onto the use of motion capture to imitate character movement which was the second major aspect I had not previously looked into. The issue with exploring this technique was the lack of a motion capture studio, however after some research I discovered a program that would allow me to use an Xbox Kinect device to allow a character rig to move in sync with a persons movement and also to create motion captured footage. Allthough it wasn't perfect it allowed me to identify methods of using motion capture footage in animation. One way to edit a motion captured skeleton on its own without a rig attached was using a combination of animation layers and adding some basic rigging to the motion capture skeleton, I had created basic rigs before but I had never used animation layers for animating. It was soon after I discovered this that I was told that our university was building a motion capture studio that would be completed half way through the project.

After this I began to combine these techniques with traditional key-framed animation to identify the strengths and weaknesses of using these methods in traditional animation. After attaching a rig to the motion capture footage it became apparent that there is much more control from directly controlling the rig than attempting to edit the motion capture footage to control the rig. Also it was soon after my combination of roto-animation and key-framed animation that it was pointed out to me that by trying to stick so closely to the roto-animated footage that the performance was not achieving its full potential due to me putting focus on attempting to combine the two rather than focusing on the performance.

I then began working on the final animation for the project, the environment I built using boolean modelling tools in Maya which is again something that I hadn't known about previously and also taking advantage of modular techniques that I was aware of however I hadn't used them extensively in the past.

The character Urubutsin was modelled in Mudbox and was my first full character model I created within the program. I also textured the character within Mudbox which once again was something I hadn’t done previously. For this reason I also had never re-topologised a high-poly character into a low-poly model for use in animation and although I knew about baking textures and normals once again it was something that I previously hadn’t done.

One of the final pieces of personal development was the directing and acting in a professional motion capture suite. During my first visit to the motion capture suite I attempted to direct another actor to achieve the motion captured footage, unfortunately it was more difficult than I anticipated because I assumed that I would be able to achieve the movement I wanted by simply attempting to interact to get a natural reaction to the given situation. However it was only after I visited the motion capture studio a second time and acted myself that I realised that its much easier to simply act out the movements than attempting to get a desired reaction from an actor.

final animation

Unfortunately due to a combination of some extensive render times and my slow internet connection the final animation has not been uploaded as of yet. I will be editing this post to include the final animation as soon as its uploaded.

Since the last post i have done a lot of work on the animation and also added lighting and sound, however for the sake of this post i will only be discussing the animation. Overall im slightly disappointed that i wasnt able to finish the second half of the animation to the level that i wanted it to be at however given the quantity of the animation I dont think i would have have been able to do better within the time i had.

Overall i believe that allthough i have been researching performance that it wasn't implemented within the animation as well as it could have been. However the combination of motion capture and keyframed animation seems to have worked well together and in some places its very difficult tell that the animation has been motion captured rather than key-framed such as when Kuat runs after the thrown vial.
However on the motion capture front i believe that re-exporting Iae's movements to remove that issue with the rotating hips would have not only saved a lot of time but also improved his movements in many areas of the animation.

Animation first pass

I have been animating the final animation recently and have finished the basic movement for the second half of it. concidering these playblasts are first passes i will just mention the areas in the major movements that need more work. I apologise for the links for some reason blogger cant find these videos to embed them.

part1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Szn-MPL5s40
The first issue notable issue with this scene is the way Urubutsin's right hand is static for far too long when leaning on the coffin, especially when he is opening his pouch. The next issue in this scene is the eases of his left hand when it is held in the coffin at this point there needs to be more of a reaction to what will be the light from the coffin entering the vial. The final major issue with Urubutsin in this scene is the turn at the end however that simply hasnt been fully animated yet.
Finally the first part of motion capture in the scene with Kuat and Iae this is simply the rigs moving with the mo-capped footage at the moment allthough Kuat's motion captured animation at this point is actually one of the takes intended for use with Iae. The reason for this was that the capture for Kuat in this scene would have required far too much editing to make it fit with the scene.

part2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJCvZ9BDIwY
Urubutsin's right hand in this scene eases too slowly at the begining of this scene when the intention is that he's protecting it also the time between reacting and turning is too slow at the moment. However i am fairly proud of the way the hat gets knocked off in this scene.

part3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPo3eZwNkis
The issue with this scene is it doesnt follow on from the scene before at this moment in time however there will be one short scene with the vial hitting the ground between this and the last scene which should make it flow better. The other issue is that Iae isnt currently moving in the background.

part4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DGrc704ZxI
At the moment this run needs a lot more work and the overall speed that Urubutsin is moving at needs to be increased.

part5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkunu7USy0Y
The only major movement issue i notice in this scene is the movement of urubutsin's left hand after he opens his pouch.

part6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOyRLlL9JSo
The speed of the dive needs to be increased slightly and there needs to be more of an impact when Kuat hits the floor in this scene.

part7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9hPPEHISag
Again a lot of work is needed on this scene, Urubutsin needs to ease into the position to link it in with the previous scene and his turn and arm positions need to be edited. Also Kuat should be walking back up to the coffins in the background of this scene so that it links in with the next.

part8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlnFVBZ7OnQ
The coffins in this scene are too far apart and need to be moved in a bit to let the characters take up more of the screen and reduce the negitive space.

 I decided to focus on the second half of the animation first because it contains a lot of pure key-framed animation which will take longer to animate and yet still contains a couple of areas where a combination of key-framed animation and motion capture will take place. Also its the area of the animation where Urubutsin actually has some actions other than simply walking and where the modelled environment is seen.

showreel peice

I recently finished this short animation for use in the showreel for the upcoming showcase.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZmbVuM-yqA
This was just very quickly thrown together with the aim of getting the character moving in the environment with some very basic lighting.

Profesional motion capture studio 2

I have had my second session in the motion capture studio to attempt to get Iae's motion captured for the animation. This time I was acting in the motion capture suit and found it much easier to achieve the correct movements in the capture since i knew exactly what the character movements should be.

The final captures turned out well however there was an issue after exporting the captures to fbx files that made the motion captured skeleton's rig spin 360 degrees at random intervals when opened in maya, unfortunately i couldnt find a solution to this issue but i believe that it would be to do with the export settings in vicon blade. For the animation i opened the graph editor in maya and moved the rotated frames in the hips back to their origional positions (or as close as possible manually) however because it isnt precise the captures with Iae have shakey of foot planting in some places.

If i was to attempt directing a mo-cap actor again after this session i would focus more on attempting to get the actor to imitate the percived character actions rather than trying to interact directly to get the disired responce. The reason i would do this is because i believe that the only way of getting the exact right reactions to a situation is to have the actor in that exact situation and even if those conditions were met i doubt the outcome would be as benifitial to an animation as some exaggerated acting.

profesional mo cap studio first attempt

Recently i was able to use the professional motion capture studio in the university of abertay to capture what the scenes i needed for my final animation. Unfortunately could only get the character Kuats scenes done however i will soon have the oppertunity to capture Iae's performance using the studio also.
Due to the characters different builds i got a relitive to help with the capture of Kuat with the intention of getting natural and realistic movements by directing. I believe that this was in the end achieved with some slight difficulties along the way and the captures for Kuat's character are complete.
However I believe that due to being an animator attempting to suddenly direct a live performer was unusual, especially concidering at the time i was attempting to realistic movements and therefore avoided interfering too much where possible. The reason for saying this is that i am used to leading the performance through animated characters while as in this situation i was allowing the actor to lead the performance.

During the next capture session i am going to act the character Iae personally and attempt to focus on the characters performance rather than my own performance. Also concidering i have a better idea of the how the character will act hopefully the process should be smoother and achieve a better final result.

urubutsin finished character

Finally have completed the urubutsin character which is also fully rigged, skinned and ready for animating. There are still some minor issues with it such as the wrist orientation on the rig being off but nothing that should majorly effect the animation.