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.

urubutsin body and retop

I have finished creating the body mesh for urubutsin in mudbox, and retopologised the body and head.



 This is the finished base model for urubutsin in mudbox, he is missing a number of assets (hat,cane. etc) but i will be creating them at a later time.

This is the retopologised model in maya using a lot less polygons however in this image the normals applied to the head mesh had done something odd. The normals were facing the correct way and the head looked good in the high quality render viewport but when rendered they looked reversered. I attempted to invert the normals, edit the green in the normal map itself and still had the same issue no matter what i tried. Below is a closer render of the head.

Eventually i discovered it was the way that i had created the head that caused the issue. I had created it by retopolgising half the head and baking half the high poly head textures and normals onto it, then mirroring the mesh and attaching the two halfs of the head. So to fix the issue i simply unwrapped the head when it was a whole and re-baked the entire head texture onto it and the normals are now the correct way and it looks much better.

I have also added a seperate shader for the eyepeice in this render.

Crit week 2

I had my semester 2 crit week presentation recently and i did recieve a lot of useful feedback however most of the feedback was to try and discuss my theory for the project more in the presentation rather than the practical work and that the purpose of the year is more to educate others on what i have discovered rather than simply displaying finished work. I also recieved some minor feedback on the temple model being too tall and too wide for the time period and also about the timing on the 3d animatic.

Personally i do believe the presentation could have gone better i agree that i definately should have shown more of the theory in the presentation  and overall i believe i need to generally improve on my presentation skills.

3d animatic

As mentioned previously here is the 3d animatic for the final animation. It is definately an improvement from the previous animatic however it is still slightly too quick in places.

One issue that i did notice while creating this animatic was simply that given the fact that the animation will be done with the brothers being motion captured and Urubutsin being rotoscoped is that trying to identify how long scenes will take is conciderably more difficult than if the entire peice was created using key-framed methods.

Urubutsin character head

I have created the head for the character urubutsin in the final animation using mudbox Im not overly experienced with it having previously only done quick tests and general messing about with it in the past however i am fairly pleased with the finished head.

This was actually my 2nd model of the head as my laptop crashed soon after finishing the model the first time and the file was unfotunately lost.

Here is a render of the model after a bit more detail had been added and also painting the textures onto the model. This was actually again my first attempt at texturing in mudbox aswell and again I am pleased with the quality the of the finished head.
However there are a few issues one being the loss of detail the closer to the tip of the mask this was simply due to the fact that the model began as a mudbox basic head and I edited it to this shape and because of that the topology caused there to be a lot more divisions at the base of the head than the tip. The second issue is the polygon count which i will need to reduce through retopologising the model and baking the textures to make it suitable for animation.

final animation brothers base

I now that i have an idea of how i want the story to pan out i have edited the morpheus rig to have a starting point for the brothers.

Iae is on the left and Kuat is on the right. Their design was origionally going to be based on existing perceptions of god's of the sun and moon however after some research I could not find any that were consistant apart from the Egyption gods Throth and Ra who's design doesn't really fit into the story. so given that the story's antagonist Urubutsin was a vulture god I instead looked at animals relating to the sun and moon and decided that a lion for the sun and panther for the moon seemed appropriate.

With this in mind i created these quick edits of the morpheus rig to give myself a base to work from, of course the hair, clothing and textures will be edited in future to make them more period appropriate.

storyboard animatic

For the creation of the animation i have storyboarded and created an animatic with an attempt to get a vauge idea of what the pacing of the animation will be. Unfortunately it is far too quick cut and many of the camera angles could be made more interesting, and after a meeting with my project supervisor we both agreed that creating a 3d animatic would be better to create more interesting camera angles in a blocked out environment and also help the planning with correct timing.

temple creation for final animation

In the final animation most of the animation will be based within a temple to astral deities. so looking I began to look at gothic church's that fit into the time period in an attempt to imitate the architecture  from that time.

Here is some of my current progress renders of the temple i do have appropriate tileable textures ready to apply however i am wanting to add more detail to the model first if i have the time to do so.

Pitch week 2

Had my semester 2 pitch week presentation a couple of weeks ago, after presenting my work and concept for the final animation I got one resounding peice of feedback which is that the pitch seemed as if it was focusing more on the technology than the performance on the animation. Was also advised to change the structure of my project aim to place character performance first.

Given the feedback i have restructured the aim of the project and am planning on focusing more on the performance in the final animation regardless of the capture or rotoscope.

concept for final animation

For developing the concept I began with the rather simple idea of a landlord coming round to the house of a tenant to retrive the rent with the inital plan of the landlord being animated using a rotoscope of a vulture to put emphasis on greed and the tenant being motion captured. However after a meeting with my project supervisor we agreed the story was fairly boring so i decided to focus on the most insteresting element of it which was the vulture landlord.
  After some more research on vultures i eventually unconvered some myths about their wing's having the ability to eclipse the moon and discovered the amazonian myth of Urubutsin the vulture god who was described as a horder of light and the king of all birds.

The myth of Urubutsin goes that he had all the light in the world and his minions wings blocked out any other light from touching the earth. Two brothers named Kuat and Iae who's tribe was in constant fear of attack from wild beasts due to the darkness decide to steal the light from Urubutsin. They hid themselves in a corpse and when Urubutsin came down to feed Kuat grabbed his leg preventing him from escaping forcing the king of birds to negotiate. He offers half of his light to the brothers in return for his freedom this light became the sun and the moon and it was agreed that day should alter with night. After this Kuat became associated with the sun and Iae the moon.
   This was a much more interesting tale and began to look at ways of adapting it to make it work in a short animation. Eventually it was decided to take it one step further and base it in a different setting, after looking at some south american art and deciding that the style wouldn't work well with my aim I decided to create an after-story based in the renaissance period during the black plauge.


The story i decided on was one where Urubutsin tries to retieve the light that was taken from him by Kuat and Iae by harvesting it from their corpses which were being kept in a temple to solar deities in Italy. Disguising himself as a plauge doctor he enters the town where the temple is and enters the temple. Unknowingly to him another 2 brothers notice the suspicious plauge doctor and follow him to the temple and stop him after noticing the moonlight disappearing.

Rotoscope and keyframed 2

Here is my second attempt at adding keyframed animation on top of rotoscoped footage. The issue i found mainly with doing this as a test was attempting to find a balance between what was allready being shown on screen and what i was adding to it with keyframed animation so i could keep the actors origional performance while implying my own influence to it.
    The issue i've found with the use of this technique in a film scene such as this is that essentially the intention is to try and improve on an established performance created by the actors involved and trying to improve on it. I believe aswell with this test i focused a bit too much on attempting to mimic certain actions of the live actors due to the nature of the test and because of that the overall performance may have suffered for it.

motion capture and keyframed 2

Here is my second attempt at editing motion capture footage but this time I have the kinect rig controling the morpheus rig. The Morpheus rig is a highly customisable rig created by Josh Burton (link below) and will most likely be the rig i will use in future when using motion captured footage.
http://www.joshburton.com/projects/morpheus.asp

 Allthough the capture itself was intenionally bad to begin with i managed to clean up a lot of the more jittery parts of animation and fix some positioning issues. However from doing this test i have identified how to correctly apply the mesh to the rig the next time and also the importance of having a clean as possible inital capture.
    The major issues with using the kinect system for motion capture that i've identidied from this test are crossing limbs, hidden limbs and also planting the entire rig to a set floor plane. However when applied correctly there should be no longer any mesh issues and the main concern at that point would be to improve the animation on the capture

motion capture and keyframed animation first attempt

I attempted to simply record and fix a peice of motion capture footage using the kinect system and animation layers in maya. For the sake of test i simply added some quick rigging to the kinect skeleton in maya and used the animation layers to blend the key-framed and motion captured footage together to remove some of the glitches that appearred in the footage.
It worked well and served its purpose however i now need to focus on attempting to attach the rig i'll be using to the skeleton so that i can quickly apply the animation to a custom rig.

Rotoscope and Keyframed animation first attempt

I have begun the combination tests of adding keyframed animation to both the rotoscope and motion capture footage. I am avoiding the combination of motion capture and rotoscoping given that they are both ways of achiving a similar outcome and with the exception of facial expressions there is no benefit to combining them.
My first attempt at combining techniques was the combination of rotoscope and keyframed animation using a the construct scene from The Matrix. I used rotoscoping to animate the scene then attempted to add to it using keyframed animation however even though the peice was animated and looked decent, through exagerating the movements of the characters I lost sight of the inital point of the scene and the movements werent approriate to the peice.
My next attempt i will be trying to focus more on the emotional performance in the scene rather than the movement within it.

Rotoscope and Roto-animation

It is best for me to me be clear about the differences between rotoscoping and roto-animation.

Rotoscoping is a technique that is majorly used in 2d animation where an animater essentially traces a peice of live action footage frame by frame to imitate the movement of the subject in a 2d animation.
Roto-animating is a 3d variation on that technique where a peice of live action footage is braught into a 3d program and the character is animated using close referencing on top of the footage. The first instance of this technique being used is (once again) with Gollum in The Two Towers and i believe it was the team at weta digital that gave it its name of Roto-animation.
Both of these techniques are incredibly useful to animators especially for studying the movement of  subjects that may be more difficult to animate such as animals.
I mention rotoscoping a lot on here however i do mean roto-animation when that is said, The reason being is that the term roto-animating does not seem to be as well established as the term rotoscope and it is in the end merely a variation on the rotoscope technique.

In conclusion when i mention rotoscope on this blog i am mostly refering to roto-animation.