Gratitude feedback

Nick’s course has enabled me to learn something new each week as I review my Principles of Animation course. As I used to work as a environment designer in a game company, I’m not really familiar with characters. Still, I’ve had a lot of fun making character bindings and drawing decals this semester, and I’ve learned a lot about rigging , and I’d really like to learn about adv plug , which might be very helpful for my future character making.

I’ve received a lot of feedback on various courses this semester, which has been the most valuable part of the semester. First of all, I’m grateful for George’s feedback on my weekly animations. He is really friendly and has sufficient patience with students! Before this course started, I struggled with making the animations assignment more natural, and George’s advice has been very helpful! I had been frustrated for a while, thinking that my animation always needed a bit of ‘feel’.But I will try to overcome the language barrier to become more proficient with Maya and some of the renderers in this term.

Group Collaboration

This week we have been collaborating on a group project. We tried exploring some exciting settings and scenarios and researching some very inspiring material for us. What I enjoyed more about this process was the group swapping ideas and working together to develop more exciting ideas. I also enjoyed meeting people from different majors and getting inspiration from other areas in my first semester.

Group work pdf

I really enjoyed working as a group and we all thought hard about how to make the mermaid story more realistic and interesting. We explored the flora and reefs at different depths of the sea and the various sea creatures, I also went to the Natural History Museum to see the strange fish in the deep sea and it was very helpful to know a lot of real life references to help me just make models.

Deep-sea fish at the Natural History Museum

Some sketch

Final Showreel-Including the scene design of group operations and ten animations

It includes some of the scene designs and scene 3D models I made in the first semester, and I’ve put together some of the animations I made this semester in the second part of the video.

This week we continued to adjust the mouth shape and began to pay attention to adjusting the character’s speaking rhythm and personal habits. For example, as a very dynamic character, Truman involves many facial muscles when he speaks and laughs. It takes a lot of patience to adjust.

cutting uv’s and drawing materials for faces

As I’m not very skilled at cutting uv’s and drawing materials for faces, I tried a few more times to draw human skin weights, which was very challenging and I realised I was getting better at it one at a time. I used to be better at scene modelling and rarely got involved in character making, this class has piqued my interest in character making and I find it very challenging every time I finish a skin material

The process of creating a uv

The First painting of skin material

The second painting of skin material

Body Mechanics Spline

Last week I made keyframe poses, and this week I added some details by adjusting the rhythm and angle of the limbs to make the model more vivid and natural.

Receiving feedback

George gave me some advice on movement, and I realised that when the model suspended the body in mid-air, I should focus more on the relationship between the body and the legs when animating. I was concentrating on the forces and the weight shift when landing, so I tweaked the animation several times.

Final animation

In fact, I think I still need to tune a lot of details for this dynamic, because I checked a lot of ideas for making oil tube animation when I came across the tumbling animation, and I realized that I still don’t observe enough about the human body in my life. I would tend to overlook some details on the body and control the rhythm of the body movement

This week we have been learning about character mouth shapes and the need to fill in a few expressions to make our animation move, and I have chosen a clip from the film ‘Truman’s World’ as a reference.

When the character is speaking, in different tones, attention should be paid to the impact of the mandible and the orbicularis oris muscle. Pick out the heavier tones to portray when animating, or the obvious pauses.
The effect of language on mouth animation

In the case of English, the mouth shapes are grouped according to the phoneme (phoneme) required and when animating the mouth shape, the corresponding mouth shape is selected according to the pronunciation and then drawn.

English is a language that is used with rhythm. In addition to mobilising the lips, teeth and tongue as a basis for pronunciation between different sounds, real words are pronounced heavily and imaginary words are pronounced weakly, producing a lighter or heavier rhythm.

The alliteration technique allows words to be pronounced next to each other in a cluster, with pronunciation within the cluster full of glide, and then pronunciation emphasis or weakness depending on context, character and mood.

Body Mechanics Planning

Week 7：Weekly Assignments-Blocking Reference Video

1.0 Reference Video

Actually, for me, doing the layout in 2D first would make it easier for me to spot problems. I picked a reference video of crouching, tumbling and shooting because I thought it would help me to notice the centre of gravity of the character when moving, and the stagnation when tumbling through the air, and the rhythm of the character when moving.

2.0 2D sketch-find key pose

3.0 3D Animation Blocking

Feedback

This week I showed the video to George and he was very patient and helped me with a lot of the movements, I really appreciate it, I also realised that the inertia of the character when spinning in the air tends to carry the limbs and deflect them, this is also a problem that I overlooked

This week we continued to finish tweaking the shape editor for the face, including learning how to animate through the shape editor.

Rigging – add skin Materials

Because I’m not very good at binding, I did many iterations of the rigging exercise

Walk Cycle

Week 7：Weekly Assignments-Blocking Reference Video

This week we learned how to control a character’s face by adding IK joins to maintain bones and making the model more silky and flexible when moving. We must be careful to understand the hierarchy of bones; these skills are the basis for everything in the animation process.

I tried to modify the model given by my teacher because I thought that by modifying it to a slim old man, instead it would be easier to see where the muscles were going, help me understand the mouth animation better, and bind the character’s facial expressions with great fun!

walk cycle

reference：

This week we have animated the character walking, a very basic set of movements that we will often use in our animations. Walking can express a person’s mood, happy or sad, light or slow.

Animating Weight Shifts

Breaking down walk cycles and how weight is distributed.

We don’t get weight by a smooth level movement.

The up-and-down position of your masses gives you the feeling of weight.

Flour Bags

This week we tried to make the animation of flour bags. We learned how to edit some joints to control the flour bags and modify the model of the model. When making a flour bag animation, I want to make it more interesting and give the flour bags it personality, using different control curves to imitate an angry, sighing flour bag

This lesson taught us how to control a skeleton to make a flour sack walk.We have joints and IK going on here. We will now try to make some animations with it and get it moving around.

The model was repeatedly modified.

Final animation

In this lesson, Nick taught us how to Create a controller for each joint with a curve and connect it to the model using a simple controller.

Animating Weight shifts

George’s feedback and sharing some animation tutorials for us

 I noticed in the tutorial that it was very helpful to talk about using the time difference between rotation and displacement to create some natural rhythms when the characters were moving, as I had often missed these small details.

1.1Hand

Today, we have learned how to build a hand model to pick up the ball and enter the basketball frame. Understanding things like hierarchy and pivots.

Using the controller and parents and teaching us how to use the curve editor to control the movement speed of the object these details are beneficial to me

Final Animation-hand

1.2 animating ball with Tail.

Today we learn about the animation production of the tail. The tail bounce involves a lot of knowledge about the laws of motion and time curves. These problems are beneficial for our future animation production.

Feedback

George gave me a lot of advice, and I realized some of the moves were wrong.

I went on the tube and watched some videos, as well as drew some reference drawings. I would only make tails from the book at first, but with weekly feedback and learning, I am now making much better animations than before

Final Animation-Add HDRI and Render

I added hdr to this little squirrel animation, in making this animation it was very difficult to get the squirrel to fire with its tail, George showed us the squirrel film to help us to understand the movement pattern of the tail animation, I worked hard on it but I think I still need to practice different animal tails like monkeys and rabbits, it is all about paying attention to their movement pattern.

In this lesson, we learned about the principles of using a camera and how to manipulate a shark to swim.

Shark

1. Non-Linear deformers bend, squash, twist etc, for animation

In the second week, we learned the usage of Nonlinear under the Maya menu, such as Bend, Flare, Sine, Squash, Twist, and Wave. I used to be confused about the adjustment of parameters, but this course improved my understanding of the use of deformers.

2.Nonlinear&Shark

Add a new camera and aimer. If you put the aim into a subset of sharks, you can focus on the shark through the camera.

3. Texture

Test-1

For the first time, I added basic materials to the shark, added lights to observe the swing of the shark’s tail. When I used C4D, I had a transformer called distorted. I can distort the object by controlling the wire frame. The method of using a transformer in different software is a bit different, but I like to explore different ways to solve the problem.

Test-2

Pendulum Shot Animation

First Adjustment

When the pendulum made the first keyframe, the swing of this pendulum looked very unnatural. I tried to continue adjusting the frame’s length and movement trajectory.

Second Adjustment

In the third week. I received feedback from George, who helped me to adjust the angle of the pendulum’s movement. Then I realized that the speed of the pendulum’s swing would also change under the effect of inertia, so I modified my animation again.

Observing the sketch of people’s movement status

In the first week, Mr.George explained how to make the ball rebounding animation in the first week. As the most basic course of sports, I still think it is essential for creating animation.

1.Graph editor

The Graph Editor is presented as graph view of scene animation so you can create, view, and modify animation curves in various ways. For example, we can control interpolation between keyframes, extrapolation of curves, and change animation curve value and timing by altering the shape of animation curves using tangent handles.

2.Timeline

3. bouncing ball

The first principle is squash and stretch. This is the principle that animated objects will get longer or flatter to emphasize their speed, momentum, weight, and Max. There’s a bouncing ball that has squash and stretch.

At the apex, the ball is not moving. When falling, the speed of the ball increased in the index. Before and after contact with the ground, the ball reaches its highest rate.

From a physical point of view, gravity will pull it down when a ball bounces until it encounters obstacles (ground). Forced the small ball to play until the power was less than the gravity, eventually making it fall again.

I noticed that the speed of different spheres in the process of landing is also different. For example, in table tennis and bowling, the speed and rebound are all affected by the object itself, so we also need to maintain the authenticity of the object in the creation process.