Yeri's Animation Blogs
You can easily click each chapter through Category,If you can't access it, please contact me：yeri.yy66@gmai.com

Category: Uncategorised

Categories
3D Computer Animation Fundamental Uncategorised

Week 10 :Animation Showreel

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.

2023-group-animation-mermaidDownload

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.

Categories
3D Computer Animation Fundamental Uncategorised

Week 9: Lip-Syncing

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

Categories
3D Computer Animation Fundamental Uncategorised

Week 8:Shape Editor&Body Mechanics Planning

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

Categories
3D Computer Animation Fundamental Uncategorised

Week 7:Shape Editor&Walk Cycle

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

Reference Video

Categories
design-for-animation-narrative-structures-and-film-language Uncategorised

week 8:Research Methdologies

In week 8, this session focused on understanding the methodology, abstract, introduction, and summary. Nigel Mairs professor, provided us with some references and notes on reporting. During the class, the students asked for many details about the paper, and In the process of finding information, I created an outline of my dissertation to help me sort out my thoughts.

As I had no experience studying overseas, the report format was slightly different from the format of the dissertation I had written before. I asked Dr Nigel Mairs two points I was confused about before the class.

The first was about using diagrams in the report and the dissertation, and the second was about the methodology and the percentage of words in the report. Nigel Mairs professor answered it all very clearly and kindly for me.

Categories
design-for-animation-narrative-structures-and-film-language Uncategorised

Week 7：Group tutorial

In this session we will meet in groups to discuss topics, exchange knowledge, share resources and approaches.resources and approaches.

In the first few weeks, when putting together my literature review, I looked up some literature in Google scholar that could help me search for the scope of keywords and organize my thoughts.

  • I hesitated in identifying keywords until I went on a small search for connections between animated documentaries and other fields, and this material helped me a lot in going for the pulse of the thesis, and my main points gradually became clear

In week 7, I continued to explore the keywords identified last week. I wanted to talk about the values and effects, the prospects and potential of the field of animated documentaries.

As an animation student, I often face several problems in the animation production process, such as the complexity of the people involved and the long lead times. For animation production, the cost of creation and the revenue is an issue we must face. After sharing my views with other majors in this group exchange session, I realized that economics is a vast topic, and this part is too broad to be a sub-part of my subject. So I will not be exploring this area as a significant part of my subject.

Secondly, I realized that my knowledge of philosophy is lacking through the exchange with classmates from different countries, and I need to continue to spend much time improving my reading skills and knowledge. This exchange allowed me to hear about many exciting topics in other fields.

Categories
design-for-animation-narrative-structures-and-film-language Uncategorised

Week 6: Paraphrasing Activity

Original Paragraph

The authenticity of a documentary is ‘deeply linked to notions of realism and the idea that documentary images are linked to notions of realism and the idea that documentary images bear evidence of events that actually happened, by virtue of the indexical relationship between image and reality’

Horness Roe. A. (2013) Animated Documentary. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Paraphrased Paragraph

Honess Roe (2013, Animated Documentary) argues that images can reproduce social reality realistically and objectively, and the existence of the documentary image can prove the authenticity of a documentary.

Categories
3D Computer Animation Fundamental Uncategorised

week6:Planning your walk cycle

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.

First, we need to create six joints to control the movement of the skin, and the bones can control the chin area once they are bound and colored.
We need to be careful to understand the hierarchy of bones. For example, the jawbone controls the jaw area of the lips, which is the third joint, and the sixth joint influences the head.
I modified the model a bit and changed it to a more handsome Asian, Nick was doing Europeans in class, and I chose to change it to an Asian because the arch of the eyebrow is lower in Asia and the facial structure is different so that you can see the difference better.
You can see that we can easily control the opening and closing of the mouth through the skeleton.
The bones most affect the white areas, and the opposite is true for the black areas. For example, if we need to adjust the part of the chin, we can use a different brush to change the area where the skin is most affected by the bone.

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.

Categories
3D Computer Animation Fundamental Uncategorised

week 4:Box man rigging&Overlapping Action

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.

I can see it here on the left-hand side of the outline view, opening up everything in the group’s structure.
When animating a walk, make the different joints of the whole body step forward, and as we make a soft fabric, sway and rotate with care in the direction.

The model was repeatedly modified.

Final animation

Categories
3D Computer Animation Fundamental Uncategorised

Week 5:Planning/ animating Weight shifts

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.

Freeze the parts, ensuring their coordinates are 0, as we will be animating the movement later.
When freezing the various joints of the body, pay attention to the hierarchy. One will succeed the other in rotation, linking them together.
The key to this lesson is understanding the hierarchy of joints, parent, the upper body using curves to bind polygonal objects, and the lower body using bones and polygons to create the parent. Nick shows us the most frequently used binding techniques in animation.
End.

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.