CCA Animation Complete!

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Above is my completed animation for my Creative Character Animation module at Teesside University. The cool thing is it only took me about a week! You can follow the development blog for this here. Big props to Josh Burton for the amazing Morpheus Rig! Love the facial controls on this one, very extensive!

I'm going to Framestore!

This news is actually about 3 weeks old... but all this time I was waiting for the University to update their website with some sort of video or news or something, but hey... they sure are taking their sweet time. Long story short, I won the Animation and VFX Award at Expotees on 6th April 2011 and won myself a 6 month animation internship at Framestore, in London!

I had to hand-in my trophy for my name to be carved on it so am still waiting for it to come back to me... which is kinda why I delayed this post for so long. I wanted to post it with some pictures of the trophy and certificate. But it's been so long so I thought what the heck... people ought to know!

Yeah! So I am super excited about this opportunity and cannot wait to start. There are some pretty amazing animators over there!

CCA Blog

As part of my Creative Character Animation (CCA) modules at University, I have to create a development blog and record my progression. So hey, if you're interested in seeing how I get a shot done from blocking to final, go check it out!

The exercise is to animate a lip-sync piece to a pre-recorded sound clip. This animation I'm working on now is actually rather interesting. Why? Because if you thought my short film was subtle, then this one is even more so! It almost seems like I'm getting into even smaller details with every new animation and underplaying everything. Could just be I really like the subtle details and find it challenging...

But hey, I'd like to try for more extreme cartoony styles sometime in the summer to flex my animation muscles in a different direction for a change.

Self-CONFLICT Released!

Hey guys,

My short film is finally done - go check it out and tell me what you think! I will post more THE MAKING OF stuff in future so please bare with me.

AAH! I'm so excited about the release :)

Here's a bunch of people I'd like to thank:

Matt Seligman - my good friend who's pulled through with me on this project with the modelling and texturing side of things. Looks great man, and thanks for working with me on this.

Fernando Zamora - the voice actor legend. Thanks for putting up with all my re-recording requests and under such short notice. Your flexibility and availability is much appreciated.

Tim Bolland, Albin Nilsen, Martin Davies and Ben Klimmek for render advice and post-production tips.

Penny Holton, my project supervisor.

Everyone at the Teesside Animation and Games Society (TAG) at Teesside Uni for watching and giving me weekly feedbacks.

Everyone at Animex Festival who I had the chance to speak to and got constructive feedback from.

And of course all of my friends who have supported me and kept me sane. Ha ha.

Self-CONFLICT Promotional Still

Promotional Still for my short film Self-CONFLICT. Coming very soon

FYP Animation done!

8 months of hard work and my short film is finally coming to a close. I can't express how excited I am about this. The animation portion is finally declared done. I just need to spend a day or two finalizing the lighting and camera animations and then it's off to render. Post-production is expected to take a week or so.

Will post images and posters nearer to the time of release. Awesome!

FYP Update

It's been a while since the last update. My short film is going great! It's been about 6 months since I properly started this project and I've been working on it non-stop, practically full time. The animation is mostly there now, I'm just doing all sorts of tweaks here and there to finesse the details and adding the final touches. I'd say it's about 85% complete by this stage, I want to spend a good 15% of the time to really clean up and polish the hell out of this piece to really push it to the next level. That means about another month of animation tweaking, I know it sounds crazy but I am a true believer of doing the best I can and love nothing more than a wonderful polish. 

From what I gather, most students get to around this point of 80% complete and call it finished mostly due to lack of time and possibly even being sick of the animation by this point. No one really spends quality time cleaning and polishing their animations these days! 

It's at this animation stage where tweaking to get better animation is also incredibly satisfying and rewarding that really boosts motivation! Yeah, this is me being motivated to keep going! Go go go :)

You can expect a finished render near the end of March and if I'm still not done by that time, you can start sending your hate mails. 

A Systematic Approach

There are many times during animation where I'd get frustrated and exhausted by the complexity of the scene or character, when the animation just isn't looking right or when there is just too much going on for me to handle. Often when this occurs, and I still continue animating, I'd quickly burn myself out and end up animating blindly and hoping for amazing results. More often than not, it ends up with poor animation, possibly adding keys all over the place, making the organisation a lot worse than before and just plain messy/bad animation. Did I mention you'd also burn out really quickly? So it's a lose-lose situation, things just get worse if you go on like this.

Things start becoming incredibly complex when you start worrying about too many things. For example, I'm trying to do animation tweaks to my character and I have a few many things to watch out for:- 1. Entire body animation and how it affects movement, checking which parts lead and which follow, 2. Needing to add keys for moving holds in between 3. Comparing current animation to video reference 4. Worried about translation and rotation axis on the hips and how it affects the position of the arms. And that is just one shot, as I move on to the next shot, new problems arise and I may be focussing on different things like facial animation and needing to re-pose some key poses that aren't working as well. When all that comes into play, trouble is at hand and my brain goes into panic with all the information it has to manage in real-time. And if you're working on a full scene with many shots continuously like I am, you can see just how complex and varied the tweaks and considerations are going to be like as you go through it.

The solution to this mess is in the workflow I believe. If you approach the scene systematically, or in smaller parts/chunks, it becomes a lot less to worry about, a lot easier to handle and is also a lot more rewarding and motivating when you get that small chunk done. The task no longer feels like infinity miles away when you meet smaller deadlines and go at it step by step - you can see the progress being made and it keeps you SANE and saves your motivation from drowning.

You can approach the animation in a few ways, but the key is doing it ONE STEP AT A TIME. I can either split my scene up into shots and work on them on a shot-by-shot basis and crossing them out one at a time or I can approach it in smaller passes. By passes I mean focussing on one object/idea at a time throughout the whole scene. For example, I can do a hips controller pass whereby I look into the graph editor and clean up all my curves for translation and rotation. Or I can attack my tweaks one problem at a time, if I need to repose some keys, then I should work on those first before attacking the moving holds. Basically work on one idea at a time and tweak them in passes so it's a lot more organised. That way you don't forget what you're animating and you apply the same amount of effort and care into your work and have consistent animation.

Did that make much sense?

The Right Approach

In this post, I'd like to talk about how I approach animation and how it's changed over the years. I'll start off with some history of how I got into animation and some of my insights. 

My History in Learning Animation

As a kid, I never knew what animation really was. When I saw cartoons on TV, I'd never think much of it as a medium, but more so for the entertainment value that I got out of it - as I would with any other medium such as live action. So back then, I had no clue what animation was or how it was done. 

At age 11, I was introduced to Macromedia Flash (Now Adobe) by my brother. We had just seen some Counter Strike Flash animations on a Flash Website called Newgrounds.com. I instantly fell in love with the animation software, Flash as it gave me the freedom to create my own animations - my own visions, my perspective of the world for the rest of the world to enjoy. From then on, I began my first step into learning animation. I would watch lots of Flash animations on the web and as much I could try to decipher the animation techniques used and apply them to my own. Back then there weren't many Flash tutorials or animation resources (not that I was aware of anyway!), so I self-taught myself everything. 

I made my first Flash animation ever at age 11 and it took me roughly a month. It was the proudest thing I've ever done. It felt great that after all the hard work, I could show everyone a movie I've made.

A couple years later, I've made successful Counter-Strike Flash animations viewed by millions of people worldwide. They won several awards on newgrounds.com and I started getting fan mails daily. Things were looking good for me. With each new animation, I would constantly look for new ways to improve my skills as a film-maker and an animator. 

After finishing high-school, I had to make a career decision. I wasn't sure if I could even make a living from just animating. I ended up doing a Law course at University. After my first year, I realised just how much I loved animation and how much I didn't want to do Law. 

My parents weren't sure about my decision to do animation at the time, but in time they became supportive of my decision. As a result, I had to work extra hard to prove to them that animation was really the course for me and I wasn't just going to change my course again. Backed up with my personal love and passion for animation, I made a vow to myself that I will be the best I can be. I will strive to learn as much as I can about animation and I was ready to ask a million questions and constantly bug lecturers about any problems or issues that I may have. 

Then first year of University started and I was doing animation! This was where everything was blown out of proportion. A whole new meaning came to the term animation and a whole new world was open to me, with the introduction of the animation principles and 3D softwares. I was blown away by how much I did not know. I spent all year studying and getting used to this new world. 

Second year of University started and I was told about work placements and how hard it was to get one. I really wanted a placement as I believe it was the best way to learn animation. I felt University teachings just weren't practical enough to prepare us for industry work. Yet again, I worked very hard throughout my 2nd year. I won the VIS Awards for best Character Animation category in 2009 and secured myself a one year work placement at Ubisoft Reflections. 

Statistically, I was the only student in my course to get a placement doing actual animation work. Times were tough...

For my placement year, I did a lot of work with mo-cap and full facial animation. And boom! Everything I thought I knew about animation was yet again blown out of proportion. I was finally beginning to understand movement and how the body really moves. 

And now in my final year at University, I feel different. I was still studying animation, but from a completely different perspective. I was no longer animating "blindly", praying that it will all work out in the end. I feel like a lot of the lecture topics are becoming irrelevant if not, repeating things I already knew. I would approach animation in a completely different way to every student in my class. I could see the difference. And eventually I figured it out. 

Approaching Animation

It's all down to how we approach animation that makes us better/worse animators. 

When I was in my first and 2nd year at University, I was learning animation primarily from The Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams. It was my bible. It wasn't just a handbook for me, it was my reference. And that is exactly where I went wrong. 

While I absolutely love and respect all the information in that book, I wanted to clarify where I was going wrong with it. The book is great for traditional 2D animations that strives to get as much life into the characters that we create. While that may be our goal, I must admit it probably was not the best approach in learning and understanding animation. 

Why? Because it's like trying to learn how to run before you can walk. Cartoony animation is a style. And stylistic animation is a caricature of real movement. What I'm trying to say is, if we don't even know how our body moves in reality, how can we understand why/what we're doing in stylistic animation?

Studying mo-cap gave me a fresh perspective on this. All the tricks and tips given by Richard Williams in the book were stylised to teach you how to get more life into your characters. However, it also meant he would break some rules to do so. In fact, he even says in his book that the pros break the rules all the time. Here is where it hit me - I didn't even know the rules in the first place. I thought I did, in fact, a lot of people think they do. 

If you don't know the rules, then how can you break them?

That is exactly what I mean by animating blindly. When we first start learning about animation, we're told about so many tips and tricks that we're just doing them for the sake of it. We're taught about perspective, composition, staging, line of action, silhouette, breaking of joints, etc but most of the time we're doing it just because the pros say to do it. The question we must ask ourselves is WHY. That to me was the biggest epiphany in my understanding of animation. As soon as I understood why I was doing what I was doing and for good reason, I was able to animate 10x better.

Animation is about understanding. The more you understand what you are animating, the better it will be. All of my problems I had with animation before, such as jerky motions, poor body mechanics and mediocre facial animation was all down to LACK OF UNDERSTANDING. So what have I done differently to fix those problems? I studied mo-cap data. I studied how a human body can physically move. I studied anatomy, I studied the bone structure of a biped character and looked carefully at how the joints are constructed and what kind of movement that allowed. I re-visited the Animators Survival Kit again, and over time, I learnt how every animation principle is applied to the animation of characters. I was beginning to understand why I was applying squash and stetch. Why I was applying overlapping action to certain limbs. Why I was applying arcs and line of action to the poses and animation. Everything just started "clicking" into place. I was no longer animating blindly. I was no longer overdoing exaggeration of poses for the wrong reasons. I was now animating with a purpose. I was now animating with a clear goal/intention in mind and applied the necessary principles AS and WHEN needed. 

For facial animation, I read up on Gary Faigin's "Complete guide to facial expressions" and that blew my mind. Understanding how the facial muscles work is crucial to generating believable facial performances. You wouldn't bend your knees to impossible angles if you knew it wasn't physically possible to do that with a human character. Similarly, you wouldn't pull certain muscles in your face if it wasn't either a) physically impossible or b) inappropriate to the emotion you are trying to convey. Yet again, understanding is KEY. 

I totally believe that you should not move the controller (of any body part) UNLESS you fully understand WHY you are moving it. If you are moving it for the sake of generating movement and avoiding stiffness, then you're doing it wrong. Same thing with offsetting keys, I remember getting critiques like "just offset your arms/body/head keys until it looks right". Come to think of it now, that is not how you should be doing it at all. Our bodies move in very systematic fashion depending on many factors. Mostly it's driven by emotion. So if a character is angry, he might lead with his shoulders as he turns. You don't just offset keys blindly till it "looks" right. You should've done your research before hand, find out which body parts lead first and which parts follow because every little detail can convey a completely different feel. By offsetting the wrong keys, it could make an angry turn look like a reluctant turn. Small details, but important nonetheless. 

I am still learning about this stuff and my approach may change from time to time, but I thought I'd share this. Feel free to start some discussions in the comments.

T-Rex Walk Animation

After working on my Final Year Project for so long, I felt I needed a break so I can come back to it with "fresh eyes". And seeing as I may need to have some creature animation for my showreel if I'm going to make it as a Character Animator in the visual effects industry, I thought I might as well start practising.

And so I went on creativecrash.com to find a nice rig for any creature and I really liked this rig by Joel Anderson and decided to give it a go. It's a great t-rex rig with great stretchy IK controls that allows for flexible bones.

My usual workflow is to do a lot of planning and referencing before I even begin animating. But since I'm on my "break", I thought I'd just give it a full blast of what I've got. So this is the result of just animating with the animation principles in mind, and hardly any consideration to how a 2 legged dinosaur would move. Animation took about 3-4 hours.

Click here to view in HD

I was quite pleased with the result and found a few handy principles reinforced.

Balance - When one body part goes one way, other body parts will move the other way to counter-act and keep the entire body balanced.

Sine Wave - Reinforcing the balance principle, what I found gave me a happy surprise. By the time the body parts are animated from head to tail, I've found that the entire motion if seen from the top view is a nice sine wave. Just like a snake!

Weight - Heavy creatures spend more time on the ground than in the air. To enhance the sense of weight, I've deliberately slammed his feet to the ground on the contact position in just 1 frame. If you look carefully, you will also notice that the feet are displaced slightly in both translation and rotation to emphasize the weight distribution.

Overlapping Action - Most applicable to the tail swaying. I realize the tail animation could be polished a lot more.

Analysis

A good animator understands all the animation principles and applies them to everything they animate, be it human characters, cartoons, creatures or even text animations. Sure, but how do you get from good to great?

I strongly believe the difference here would be the level of understanding of the creature/rig that is being animated. I think this t-rex animation is good. But for it to be great, it has to have that level of realism. And the only way to achieve that is to have good reference and understanding of the t-rex anatomy and locomotion.

I first need to study how the bone structures in the t-rex works (different skeletal structures allow for different types of movements) and then find the closest reference I can for it. Although its impossible to find a real t-rex to reference nowadays, I can always look at the closest animals their body structures resemble and go from there.

Once I fully understand how that works to my fullest advantage, and combined with the application of the animation principles, I will no longer be animating as "blindly" as I was when I was just moving bones around without a full understanding of the range-of-motion of a creature like the t-rex.

From there on, I can then start applying an emotional/objective based animation to my t-rex and go from a standard t-rex to a say, "hungry t-rex" or "aggressive t-rex". Nonetheless, basics must come first. It's useless if I try to animate an angry t-rex before I even understand how a t-rex can truly move.

I'll be revisiting this t-rex in the future to create a more polished and showreel deserving slot.