Final Documentation

This entire semester has been focused on the animation and development of characters in motion. And for my final, I have chosen to take one of my original characters and make him move as fluidly as possible in different actions.

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At the beginning of this semester, I have been drawing several new characters in my sketchbook. Each of them were different from each other, from their wings to their eyes to their facial expressions. In addition to these new characters, I have also been drawing my first character from last class, Domino.

There were a few sketches that looked better than others, and all of them showed the characters in motion, or at least in different poses. However, while I have been giving a lot of attention to the newer characters, my own portrayal of Domino was lagging behind, especially when he's in motion.

I wanted to fix that, so I decided to make him the sole subject of my final project, which was an animation of him doing various actions; running, jumping, landing, and an idle pose.

The keyframes luckily were not as difficult as they used to be, since now I know well enough to always keep track of them and place them often. But weight painting was something I could not fathom on my own...lucky for me, my good friend Jen helped me out and made Domino look less like a rubber dog or some toy.

The most interesting things I animated were his ears, tail, and hat. Having them flop around in the air or wag as he turns his head was fun to animate, and it felt like I was really bringing the character to life.

The worst thing about animating Domino, or at least the most challenging thing besides weight painting, was one of his legs that moved in wide circles sometimes between keyframes. I fixed it by manipulating it directly over the course of the animation, but it was still strange to see.

All in all, I used a lot more time in this animation than my previous ones just to showcase different actions and try to put some spacing between them. All to help it flow better, which I really think it did.

A Weight Off My Shoulders

Thanks to Jen's help, the weighting for my model has been completed! From its fingers to its legs to its tail, it doesn't look like bent rubber anymore thank goodness.

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At this point, I want to make my walk cycle with it, or at least a few different actions like I planned to do. It all depends on how easy they come out I suppose. But if I can make multiple actions, I plan to have a walking motion, a running motion, a jump, a fall, and then maybe a landing animation before it loops. I might also throw in an idle animation in there as well.

Weighing the Odds

I've been trying to get my weight painting together, but it's been a lot more complicated than I thought. I tried just painting everything a color or taking all the color away and it just did different things to the body part, things I didn't want to happen in the first place.

Maybe I'm a perfectionist but my limbs always looked rubber and odd looking, so as I tweaked them they just got either a little bit better or a lot worse. The biggest mystery was why the back of the head moved when I adjusted the hat, or other oddities like that. I'll have to work harder on it to try and get those issues out of the way.

Storyboarding the Model

I've been going over what exactly to make of my final as far as movements go, since he's already fully equipped with a skeleton and the model's still in one piece.

I was hoping to have several poses or actions, such as running, jumping, landing, and perhaps a shocked expression. If not all that, a single walk cycle will be enough. Depends on how long I can work on it once the weight painting works out.

Creating More Models in 2D

Over the past week I found myself creating more 2D sketches of my characters in different poses, which not only helped me improve my drawing skills for my first character, but also helped me draw them with expressions in motion.

With my first character, Domino, I realized that how I drew him was weaker compared to the other 3 characters I developed, especially him in motion. I made him a priority this time and focused on how his body moves and acts, as well as updating the shape of his paws. I made them less glove like and more of individual fingers.

The frog character went mostly unchanged and I tried to keep with his specific feel. I was using the older pictures I did of the character as reference. Same goes for the ball-like character I created, even if he's the simplest of everyone with just eyes and a body.

The snake character though I think helped greatly now that I can create his wing hands easily and I can understand his body structure. His expressions show a lot, and I feel like he's coming along more as a character. Given the four of them, I have high hopes for them in the future, especially with Domino so I can made his walk cycle for the final.

Making a Walk Cycle

Taking one of the older models into Maya, specifically the basic model, I decided to take a shot at creating a walk cycle with a rigged character, and was as difficult as expected.

There were lots of different parts of the rig that I had to keyframe every time I moved it, but the best thing is that I didn't mess up and ruin the flow of what I was key framing by forgetting a moment to keyframe. I started with the legs and feet, which went pretty well as I moved the parts around.

Afterwards I moved the arms and torso, and finally the head to finish the animation. I feel that overall the head was the hardest thing to do because I never really notice how my head moves when I walk and how much it bobs up and down. Same with the back and the hips, since on my own I can't really feel anything moving.

Just Walk It Out

The last class we spent together was all about walking animations and characters walking. I was really surprised how difficult this was to do, since out loud it sounds really easy. I never really thought about the specifics of a walk cycle before.

I walked around in different ways to see how it felt, paying attention to how my arms and shoulders and other parts moved when I walked. It was really strange, because I never payed attention to it before.

For my animal character though, I payed more attention to how his tail and ears react when I walks. The tail itself is less floppy compared to a squirrels, casually moving itself back and forth as he walks. And his ears I figured out would behave much like long hair, moving depending on the speed he was going but probably bouncing lightly as he moved.

Midterm Blog Post: Self-Evaluation

Through the first half of this semester, I've learned a great deal about motion in characters, forces, and structure within said characters themselves. From hand drawings to 3D modeling, I really enjoyed every part of this half and am a little excited for the next half.

One thing I am especially proud of is my drawing skill, and how much they've improved since the beginning of last semester's class. Back then I was just getting the hang of drawing characters in poses, but now I've grown to have them exclusively in motion.

The thing with animal characters is how much their anatomy is different than normal human characters. The shape of the eyes, as well as the size of the pupils, really gave character to my frog character. The expressions on him were something I particularly liked, and he seemed very easy to draw as well.

I have also created a character with two big feathery wings and a serpentine body in place of legs. At first it was very difficult to draw because the placement of the feathers bugged me, but after trial and error I now know what I'm doing enough to clearly show the "fingers" from the rest of the wings.

My third character is one without a body or limbs, and all of his emotions are expressed through his eyes or a disembodied hand on occasion. At first he only had one expression because his pupil is the same color as his body, but by sliding the pupil's position around I found he can show more than one expression. The subtly of his expressions is one of the character's strong points.

All these characters have come along so well in my opinion, and I look forward to drawing them more in the future, for leisure or otherwise. For my final however, I will take my first original character, Domino, and make a walk or run cycle for him in Maya. Since I spent so much time on these newer characters, he deserves some quality time. I want him to be the most polished off the group, especially for future projects.

Using the Force

Using a new 3D model, I decided to mess around with forces and gravity on a figure. It took a little longer than I imagined, because the keyframes wouldn't stay where I wanted and ended up glitching out throughout my work time.

The best thing was playing with the model. Though the silly dimensions were cool, I wanted to really experiment with the humanoid figure for my character. The exaggerated motions went with my more cartoony characters than more serious ones, and the character had his arms and legs flailing about as the platform moved beneath him.

More Characters: Snake and Ball

After last class, I have been looking at different poses on Maya to better understand my characters and how they would be posed.

In addition to my previous characters, I have been creating a snake-like character in my sketches to draw. What makes this character special is that he has no legs and more feathery "hands" compared to the others. These actually function as wings, and let him fly around. Choosing clothing that doesn't restrict his wings is key.

The other character is more simple in his design, but has two large eyes on his face. While its easy to draw him, I try to keep him just as expressionite as the others by using his eyes. He makes me think about how characters express themselves with different emotions, and how eyes play a part in it.

Sketching Characters: Frog and Dog

Much like last semester, we took time to sketch out our characters with a live model posing for us. I liked drawing my character, and this gave me the perfect opportunity to figure out his body structure and physical traits.

My character is a humanoid frog with a very thin physique, mostly in his limbs. The trickiest part of drawing him initially was his eyes, since a frog's eyes are much larger than say a dog's eyes, and they aren't contained by the skull. As I draw him more, I learned how big to make the eyes compared to the size of the head.

Another issue was how to make his pupils within the eyes. As class started, I made them look connected to the bottom of his eye as well as the top, much like in the picture above. But as class went on, I realized that I limited his sight range and expressions because his pupils were too rigid. I eventually fixed it by making his pupils smaller, giving him more expressions.

Since this is the first animal character I made with pants, as he has no fur to cover himself, it made me think about my other character Domino in terms of design. Seeing the two next to each other made Domino seem a lot more...bare. Why does the frog need pants and Domino doesn't? Is it because of the fur? It gives me a lot more thought into the characters, and gave me potential ideas to edit their looks further.

Creating Characters

All this week I've been thinking on and trying to create characters that I can use tonight for motion-related poses and stances. More specifically, I've been building on the characters I've had from the previous version of this class.

The frog and the snake characters are gonna be my focus for tonight's class, as well as my other character Domino, for the sake of keeping his structure fresh in my head.

Animating A Character

Animating a character has its own techniques and strategies depending on just what kind of light you want the character to be seen in. My model was a fox and I made him look more cartoon-y than realistic because of his squashing and stretching.

The character is scared, and I have him exaggeratedly flailing his arms and jumping off of the ground in response to something frightening. I made sure to put extra attention to his ears, folding them when something was wrong and bringing them up when alert.

The tail doesn't have any bones in it, its just a long piece of fur. So I had it as loose as possible in the beginning, but made it become rigid when he became scared, like many animal characters in cartoons. I had fun playing with the eyes and mouth of the character as well, making sure to set the key points for both throughout.

Animated Observation: American Dad

For my observation on an animated TV show, I decided to use an episode of American Dad called "Familyland", where the main characters become trapped in a Disney World-like theme park and must fight for their survival.

I chose this episode because towards the end there was a scene of the Smith family confronting the mastermind behind the park's entrapment, Roy Family. Each of the family members prepared themselves to attack Roy for holding the mom (Francine) hostage and subjecting them all to bloody combat with the other park goers. It really stood out to me because their movements really attributed to their characters and backgrounds.

From right to left we have Francine, her husband Stan, son Steve, daughter Hayley, and the family's alien Roger. When the park went into anarchy, each Smith sans Francine took refuge in a different attraction; Stan in the wild west park, Steve in the children's area, Hayley in the princess castle, and Roger in the futuristic sci-fi zone.

Stan is a CIA agent and is supposed to be a weapon expert. As the father, he takes the most charge out of the rest of his family and showed this by being the one to tell Roy Family that they would hurt him for what he put them through. The way he showed his gun and narrowed his eyes reflected his CIA training, ready to shoot him in an instant. He also showed the gun to Roy from behind his cloak, like how a secret agent would conceal weapons.

Steve is seen as a very nerdy and often fragile boy instead of the man Stan wants him to be. Despite the flack he gets through the series, Steve does try to show his manliness to Stan in different episodes. In this scene he holds up his hands in an attempt to look threatening like his father, but the frailness of his stance shines through. His fists shake to show his determination to protect his family, and the nervousness of the situation at hand. His hunched back adds to these feelings.

Hayley spent all her time in the park teaching the little girls that being a "princess" is not what they should model themselves to be like. She doesn't rely on a man to handle her battles, taking charge and speaking her mind no matter the consequence. Compared to her brother, Hayley looks more confident and strong, holding the sword like a valkyrie or a warrior.

Roger is a sassy and charismatic alien who has been hiding from the CIA in the Smith's attic. He uses disguises and personas to go outside the house unnoticed, but by being in charge of the futuristic area of the park let him stay under the radar by the other people. One thing about his character is often not being on the same page as the rest of the family, taking one extreme in the opposite direction of what needed to be done. This is an example of that; while the rest of the family prepares themselves to fight, Roger takes the opportunity to snap a picture of himself with a pose. He did this at the same time the other Smiths went into a battle stance, showing he was not on the same mental wavelength as the rest.

Showing these movements at the final confrontation of the episode really pulled in my attention, and brought a smile to my face just as they moved their heads and gritted their teeth.

Toy Story Observation

In the first Toy Story, I payed attention to the movements more than I have before, one character in particular being Sheriff Woody. The lead character of the film, Woody's present from the very beginning.

The way Woody moves is very lanky and spindly, since he is a cloth doll and his material isn't as rigid as plastic or metal. Woody's limbs are very free as they move, and can move quickly. When they're not flopping around in the air, they're pointed straight in accusation or emphasis.

As a character, Woody has leadership qualities but becomes jealous when Buzz Lightyear is give to his owner, Andy. Since then his jealousy grows more, until he has to work together with Buzz to return home safely after getting lost at a gas station.

Through these situations and trials, Woody changed to a more caring toy, able to realize his flaws and make amends with Buzz. A "tell" for Woody would be his flailing legs when he's running.

Looney Tunes Observation

After seeing the classic cartoon show "The Looney Tunes", I payed extra close attention to how the characters moved and were drawn. I saw Road Runner, Sylvester & Tweety, and the sheep dog cartoons.

With the sheep dog and Road Runner, I noticed the wolf and Wile E. Coyote had the same design except for some different shades of fur and nose colors. Both of these characters moved very exaggeratedly, with lots of stretching when they get thrown or caught on something. From subtle movements to wide gestures, they conveyed as much emotion as possible given the situation.

With Sylvester & Tweety, in addition to the cartoons above, tails and ears were used to give more emotion than just their facial expressions. All of the drawn characters looked relatively smooth except for tufts of fur or hair.