So this is what I've been working towards making in my tutorial lessons, this is a composition made up of the fruit that I made earlier this week, I made the fruitbowl using the CV tool to make a curve which i revolved into a bowl, then it was just a case of duplicating, scaling, changing the position and angle of the fruit until the bowl was full and I was happy with the composition. Truth be told I didn't plan the composition it was just a case of having a look at what looked about right. I felt in a scene like this where the placement of fruit is random that approach worked well enough. In future I will give scene composition more thought. Other observations I made is that it is unusual placing the items in the bowl because you have to really work to make sure they touch each other and the bowl (giving a sense of weight and earths real gravity) without allowing their surfaces to intersect (something apples dont tend to do in real life), but this is just one of the things you have to do when working in 3D.
This week we've been slowing dipping into the world of plasticine character based animation, this week we were concentrating on sculpting heads. I choose to base my sculptures on the character designs I made during the Illusion of Life module. So Vaughnie the Viking is making his comeback but it three dimensions. To sculpt the heads I used styrophome balls to bulk the head out but keep it light. Then I lightly covered the ball in plasticine and began to sculpt up from there. I learnt a valuable lesson in that if using more than one colour of plasticine start light and go progressively darker. This stops transfer on my fingers darkening or dirtying the light coloured plasticine. Once I had built the heads I took a selection of photos using a DSLR (which it turns out I am useless at using) and lighting them with in different ways with a 650w spotlight. I also tried using a piece of red tracing paper to give off a red hue, but it was very pale. Next time I think it would work better with a transparent coloured plastic sheet.
Today my lecture watched Pixar's Wall-e with a view to looking at how CGI is beening made more realistic by the use of cameras that impersonate the cinematography of real physical cameras used to shoot live action. The theory behind this is that we are so used to accepting what we see in live action films, that what we see being shot or filmed through what appears to be the same medium has the same effect and tricks the mind when it comes to realism. Pixar have clearly done a lot of research when it comes to this. By creating visuals we normally associate with live action filming, such as lens flare, and changing focus due to different aperatures the film gives the appearance that it was made using a film crew rather than a hoard of animators. Pixar are also clearly skilled at using the language of cinematography to tell the story much in the same way a live action director does, this method of working in similar ways to any other director really helps in convincing you that what your eyes see is more real than you would think. But one of the key points I felt was important in highlighting how clever Pixar we being when using cameras, was how they portrayed a sense of scale, considering that there are no human beings in the first half of the film, and this is the distant future so buildings and landscapes we see are not neccessarily as good indicators of scale as we might think, we still know exactly how big Wall-e is. And when the first humans are introduced Wall-e turns out to be exactly the size we thought. This almost confounding ability to make us natural assume the exact scale of characters and landscapes that are completely fictionalized demonstrates how aspects of the film trick the audience into believing it could be real. Obviously Pixar have a style that is styalized and isnt firmly based on ultra-realism but rather greating lovable characters and good stories, I still find it interesting that we can be tricked into believing that parts of the film could have been filmed from live action. Also interestingly I did some further research into Alex Roman's the third and the seventh posted on this blog last week, and it turns out that the cameraman ( a figure many said shows what see still cannot reproduce accurately in CGI, is actually a real person green screened into the animation) I found it ironic that the image that jarred with viewers in that piece was actually the only thing in it that was real.
Heres my second piece of fruit for today, you know what they say about five pieces a day, on second thoughts probably won't be making vast amounts more today. This is quite obviously a banana, I made it using lofting, and nurbs and the bend deformer. Which was co operating way more with the banana than it was when I was making my apple. Hence why the leaf on the apple is not bent the way I want for some reason it would only let me bend side to side, not up and down, hopefully I will work out what silly mistake I was making and resolve this soon. But enough talk here is a banana. I'm quite proud.
This is a bit of an-unchronological post. This is a post just giving a few behind the scenes bits from our experimental animation, that I posted the finished version of not so long ago. This post will have little video tests from the pixelation animation I was working on, along with a few of the many pictures we took to test out different lighting, before beginning animation. Along with some of the tests I helped by performing button clicking duties for the other half of the group on the "very experimental" animation.
I've been a bit distracted by maya at the moment, so I thought I would start to post up some of the stuff I've been working away at. I've been working through the Maya getting started book (which is no small task, the books huge) and I've finished a few sections in the book, some of the modelling ones are started but unfinished. But recently I've been working through the methods of animation tutorials, I've now learnt how to use keyframing, graph editing, trax, and I'm starting to learn how to use inverse-kinematics. As a result I have 3 or 4 little animations I need to stick up but I need Adobe Premier first, so hopefully those will make it up soon (I'm really quite pleased with them). Also in recent news I bought escape studios maya core online lessons yesterday and already I've made a primative man in 3D (hoped to animate him doing a walk cycle by the end of today, but I realise I need to make a IK skeleton first, so sooon hopefully) and this morning I started learning all bout nurbs modelling and some new stuff. So here is my apple.
My critical analysis lecture today was on the beginning of the CGI revolution which has affected animation mush in the same way that handrawn animation did when Walt Disney's films perfected their formula for making great animated films. We were tasked to research a few important names and see how people and discoveries all linked up in the grand scheme of things, and how this led to the developement of the CGI animation we are surrounded by today and it was also highlighted to me how much to techniques have improved in under 40 years.
So where did it all begin, I think this has to be without a doubt with Ivan Sutherland's invention SketchPad. This was a computer program that allowed you to store and use visual information onto a computer with a pen tool. The sheer enormity of the task Sutherland managed to complete in creating this task astounded people, when he was asked how did you manage it he replied "No body told me how difficult it was". This was because there had never been anything remoted like it before that it was impossible to gauge the size of the task Sutherland set himself. Not only was creating the program a breakthrough, but part of what made his task difficult was finding computers which could be used to work on. Sutherland would journey around universities who had invested in these "supercomputers" and show that he could use them, and from this develope his software.
One of Sutherlands students Edwin Catmull began working at the Computer Division of LucasFilm (a division that literally shaped computer animation as we know it) he and Alvy Ray Smith became vice presidents of the Computer Division at LucasFilm. However it would not remain the Computer Division of LucasFilm for long, during his divorce George Lucas was forced to sell of parts of the company to pay the divorce settlement. The Computer Division was one of several to be sold off. Steve Jobs, founder and up until recently head of Apple computers bought the computer division for $10 million. The idea was for the division to create software, however it is apparant that after several years the company went down a new path.
John Lasseter an animator at Disney around the time that CGI demonstration films were being made, became fascinated by this new form of animation. However upon suggesting the idea to Disney was let go from the company. He later joined the now named Pixar, computer division of LucasFilm. He believed that the people using the current computer software for creating CGI where appraoching it from a computer science point of view as opposed to an artistic point of view that he had as an animator, and so at pixar they create their first animation short Luxo Jr and Tin Toy which paved the way for them to create the first fully animated CGI feature length film and establish CGI as a form of animation.
Since then the quality of animation has improved in leaps an bounds so that 15 years later this film by Alex Roman the Third and the Seventh demonstrates the quality we can achieve in CGI animation
Here it is the final edit animation from the experimental animation task set at the start of the week. The animation has been aptly named Money. Today we were simply editing the animation together from its componant scenes, including adding the rather fetching credits. Once we had finished that we decided that soundtrack was in order, and rather than spend a long time making a very realistic soundtrack we opted for being experimental and created the entire soundtrack using just the voices of the animators who made it. I think this works really well in this case. Particularly the rather epic song that was invented for the credits.
And now time for a little bit of an evaluate of the animation, in terms of planning and coming up with an idea as a group I feel we did very well, we started brainstorming (am I allowed to say this??) ideas from the topics we were given and trying to incorporate the bits and bobs we had brought along for experimental animation. Once we got ideas flowing we split into different groups to do the two smaller projects that would make the animation. From this we once again as a group bounced ideas of each other and in my group actually acted out our ideas before we storyboarded the final idea. (We really should have video'd this to show this planning). Once we had storyboarded that was planning complete. Because we opted to use no dialogue or work from sound initially we didnt dope sheet and just added soundtrack to fit the finished animation. When we were filming we performed tests which were useful in judging how the animation was going as we were using a digital SLR camera as opposed to a DV camera and Istopmotion so we werent getting the benefits of being able to onion skin and judge animation quality that way. As a result one or two sections look a little choppy particularly the growth of the tree which claire found difficult in her "costume" and the scene of myself lying on the floor covered in money as in order to get the angle for the shot Richard was holding the camera in mid air on a fully extended tri pod and was just taking shots quite blindly. This is the kind of shot we will be able to do better if we use the MILO camera.
This week we began the second of our group tasks, our brief was to create a piece of experimental animation based around one of four topics; growth, sea/wildlife, dance or conflict. Our group approach was more towards finding an idea and then tailoring it towards one of the topics. Because of our group size we opted to use two different types of animation to show variety in the final piece. We chose to divide the animation in two and have a thought sequence set inside the main characters head in which he is looking for a solution to a worldly problem. This animated sequence would be made in a different method to the rest of the animation, this would allow us to explore the idea of another world (a concept often used in animated films) and also show a clear distinction between them. The sub-group I was decided we wanted to experiment with pixalation as a form of animation, and decided that the thought scene would be done using pixalation and characters acted out using ourselves and props. We felt this gave the piece a nice feel as the "imaginary" world would be visually similar to our world and the "real" world to look exagerated and animation. We felt this was the inverse to the norm and gave the piece some atmoshpere. We also used very different colour schemes in the two world bright and vibrant for the "real" and black and white for the "imaginary". This video is the entire thought scene before it had been edited and filtered to be black and white. I will be uploading the finished edit at a later date along with our video tests and the many different lighting test we performed before we began to animate. Also at a later date I will post the other half of the animation, tests, and the fully finished and edited animation.
I've started to really get into stopmotion animation (at the moment still using stickfas figures) and so I made two more short clips today. I decided to spend some time working on walk cycles as I felt this is an area I just need to know like the back of my hand. So armed with a stickfas figure and the Animator's Survival Guide by Richard Williams I set about making a walk cycle. First of all unlike the walk cycle that I helped make in the group session on tuesday, this walk cycle is not made using replacement technique. I found that technique far too much of a headache due to not having either eight or sixteen figures to effectively make a walk cycle. This does mean that the walk cycle is lacking some of the smoothness you get by using replacement as my eye for creating a really smooth animtion is not going to be as good as those who have spent many more years doing this. For my first cycle I chose to do the walk cycle on eights but doubled it to draw it out a little bit longer.
I am pleased with the walk cycle, I think it runs smooth enough although I think I can catch a glimmer of a slightly out of place action somewhere in the middle. Following the walk cycle I decided to try something new and opted to make my character run. This however turns out to be a little bit trickier that anticipated purely because I am not yet used to stopmotion and that your model will not float in mid air on nothing but good will. As a result I have to stack the feet with blu tack (my only readily available resource) in order to give the impression of the character being off the ground. The animation works quite well but is only just passable in points where the character should have less contact with the ground.
Minor problem I realise you cant loop videos on blogger, sorry bout that.
Here is my infographic for the critical analysis assessment. I chose to base the infographic on Nick Park and Aardman, and a little background on how Wallace and Gromit came into being, along with some other animations made by Aardman studio. The graphic is laid out in the style of one of Wallace's cracking contraptions. The idea was to create a kind of flow diagram in the form of a bit machine that invented Wallace and Gromit and others works Park worked on. I've been watching a lot of Aardman animation: the entire of the Wallace and Gromit collection, Creature Comforts, Chicken Run and also Aardman's Darkside DVD. I did have some trouble when making the infographic as to how to do it and I still feel that for communicating information I think I would rather have sat down and wrote an easy on Aardman and Nick Park.
We were set a little christmas project to keep the drawing up, and out of the choices of subject matter I chose hands - my reasoning was hands in my opinion are a particular weak point of my drawing and so I took the opportunity to try and get in a bit of practise. Here are a selection of some of the drawings I've done over Christmas.
These are the last couple from the Life Drawings around the place, I have more that need to be scanned in an uploaded but I will get to those once I've finished uploading the huge backlog of stuff that I have at the moment.
This is the second load of life drawings, these ones are a mixture of lengths and mostly drawn from all over the place, some on buses, trains, and beyond.
Im making a start on posting a pick of life drawing work i ve been doing over the last term and a bit from over the christmas hols, still not happy that I'm doing enough really got to work on whipping the sketchbook out more often. Anyway these are all life drawings that were done in about 30 seconds each before the position changed.
Today was the first day we were sitting down and starting the stop motion animation process, our brief for this week was to create a walk cycle using Replacement technique, this is an animation technique quite commonly used an example of which is the animated childrens program Pingu. Replacement means using many different models each posed in a different way to make the animation. Our group found this quite challenging as we had 6 models but to do a walk cycle smoothly by replacement we would have liked to have had 16 different poses. As a result we had to reposition certain models to get the extra positions and this was more time consuming when we would have been better re-posing one model again and again. This is a more commonly known stop motion technique, which we used in our later animations the break dance and the Zoommbiieesss animation that we started to make to test our ability to move six characters per frame.
This was the group walk cycle
Evil mastermind claire Manson is responsible for this one, The rest of the group offered camera and lighting support and when it came to the more complex jump movements help with the very technical aspect of rigging the model in mid air with bits of Tom Doyle's hair.
Finally this is the first two scenes of our "feature length" Zombie epic, we went for a very very staggering approach when it came to making the zombies walk or rather shuffle at high speeds. Over the course of the day we learnt some valuable lessons about lighting (and how to avoid the random changing in lighting colour demonstrated in the walk cycle), we learnt a lot of points that will be taken into account when making our own armatures for example making them big enough to be easily manipulated and not too fiddly.
