Man with BO staff

To practice animating a character interacting with an object i wanted to animate a kung fu type waving a stick around.

A very important thing to keep aware of, is the relationship between the object and the part of the character that is going to control the object. In this case PARENT CONSTRAINT in maya.
In addition to keying the "on and off" of the constraint, its also important to be aware of the object`s position in world space, which also have to be updated and keyed in order for say, switching an object between hands.

Once Georg taught me all that, i animated the guy first, then rigged up the constraints, then tweaked the movement of the staff for optimum pleasure.

The last thing i did was add some basic head and facial animation.
I could keep tweaking this as there are a LOT of improvement possibilities, but since this was only meant as a practice for object interaction, i am going to leave it as it is and jump to the next thing.

I started animating!

For my 3rd year project, i am basically focusing on building a strong showreel full of character animations.
And i am hoping to get involved with as many of the projects in our class as humanly possible.
That way, i will get a lot of diversity on my showreel. As well as practice animating different styles.

I started doing animation tests for the "Tom Dowler- group".
Here is the first scene i made. It is meant to be comical and cartoony. It is part of a chase scene where a hunter-character chases a little creature through a field of bouncy mushrooms (!?!?!?)

Animationstyle: super cool

I remember really liking the Moomin animated series growing up. And i noticed the animation was different from the Disney movies, but still thought it was an awesome style.
I later recognized the same type of animation in japanese films.

I knew Moomin was from Finland so i figured it must have been made by a finnish crew.
But today i found out that almost the entire crew of that series is japanese.



And you can definately see alot of typical "japanimation" techniques used (even just in the intro thats in hebrew), like paralaxing and the very(!!) simplistic lip syncing.
Even when they animate action stuff, its really energetic, but can be insanely simplistic.
A good exmple of that style is the intro dream sequence to Kung fu Panda.



Gotta love it!
In this style of animation has the best use of slow motion i think. Its great for making a powerful anticipation for example.
And even though the actual "action moves" sometimes are very subtle, and sometimes they´re not even there(!), they feel very energetic.

One more example of this is this Ill Bill music video. Notice the simplicity of the animation, but how COOL they´ve made it by throwing tons of other stuff onto the animation.



I am definately going to try to copy this sort of style. Japan 4!!

Basketball jones

I tried ToonBoom just to see if it had any advantages to adobe flash.
To be honest, i thought it was exactly the same. But i only tested out the very very basics.

I animated a basketball dude doing a cool slam dunk:)

Over the summer

I havent done much animation related work over summer. which i now regret.
But i did make a little experimental thing with a friend of mine who is a DJ.

The idea was to have simple 2d animated figures move and do wierd stuff to the beat of the music my friend had made/ was going to control live.
The figures were also motion tracked onto real footage backgrounds to make it a bit more interesting.

The "old super8 look" is just because of the club he was going to play at. They usually show stuff on screens with the same type of look.

It was simple to make the animations. But matching it to the (changing!!) beat of the music, was super duper difficult.
We figured the best way would be if we could somehow control the "beat" on the animations interactively. Maybe this could be done with flash? i dont know.. we´re scratching our heads.

Anyway here is a sample of what it was gonna look like:

The mesh..

The Wolf MESH is probably what got the least attention.
I was not really interested in making a good model. The importance was in the rig.
But i did make a simple little thing and i did adjust the weighting a bit, but i really couldnt afford to spend much time on it.
It still works to show the movement created by the rig. i made him bark a bit in the test animation just to show that the jaw is working.
The mesh has a fair amount of polygons, but of course they would have to be weighted properly.

I was going to try playing around with the fur effect bulit into maya. If i can get fur on a mesh that is weighted properly and where the rig works even better than this one, that would be it basically.

Here id wolfie running again!

About the rig...

The rig i have made is fairly simple.
All the legs have ONLY ikHandles. no FK ones. This seems to be the noral way of doing quadrupeds.

For the back feet, i just threw a normal ikHandle on. But with my particular leg dimensions, i can see that i will need an extra something to make the foot react more realisticly.

The feet have a heel, a ball and a toe joint. Like a human rig. In case i would need toe movement.
I only included that because it is simple to make, and though i doubt ill use it, it cant hurt.

The head has a neck, head, two ears and one jaw joint.
I should have made the neck a little bit longer considering the way dogs sway their head up and down to create extra momentum while running.
So if i had more joints in the neck the motion could have been made more fluent.
The ears should also get a bit more attention. A lot of a dog/wolfs emotion is displayed through the ears. So if i needed to fold them back and forth, it will need to look good!

Apart from the incredibly frustrating back leg setup, the spine and tail was the worst.
I struggled a good while before i understood how spline iks work.
The spine could also have been a bit more complex.
If this would have been an aim for a proper rig, the spine wouldnt be good enough. I only have one cluster in each end of both the spine and the tail. +the twst attribute.
This basically means limited movement in a place that might be important in making the dog look natural.
The tail itself isnt moving at all. I could not figure out how to make a good controller to make the tail swing from side to side AND up and down. The tail would also need a few more joints. At least make it bend in more areas.

The control curves i made are pretty standard. Most are made from nurbs curves so they dont show up on renders. For the pole vectors i used "invisible" polygon geometry that also can only be viewed within maya. And i made all four different, because i thought they would all be on the inside of the wolf's leg, and thereby easily end up on top of each other, making them harder to grab.
I made some original control curves as well.
For the jaw i created a jaw looking curve that u simply rotate in whatever axis you want, and the jawJOINT will react perfectly.
For the ears i made curves shaped like ears and a bit bigger that the mesh ears, just to make them easier to grab.
The foot control i made in the shape of a dog paw. The base controls the whole foot, while the little toe symbols control... just the toes.

I also added something i havent actually seen on any other quadrueds. Which is a parent to both sets of legs.
I made one controlcurve for both the front feet, and one for both the back feet.
I did this because when four legged creatures run, they roughly move the back feet the same, and the front feet the same. with a slight difference though.
I figured it would be easiler to animate if i made this curve that animates two at a time, get the timing right, and then adjust the difference with the individual foot controls.

I did not bother with a reverse foot control. Its easy to make, but i did not need to test anything out about it, because i know pretty well how they work, and im not even sure i will have any use for it on an imporved version of this rig.