Moom Animatic

After creating my animatic, I managed to get a temporary voice recording, with the timing and ten that I was going for. This was considerably shorter than my animatic - I already would have wanted to extend the animation out for longer since the time I have given each movement in the animatic was quite short.

The new, revised slower audio I made was still too long for the animatic, so I would have to change my ideas for the animation rather than the audio. I should have recorded the final audio before the animatic so that I could make sure my timing is right, so instead I will be using my animatic as a rough reference. I will keep the order of the shots and close ups, but the individual poses themselves will be cut and rearranged to fit for my animation. I will also use my video reference which fits in a lot better with my audio, but still isn't perfect and between the two, I can key in enough poses to make the movements I absolutely need.

I do have a good idea of how the lighting will work though, so the animatic is definitely useful for that.

Idle Man Brief Analysis

The Idle Man is an online clothing company for young males, wanting to be noticed through a campaign/overarching campaign idea. I can use whatever media formats I want, but I must show how my ideas work in context.

5 Words
Average [Guy]
Affordable
Fun
Fashion
Passionate

5 Considerations
18 - 25 year old
'Enjoyable Experience'
'Build Identity'
Be Noticed throughout multiple media
Aimed towards men, 'helping him be the best man he can be'

5 Products
Clothes
Wallets
Shoes
Scarves
Watches

5 Places
Shops
Party
Internet/Social Space
University

Who is the audience?
18 - 25 year old males.

Who should the audience be?
Males who want to look good

Who could the audience be?
Middle aged guys wanting to look 'young'

What do they do?
University/college
Spend Money
Use Social Media
Work
Party
Socialise

What do they want to be?
Looking Good
Fashionable
Buying Good Clothes

I am choosing this idea to give me a chance to look more into character design/fashion illustration, and since it gives me a specific audience to aim my work at. The Idle Man have outlined the sort of archetypes they want to associate with their brand, and that gives me a solid place to work from, considering that I usually design character for fiction and have some kind of story/narrative to work from.

Study Task 3 - Posing Moom Part 2

I feel like Moom's teeth actually helped for this expression; the way that the mouth moves is much better than I expected, with both the actual jaw and lips movable, so it was fun getting more of a pursed lips expression, although it is easy for the teeth to clip through the face. 

I keep forgetting that Moom has lower eye lids - they definitely come in hand for some of the less appealing expressions. Add that to crazy pupils and you can get some very manic expressions. My reference is a little more 'painful' than 'crazy' but I think that this shows Moom's frustration at being hurt much better. I almost wish that this was something I could use in m animation.

After having fun with this task, I had a mess around with Moom just for fun, and I found him capable of some very interesting things.

Study Task 3 - Posing Moom Part 1

This task was one of the more fun ones, putting Moom in a pose and not having to worry about how he moves.

 

It was confusing at first to get Moom's legs right, because I thought that it's knee would move an that was how I could change how much the leg is folded, but instead it was mostly controlled by the foot. I found that moving the hips were helpful for bending the knee a little bit more, but it was hard to get it in the right direction without moving the foot a lot first. The arm controllers moved differently, and  found them much easier to get used to,

One awkard thing about Moom is the size of his hands - I can't pose him exactly as I want because it causes clipping, so I had to find other ways to overlay his limbs. This made me lean Moom more forward so that the right arm could lay in top of the left and it helped to exaggerate the pose more.

One thing that I wish I could do on this rig is make Moom's pupils bigger or smaller; I think that I could really push his expressions if that was the case. The eyebrows make him very expressive though and his mouth gives plenty to work with for his expressions so there is still a decent amount I can do.

Syfy Ideas

I decided not to do the Syfy brief in the end, since their main goal was to be made relevant to the audience they wanted. To me, a channel being relevant means that it has good content that is what their audience wants to watch. If you do not have the content, I don't believe that advertising could really do that much in making your audience enjoy your channel more and make you seem more relevant, so I decided to drop the brief in the end. Though I do like the genres Syfy show and that would have made it extremely fun to work on especially if I got character design involved, I don't believe that any adverts/advert ideas I could create would work for what they want, and that feeling would definitely stop me from producing my best work.

Syfy Brief

Moom Props - Modelled

It didn't take me long to model the props since I only wanted them to be simple and not stand out too much.












Moom's mustache was fun to do, but I feel like it came out looking very English gentleman-ish, especially with the gondolier hat. I started to change the mustache into a shorter, thicker one but I realised that it was probably going to obscure the mouth, and that would make the lip syncing awkward - even if I attached it after I finished animating, it would still probably make it harder for the viewer to see his mouth properly. I might go back to it at the end, but for now I think it is better to leave it off.

I added the moon and water to give a little bit more context to the scene before I started animating. I could do the background itself later, for which I was thinking about having a few rows on buildings with references from photos of Venice, but preparing to animate is my main concern at the moment so that would have to wait.

I used locators to keep the hat and the oar on Moom, which needed to be parented to the object and then constrained to another locator attached to the part of Moom that needed it. This didn't take too long, but I had to turn on the skeleton and change the joint size so that I could see them properly and attach the locator to it.

Responsive: Brief Analysis

SYFY

WHAT PROBLEM DOES THE BRIEF IDENTIFY?
- Not seen as being as relevant. They have increasing competition, making this harder.

WHAT DOES THE BRIEF WANT YOU TO DO?
- Focus on the Syfy brand, not the content - create a campaign/event/product to generate interest for Syfy
- Impact and surprise the fans!

WHAT IS THE BRIEF TRYING TO ACHIEVE?
 - Get them (18-25 year old Sci-Fi fans) to connect with us
- Get their target audience to see them as relevant
- Want to be talked about
- Positions Syfy 'at the centre of the sci-fi genre'




TAYLORS COFFEE

WHAT PROBLEM DOES THE BRIEF IDENTIFY?
- Aren't 'young' enough - want to appeal to a younger audience
- Potentially looking to be a 'mainstream' coffee shop

WHAT DOES THE BRIEF WANT YOU TO DO?
- 'Creative Product Idea' - shake up the coffee category and make create a product idea to catch the interest of a younger audience
- New packaging, use or occasion for coffee

WHAT IS THE BRIEF TRYING TO ACHIEVE?
- Have an idea or product to make them more noticed and relevant to a younger audience




YORKSHIRE TEA

WHAT PROBLEM DOES THE BRIEF IDENTIFY?
- People are buying less tea - want it to be more mainstream again, especially for younger tea drinkers

WHAT DOES THE BRIEF WANT YOU TO DO?
- Design something (product innovation) that will catch the eye of buyers
- Give people more reason to drink tea (specifically their tea)

WHAT IS THE BRIEF TRYING TO ACHIEVE?
- Get people drinking more tea
- Give people a reason to buy Yorkshire tea

Responsive Competition: 11 Second Club

11 SECOND CLUB

11 Second Club is competition that I have been thinking about for a while. It would be really fun to do, and I think I'd learn a lot more from it than I have from some of our longer briefs so far - I find it easier to concentrate on smaller bits of animation like this, and I can thinking about all parts of movement rather than thinking about how many more scenes I have to animate. A lot of more experienced animators enter this competition though, so I would have to spend quite a lot of time on it. I would probably rather do it in 2D since we haven't done a lot of 3D work yet, so I would have to be careful to make sure that I can draw any extra angles/poses of the character. I feel like I might get a bit bogged down by the design and temptation to spend time on a background, leaving me with less time to animate. It would look good in a show reel,but I want to focus more on my portfolio instead, so this competition might not be the best for that - I could always wait until I have enough designs to flesh out my portfolio before giving it a go. Maybe I could even use some of the characters I have designed if they fit the speech, which could make my animation a bit more interesting.

Possible Competitions

When deciding on competitions to enter and things to make for the Responsive module, my first thought was of 11SecondClub. This is a monthly animation competition that specialises in character animation, and gives you audio to animate to, which would be really amazing practice for lip syncing. Although it is not the main focus of the competition, if I get any work for this finished in a timely manner I can do some more modelling, and build up more detailed and interesting backgrounds and props. I would really enjoy doing this even if it isn't judged as much as the actual animation itself. I could also model characters and rig them once I learn how to, to use them in future competitions and completely make my performance my own.

Riot Games are hosting a competition on Polycount with a few different categories - character art, Environment Art, Illustration, Animation and VFX. The animation, Character Art and Environment art categories sound extremely fun and would be great practice for me - if only the deadline wasn't December 19th. I do not think that I have time to learn how to make things that would meet all of the requirements of the competition, although I would still like to work on something like this in my own time, perhaps as a personal project.

Another fun competition to enter would be LoopdeLoop. It is a bi-monthly animation competition to make looping animations based on a small idea. This could be fun for generating smaller ideas - something that I generally have trouble with - and creating short simple animations. I could use 3D animation for this so that it is still interesting for me, and maybe have a few completed for this module.

Qwertee is less of a competition than others - I don't think that there are actual brief/suggestions of what to make, but the tshirts on the site are all based off of popular media - tv shows, comics, anime etc. This could be fun to do to practice design skills and doing something different. I can think about some shows or fandoms that I enjoy and make something that I would buy myself. Designs are voted on before being put up for sale, which would be very rewarding. Other sites like DesignbyHumans and Teefury also do this, so it is something to look into.

I will be doing a YCN brief as well, although the briefs might not give me quite as many opportunities learn things that I would like to as the above, but it could help my have a different way of learning and to think about advertising much more.

Responsive: Collaborations and Competitions

HOW CAN ENTERING A COMPETITION OR COMPLETING A LIVE BRIEF BENEFIT ME?

- Good practice for deadlines in the real world
- Possible learn about collaboration with other people and how well I take to it
- Practice animating in 3D more
- Exposure/Recognition
- More items for portfolio/Showreel (including pre-production items)
- Practice of creating things for a different purpose (non-narrative - advertising etc)
- Find out what sort of briefs I work best with - am I best when I am being competitive? am I best when I am being paid?
- Meet new people/Networking
- Awareness of larger animation/illustration communities
- Learning to prioritise briefs/work


GROUP DISCUSSION - BENEFITS OF COMPETITION/LIVE BRIEF
- To win - money, fame, pride
- Exposure - Recognition, publicity
- Connections
- Build a portfolio - showreel, distinct, range of things, commercial items
- Collaboration - involving disciplines, clients, experts
- Experience
- Placements/Work
- Awareness of Competition - trends, standards, experience
- Real life deadlines and time management
- Specialising/Where in the industry do I fit?

BENEFITS OF COMPETITIONS
- Freedom of choice
- Open to creative interpretation - different limits
- Stricter/more solid deadline
- Driving standards up
- Risk taking - safer?
- Confidence boosting
- Comparison to other practicioners
- Showing off
- Experience

Responsive - Session 1

First look at briefs - choose 3 and write about why you chose them

It is important to think about your briefs before choosing them - what are they asking for, and why am I choosing them? Will they help me with my skills or am I only thinking about the type of content I could make?

Yorkshire Tea - 
This is one of my chosen briefs because it is relevant to me and almost everyone I know are tea drinkers, meaning that I can get a lot of feedback from the targeted audience throughout the brief to make sure that my responsive is appropriate/relevant/what the brief is looking for. I can't use my animation skills so much for this task as the brief does not look for a campaign but this may help me to think more about branding and advertising, which would be very useful for my own work and what I may make in the future.

Taylors Coffee
This brief will make me think more about my target audience and what makes something more marketable to them than others. I can focus on designing more than animating since it isn't a communication/campaign brief. This could make me look at my own work from a different point of view and allow me to experiment with media/mediums I wouldn't usually use. The brief is also very different to our usual narrative work so this could help me to get new ideas for my own projects.

Syfy
I can look at how to make a brand/idea relevant and how to make it stand out from other competitors. This can be a campaign brief unlike my other two, giving me a chance to use animation if I want to - even motion graphics, or little animation but with a lot of modelling could work here. I am also a fan of the sci-fi genre so this brief would be fun and keep me interested. I could also experiment with posters which could help me advertise my own creations in the future, especially since this targets a much more specific audience/

Moom Prop Sheets

I would have liked to spend a lot more time both designing and modelling props, but since I have never really animated in Maya before, I have no idea how long it will take and what problems I will encounter. I decided to do a few smaller props rather than less but with more detail, because I have done more modelling than texturing and I know the limits to what I can or can't make more than what I could do texturing wise.

They are also simple enough that hopefully there won't be any clipping with Moom when I animate it, but I will have to be careful anyway.

The gondola is extremely simple, and shorter than it would actually be in real life to give me a bit more flexibility with shots - a longer gondola would mean either using much further out shots or cutting off part of the gondola. I would rather have the flexibility to do what I want but a more stylised version of the object than limit myself like that, but I think that it works out because Moom is a lot smaller and less in proportion than a real person anyway, so he doesn't really need to have everything around him like it should be in real life.

I also thought about making a mustache for Moom to carry on with my Italian theme. It may be stereotypical but since I know enough Italians in my family with a mustache like that, I want to go for it. My favorite mustache was either the top left one, or the slight variation of it on the bottom row with the curls at either side of it. Most of my classmates agreed with me on that, so I will make the first mustache and then see how if I can make a decent enough version more similar to the curly one.

Study Task 2 - Animation Skills Part 2

This was a very fun one to animate - I used the idea of a cat getting ready to pounce for the movement of this ball, since that is a good example of anticipation before a movement. I rotated and squashed the ball before making it stretch.

The overlapping action animation took me so long to figure out how to do. Eventually I realised that I didn't need to think about all of the segments of the pendulum, and that I could do it with the graph editor. I got the first half of the pendulum working with the graph editor but for some reason I couldn't make it work for the second half, so I key framed it in instead. I got very confused with the editor, and it is something I would like to try with a much simpler animation.

 

Using a camera, it was very easy to make a turntable to show off models. I had trouble rendering this animation so I had to add a black background to it. This obscured the hat at some points - maybe next time I should put it a lot further away or how to render and do the lighting properly without having to worry about the background with a turntable.

Study Task 2 - Animation Skills Part 1

I found the bouncy balls awkward to animate at first with the deformer moving around, so I had to key frame both the balls and the deformers a few times to get it kind of working. The ball on the left doesn't have quite enough bounce but the concrete feeling ball on the right has enough weight to draw and only just bounce, which was a lot easier to do since there wasn't much movement once it hit the ground.

I key framed the pendulum to move like we did with all of the 2D pendulums last time. It was a lot easier since I only had to put in 3 keyframes this time and I could use the attributes box to change the value exactly. Autokey would add in a keyframe whenever I changed the values, which helped a lot.

Interim Crit - Feedback

The interim crit was very useful for ideas for my finished animation of Moom. I got suggestions such as experimenting with frames (letterboxing my animation) and other various effects to do in post production. I had already considered doing my animation in black and white to give it more of a romantic old-timey sort of feeling, although some classmates suggested a sepia tone which may lend itself even better the the atmosphere of my animation. This is something that I can experiment with in After Effects once the animation is done, provided I leave myself enough time.

The crit also helped me to decide that I would shoot my audio properly, then record reference to match up to that, loosely based off of my storyboards since they didn't match up too well with my practice audio. I also decided that I would try to pitch my voice lower/edit my audio to a lower pitch to sound more masculine as I am portraying Moom as a male in my animation.

Another thing I was reminded of was to not let myself get carried away by modelling; since this is something that I am very interested in, I am tempted to make a lot of props and a 3D background for Moom, but the animation and performance is the key aspect of this module, so maybe I should leave a lot of my modelling and texturing to after the animation is finished (minus the modelling that I have already done).

I feel a lot more organised just by presenting my ideas and thought process in order, and I am ready to being sorting out my final reference and audio to start animating next week. I am feeling confident about my animation; I managed to do a 16 second animation in one day (see my post on the Mery Rig) and although that was obvious not up to the standard that I want Moom to be, and without lip syncing, knowing that I can make a decent, understandable animation in that amount of time makes me feel quite optimistic. We have just over two months left for this project, and I think that I could feasibly animate everything in less than that amount of time, including lip syncing. I am excited to start (especially since the sooner I start, the sooner I can get modelling again!)

Moom Storyboards

I wanted to make sure that some of the lines of the song were focused on, so that it wasn't animation full of Moom prancing around.

Close ups of Moom's expression would help to show what he is feeling, and with the shot from the moon before that it should help to show why Moom is dancing, rather than it being out of context and random. I thought about making it a shot to zoom in to the moon to emphasise how Moom is spotting it, but I don't know if that would be necessary or not.

I wanted to include lots of grand sweeping gestures, almost as if Moom was serenading the moon itself, and to show how much he is getting into the idea of 'amore', so much so that it is distracting him from his job.

In this part of the board, Moom goes a bit wild, getting carried away with the oar and making even more exaggerated movements with  it.

That then leads to him not really paying attention and, in his excitement, capsizing the gondola. I feel like this should give me enough chances to experiment with his expressions, and animate a character so lost n their imagination that the lose sight of their surroundings. It should be fun to animate.

Study Task 1: Object Modeling + Texture

For the object modelling task, I want to create something that I would possibly need to make for a future production. Tables would probably be one such item, so creating on in Maya would be good practice for the future.

I used all cubes which made the job very easy and quick, especially as a lot of the shapes needed to be repeated so that they would be the right shape/size. I added some benches to add a bit extra to the table. In hindsight, at might have been a bit more of a challenge to make chair which use rounder shapes, but the benches did give me the idea of trying to make the objects into a bit of a viking feast hall scene.

I added the wood textures with a Lambert shader, but I couldn't find any live preview so I had to change the settings and render the scene quite a few times before the texture looked okay. It still wasn't what I really wanted, but I can experiment with making my own textures later on.

Next I decided to add a few objects on top of the table to make it a little bit more full. I thought that candles would be good because that would give me the chance to experiment more with lighting as well. I added some walls and a floor so that I could see the effects of the lighting completely and make it a fuller scene.

The different lights I tried to used worked very differently than they looked like they might do, and worked differently depending on the objects. The light I had for the candles against the wall had much more of a glow, whereas the ones I tried to position over the top of my candles didn't really work that well. I need to think more about how I am using my lighting in the future as backgrounds may be much closer/further away and they will react differently with my lighting.

Area lights helped to light up the scene more but they did't work as well with the table - using a different shader maybe or changing the properties might have helped; I didn't want it to necessarily be shiny, but reflecting more light would have been nice.

Maya Software Render

The lighting on my scene looked very different depending on the renders I used; Mental Ray was much grainier, and had more reflections from things such as the candles. I think that it probably turned out slightly more realistic than the previous one, but it also looks a lot more different than the scene within Maya did. This made it slightly harder to do the lighting on my scene since I can't see the live changes that would appear after rendering. For example, the lighting had to be extremely bright in the Maya window for it to show up as it does in the image above. I think that I'll need to experiment with this to learn how different my scenes may look after rendering. Still, it was interesting to see just what an effect the renderer can have, and I might investigate more in the future depending on my projects.

Mental Ray Render

Study Task 1: Truck Modeling Exercise

Before starting to model trucks for our first study task,  we were reminded to create a project folder for Maya to use as we created our trucks. It is important that we don't move/mess with/lose this folder as the program works directly from it.

The first thing to do to make the truck was to create a cube as the starting shape. I turned interactive creation off because it is faster otherwise and I don't have to worry about getting my shape into proportion. I could just drag it out and scale the cube up from the centre of the grid and begin molding it. I had to insert edge loops before starting properly to give the head of my truck enough section so that moving particular edges would give me the right shape. I then used freeze transformations and deleted the history to get rid of any unnecessary information that Maya was storing.

After getting the shape of the first part of the truck right, I then created a new object to make as the back part of the cab. I could have used more edge loops to extrude another shape out of the front part, but this would have made the geometry of the object more complicated than it needs to be, and I would have to add extra edge loops to move the vertices of the back part inwards to make the slight gap on either side of the edges.

I think clicked on the two back edges of the shape and used the bevel tool to give it the curve needed. However, this only split it into a few segments, and I needed more than that to make the rear round enough, so I changed to segment value in the input box to '4' to give it a rounded enough edge.

I made another object for the chassis and used bevel again to get the shape right for it

 and attached that to the bottom of my object.

For the next I object I needed to make, I used a cylinder to become the front axle and rotated it so that it was in the right position for the rest of the truck. I used the same method to make the wheels and to stick them onto the axle. Using Ctrl + D, I duplicated them to use as the back set, which saves me time and makes sure that my objects are the same size and shape. I made sure to name these objects in the Outliner box for easier organisation.

I used Freeze Transformations and Delete History again on the object since it was close to finished, and then used the same methods as above to start on the rear part of the truck.

After using the same methods, I made the back half of the truck and put it in place. The second half went much quicker since I knew what the functions were and how to make the shapes. I found this task fun, and I would definitely like to try to do more complicated models in the future. I know how to make rounded shapes and how to make objects the right scale and shapes so experimenting with more complicated shapes and combinations of shapes would probably be good practice for me.

Animation Practice Exercises (Non-Linear Deformers)

I experimented with the squash and stretch functions (non-linear deformers) before we started the animation task to get a feel of how they worked. I found them very awkward and hard to get working, especially at first. The main thing I learned I had to pay attention to was the squash handle - it kept moving between frames, especially when I tried deleting keyframes or inbetweens. This made me have to go back and re-key everything. This may have been from keyframing the handles and the objects themselves differently, but even when I tried selecting both it didn't work out much.

I still managed to make some interesting animations even so, but not really what I was aiming for. This animation nearly went alright, but the squash handle must have been in the same place/at a strange factor for the first few frames to make it go as awkward as it did.

This animation reminds me of a lava lamp, and might be useful in case I do ever decide to animate like that. The squash handle will definitely be useful, especially if I move it separately from the ball. I am not entirely sure how it would work out with any other shape, though.

I have no idea what even happened to this animation or how it moved so much. Something must have gone wrong in the factor box and well as maybe the Y and X axis. 

Keyframing is much easier, even if it takes longer than using this method (provided you know what you are doing). I find it definitely helps compared to having autokeyframe on and the handles refusing to stay where they are supposed to be. I need a lot more practice with the squash and stretch deformers if I want to make some more exaggerated animations and maybe a bit more patience, but I will get there.