Senior Portfolio

Final Blog Post

This class has been very fun but at the same time I feel as though I didn't do as much as I wanted to this semester.  I simply found myself prioritizing other classes over this one which resulted in times where I believed I haven’t been doing enough.  My original plan for this class was to have 3 animations done, however I only managed to get one done.  I was very happy with how it turned out though.

    The plan was to try to do subtle animation for a dialogue piece that I assumed would be easier than over exaggerated animation, however I was very wrong. The closer I got to having more subtlety in my animation the more it looked wrong so I decided to blend at least a slight amount of exaggeration to help the animation feel more rewarding for me.  I had grown tired of fixing the small mistakes that I would notice and it was making me lose motivation to work, so I re-shot my reference with some additional exaggeration.  This made me almost entirely restart my progress on the animation but it allowed me to put more passion into it this time, the slight exaggeration was exactly what I needed to feel happy with the progress I was making on the animation as well as being more on top of implementing the tips and suggestions that my classmates made.  One of the things that I believed worked the most for me would be the fact that I redid my reference video, that absolutely made the difference for how I felt about my work.  Another thing would be the suggestions about the COG from Mark and the rest of the class mentioned. The change there made me feel much more movement in the animation as well as making it feel much more natural.

For me personally the only thing I would really change about this class would be allowing myself more time to work on the animation.  Hopefully this would allow me to refine more or even possibly finish the animation earlier, allowing me to work on the animations that I had planned earlier in the semester.  I was going to possibly reach out to a connection I had made over the summer if I had the time to work on a different project to consult about fight choreography that I would chart out and then motion capture.

Blog Post 13

This week I feel that I have finished the animation that I have been working on this semester! I hope to see what criticisms I will have this week to improve on but I believe that I have finished.  I was cleaning up a couple of the jerky movements that I saw after taking a break from working on the animation as well as finishing the mouth animations to help them match the audio more, shaping the mouth to the sounds.  That was what I spent most of my time on this week.  I may begin another animation that I do not plan to finish by the end of this class but more as a personal project that I would like to continue working on throughout break.

Blog Post 12

For this week I was working on the suggestions from my classmates and trying to implement them into the animation to help it feel more realistic.  I worked on adding more facial expression such as blinking and adjusting the eyes to look to a specific point on the camera, not just a blank point in front of the character.  I also worked on adding some characterization and a sigh as she finishes her sentence by adjusting the elbows to settle into her chest more deeply.  I think the only changes I will need to do to finish the animation is to adjust the mouth to fit the words and not simply be lip flaps.

Blog Post 11

This week I continued to match my animation more accurately to the reference, I put more effort into the weight shifts, which I seemed to forget to do in my original block out.  I also focused on adjusting the hands and arm movements to make more sense and flow more, compared to their original reference.  I need to continue on making the animations feel more natural and flow more, as well as most likely switching the arms to FK once I move the hands off of the hips. I also need to continue on giving myself time to work on the facial animations.

Blog Post 10

This week I didn't get much time to work on my project so I have little to report.  I have gone through to look at what I need to do and changed a few poses but unfortunately that is about all I was able to get done this week.  I hope to make up for the lost time this week, time management has been a struggle this semester.

Blog Post 9

This week I continued to work on cleaning up the new reference that I had shot and posed out last week.  I was having some issues with how the elbows were positioned so I may resort to swapping between FK and IK hands instead of keeping the IK hands for keeping the position on the arms crossed animations.  There is still one point of the dialogue that I need to put the body motion behind at the end, however I feel that that one will be fairly simple.  I am very happy with the progress that I'm making as well as how the character is moving since I restarted with the new reference.  I do need to add some holds and offsets for some of the animations to help with the flow of the animation, at the moment it feels very stiff but I feel that with just a bit more work I can improve it.

Blog Post 8

This week I was not able to get as much done as I hoped, other classes had taken priority because of due dates, however my poses for the new reference that I shot have been completed, and I am much happier with the timing as well as the mannerisms that they included,  the animations are already appearing to be much more subtle that they were in my previous posts.  I hope to finish cleaning up the poses to my liking this week as well as return to splining them like I had done in my past posts.  This is definitely a catch up week for me coming up but I hope that with some projects finishing up this week to be able to tackle all of the problems I face with finding time to work.

Blog Post 7

For this week I decided to reshoot my reference because of the suggestions of the class to help sync up my timing more with the audio that I chose.  What I did was focus on the movement of the chest and COG first with the new reference to then later focus on using the arms to further poses that I made for the revised animation.  Overall this week has mainly just been revising the original animation to catch up to where I was before starting this revisions.   I hope to be caught up, if not further than I was originally at the time of my last check in.  There were some adjustments to the camera to fit the newer posing.  However now that I hopefully have more time to focus on these animations that my progress will speed up.

Blog Post 6

This week I was mainly focused on heeding the suggestions of the rest of the class when I had my review.  I have been trying to lessen the exaggeration of many of the poses while still keeping their form and enunciation but it is a very thin line between feeling correct or skewed into being too much or too little.  I also fixed up the timing and placement on her feet to make the weight feel less floaty and more grounded.  The audio was also transferred over to my desktop so I could move and adjust the keys to match the audio instead of being estimated as I was doing before when I didn't have the audio.  The timing needed a decent amount of fixing so the actions actually made sense in the context of the scene.  I was not given this advice for review but others were and I noticed that I didn't have a stationary camera in the scene to base my animations on.  The things I plan on doing this week are fixing up the placement of the arms as well a bit more posing but I believe that I will be able to start facial animation either this week or the next.

Blog Post 5

This week I didn't have too much time to work on my assignment, however I was given lots of advice on how to improve the work that I have so far from the rest of the class!  Because I explained that I was trying to do a more realistic approach, they gave me advice on how to accentuate poses without it being as overly expressive as I currently have it.  Many of the changes also happen with the timing of certain aspects in the animation that I can change after I am done finishing the posing.  I also need to move the audio and textures over from my laptop to my desktop where I have been doing a majority of my work for this project, this will allow me to work more accurately with my timing.  I have been been basing my timing off my my reference video because I don't have the audio currently in the project but that is an easy fix.  I feel that I am on a good track to finish the animation in the coming weeks as well as give myself time for more refinement.

Blog Post 4

This week I continued to block out poses for the animation, still no facial animations.  I Finally managed to import my audio to help time out the poses better, the audio does go on for a bit longer than I have animated so far, however I am very happy with the poses that I have blocked out so far!  I do have a few things I will have to change in the future as I continue to work on the project, the animation feels too exaggerated already so I will have to definitely dial back how far the poses go and how long they hold,  there may be a few issues with the hips that I have noticed maybe having them in the wrong rotation but I'll have to see as I continue.

I have mainly been working in step animations but I have from time to time swapped over to splined animations to see how the transitions are looking and just how the holds feel and they feel very good so far which makes me excited to continue working on it.  By the end of next week I hope to finish blocking out and have at least some of the transitions and poses more cemented into what I want.  My stretch goal for the week is to begin facial animations, but I would rather do those after I finish the body animations.

Blog Post 3

This week I unfortunately didn't have too much time to spare to work on my animations so I decided to block out the main poses for the animation that I have decided to do first.  For the first one I decided to try doing the more subtle emotion animation with the Daria audio.  I finished recording some reference for it last week and decided to do just a bit more shooting this week for more facial animations.

I blocked out some of the main poses and for the audio while going back and forth to my reference videos to make sure that the poses weren't too exaggerated too much.  I did a small amount of posing on the hands to help me figure out exactly that I wanted to do with the hands as I approach the final project.

The posing was actually much harder than I thought to do without overexaggerating,  I originally assumed that they would be more natural to do however, I kept falling into the area of the uncanny valley where the pose would look natural but just not accurate enough to my liking.  I decided to do just a slight bit of exaggeration on the poses for the time being, but I may eventually try to reduce that to make it more human and natural.

Blog Post 2

For this week I have been focusing on finding rigs to use for the animations that I have planned.  I also went and found audio for the facial/emotion animations to be able to plan out how the sequence will go and what actions I will do.  I have been going through those audios to perform the actions that I believe will be best translated into the style and emotions I want before I decide to shoot reference video.  I found two rigs to use. The first rig will be for the overly expressive and exaggerated animation and it will be the Scout from Team Fortress 2, I feel that it fits the style of TF2 as well as the character himself.

For the second animation I decided on a free rig named Lou to be used as the more toned down and realistic approach to dialogue.  The audio that I chose came from the show Daria, where the main character is pretty neutral with her emotions most of the time, so that drew me into trying to use it for my animation piece.

I have not yet chosen a model/models to use for the motion capture combat sequence that I want to choreograph, however I have been searching for videos to use as reference when learning to plan out a fight like this.

This next week I will continue searching for reference to use in my motion capture piece as well as shooting reference for the dialogue pieces to then begin animating at least one of the two dialogue pieces.  I will most likely decide which one I plan on doing first once I shoot reference, this will allow me to choose one I like and then maybe even give me more time to decide how I want the other piece to play out.

Blog Post 1

For this class I want to improve my skills overall with my animation and production skills.  I'd like to produce animations in this class that go outside of what we would normally create in our classes, continuing to use and improve my motion capture skills to hopefully join the animation industry hopefully with a focus in motion capture. I would also hope to improve my communication skills when it comes to my work.

• Choreograph, record, and animate combat within the motion capture studio.
• Learn how to do vfx with my animations as well as overall improvement to the fluidity and impact of my animations
• Do many smaller test animations to practice techniques and learn new skills, eventually culminating in one larger project to work on for the remaining class.  
• Testing out more exaggerated movements for more expressive animations
• Practicing with subtle and small movements to help portray more realistic emotions

For the first few weeks it will be beginning and planning out the animations as well as the stories for the rest of the class.  I will begin with mixing the exaggerated animation tests with the subtle emotion tests for the first month after my planning stage.  After enough practice I would want to try to get into more intricate scenes hopefully bringing the skills that I have refined with me.  I will then try to secure some time within the mocap room to have a recording shoot of a planned out combat animation, either with another character or simply an animation sheet for a character.  This will most likely take a few weeks, depending on how the data for the shoot turns out.  Finally I would like to try to plan out a short scene/film that I would go through a majority of the production process for most likely the rest of the class, or have multiple scenes that I would be working on for the rest of the class.