Other practice animatons

Within the final hand in you will see a few other variations of the monster character animations which did just to see what I could do and how it would look. But I decided just to use the simple walk cycle one as my practice and technique learning animations for this module hand in because I forgot to do the class ones during the term.

thoughts after animation techniques and practice...

Im really happy about my short walk animation im really proud of it as i think it looks quite good. The techniques and skills i have learnt doing this exercise will become invaluable to me in the future and help build on my 3d skill-set.

Animating my model...

OK now that I have a fully rigged model I can begin to animate him walking towards the camera in a slow and ghouly manor.

I know when you use a biped you can use the walk cycle function to perform a basic walk cycle to a desired length. Instead I decided to animate the walk my self as I felt I could maybe do a better job as it does look a little rigid. Below is a screenshot taken from the start of the walk cycle. Using the auto key I hand animated each part of the walk and tried to keep the models body posture humped.

The screen shot above is at the point where I was trying to tweak the walk as it was looking a little static and robotic, I need to make the animation curves flow a little bit better so the animation ran smoother. I did need allot of practice not using the walk cycle and trying to do it simply buy hand with the auto key and the move tool. when the model was rigged I did not add any floating controls for the rig instead you just click and move the actual biped or mesh and you can move it that way rather then controls which I didn't like.

The animation is pretty much finished now im actually quite happy with how it looks just a few more tweaks to the animation to make it a bit smoother then render it out and do a bit of post production in after effects and it ready.

In this shot you can see the render set up for the walking animation, I used two omni lights positioned either side of the camera and set up a free camera to capture the walk towards it. the renders came out quite good and I wasn't that bothered about using a skylight to give it a better diffused light on the model. i have just added a floor plane to gage the footsteps and its sorted ready for rendering.

Rigging my model:

This was a part that I really struggled on with nod but after watching a few more tutorials and trying out various was of rigging a model, I decided to use the biped but modifiy it so that it worked better for my model.

The image above shows the basic biped rig that was created for the model it was a fairly straight forward biped rig which was simplified to make sure the defamation of the skin was not effected to badly with excessive movement. I actually watched a massive series of tutorials from lynda.com which guided me through every stage of rigging and skinning and refining your rig to the point it was very consistent and reliable on the model.

I learnt fairly early that it is best to design your rig around what your character will be doing in the animation. So for this small animation I just wanted to do a slow, sluggish walk towards camera, no massive extravagant movements or actions, So I decided to use a biped.

The biped was fairly standard, once the parameters in the motion panel had been changed to incorporate the necessary amount of fingers legs arms ect, in this case 5 fingers same as a human. Once that was all sorted it was time to use the physique modifier to make sure the mesh fits the biped and gets the skinning process correct.

Once the skinning process had began using physique I basically whipped round the model and checked for anything irregular in the mesh and deformation when the model was moved in various directions. if there was I then modified the envelopes until I was happy with the skinning of the mesh and it fitted and moved correctly over the whole model. tweaking the envelopes took allot of time and was a pretty long winded process as I found many parts of the mesh which had not skinned properly and had to be modified with the envelopes.

buy using allot of tutorials I found that it was good to put the model in awkward positions that may be encountered in the finished animation. After a while you begin to deal with the irregularity's that pop up in the mesh buy just fiddling with the envelope properties and most can be fixed quite quickly.

Monster textured and ready to rig

Here is my model which has now been unwrapped and textured ready to be rigged for animation. The texturing was fairly straight forward i got the texture maps on-line and just had to make sure they were consistent and in good order. The accompanying bump and reflection map where in good order and unwrapped in Photoshop to be applied to the model through the material editor in 3ds Max.

Here are some screen shots of the process below including the texture,bump and specular maps:

here is the screen shot as the textures where applied to the model through the materials editor in max.

Experimental Animation techniques (Mini project)

Seeing as this is my re submit and Jo mentioned that my original final didn't quite utilise much animation and I also didn't add many of the tutorials during the module, I decided to do a small mini project for the re submit to cover both topics.

Here is a screen shot of the Monster character which I have textured, rigged, and animated over the past month. I decided to make a small animation to further my skills in the area of animation and rigging in order to aid my mark in this module and show I have taken what was said and acted upon it.

Building a convincing persona for my character.

I need to build up a convincing persona for my character nod the ninja. i need to create a personality and physical attributes which can aid me in expressing his feelings and emotions through animation on the screen.

I have created some illustrations which show the true traits of a stereotypical ninja and the persona i want my character to have. this is a great visual way of explaining this persona creation process.

this is the stereo typical persona a ninja has, being all of the below...

And this is how i want nod to behave and to carry himself (His personality and traits)...

when i came up with an idea for a character, a ninja was one of the first ideas i had, but i wanted to do the opposite of a ninja and that is how i came up with nod the ninja. basically taking all the traits of a ninja and then reversing them to make him lazy, slow and clumbsy. I think these will be good traits to express on screen and aid in the character expression process. when i was thinking of a name Nod popped into my head and was the perfect example of his personality, and it also rhymes which is always a bonus when coming up with a character.

Expressing his persona through his physical appearance...

If you look at the way i have designed nod it is to gain maximum personality not only through his movements and behaviors but his Physical appearance too.

He is quite small and fat, this helps in aiding his lazy personality. i also made his limbs quite small and stubby to create a cute and funny aspect to his looks. the addition of small eyes and overall small and stumpy appearance helps in giving a cartoony comedy feel to him but keeping the cartoony ninja appearance. one of the key factors is his oversized head, everyone loves a cartoon character with a massive head its great for the cute, comedy factor and really helps express his overall personality visually.

overall i am pleased with the persona i have created for nod and i think it should work really well on screen, as just as a static illustration he already says allot about himself so its a really good start and should prove to be interesting.