I made polish animation this week, this is my playblast:

The most important part of this part is to make the broken windows at the end. I referred to this tutorial on youtube.

Using Maya’s own plug-in called bullet,I can quickly create the effect of objects being crushed.

First I copied the window glass model, and in FX->Effects->Shatter, I can divided the glass model into multiple pieces. This part is automatically calculated and generated.

Then I added collision components to the ground, wall, and some props in the scene. the glass fragment model is added the rigid body component so that the glass can be affected by gravity and collide with the surrounding environment.

Considering the complexity of the character model, I created a sphere to simulate the character’s body. Add a rigid body component to the sphere and give it an initial velocity. Adjust the number of the simulation start frames to ensure that the sphere and the character reach the window at the same time.

During this process, I encountered many problems, such as collisions between objects but still through the model, the mass and initial velocity of the rigid body could not achieve the effect of impact, the position of the collision body was wrong, and so on. Of course, the most serious problem is that when I complete the simulation, the rendering sequence pictures are inconsistent with the picture I see in the viewport. In the end, I had no way to render only part by part, which took me a lot of time.

After reading some information, I think if I need to make a broken effect next time, I should try Houdini or other plugins.

This is my final animation:

This week I made some environmental models based on my dormitory., I used the reference project for convenience. Adding a model to the initial ENV project can ensure that subsequent animation projects have models and the correct positions.

This is the environment I created,

Regarding the textures and materials, I found them on the quixel website. And I added some lights.

These are the final rendering images,

In addition, I thought about the whole story. I used this animation to record the process of thinking about how to perform animation, and plan to make an exaggerated ending.

In order to tell the story better, I made the camera animation. Here I used the Camera Sequencer, where I can make it like editing a video. And the number of frames of each camera can overlap, which allows me to observe the effect of my animation in the lens more clearly.

After that, I modified the timing and pose of the blocking action, and added some changes in expressions.

Here is the spline animation I created.

This week I found a good model of a swivel chair on Sketchfab and remade the binding in Maya. In order to facilitate the animation, I made separate controllers for the upper, middle, and lower chairs. Each wheel can also be rotated independently and there is a master controller to ensure the same direction of the wheels.

In addition, I also learned how to bind the wheel so that it can rotate itself according to displacement. Here you need to use keyframe expressions.

Because the formula for the circumference of a circle is C=πR, if the distance the chair moves is S and the angle of the wheel is x, the formula can be obtained:

x=(S/πR)*360. From this, we can know the degree of wheel rotation. Considering that the chair will move in the x-axis and z-axis directions, add the following expression to the x-axis rotation of the wheel:

I also made simple props, such as tables and walls, based on the Reference I shot.

And I made the blocking animation. According to the changes in the constraints, I divided the whole animation into two parts.

These are my blocking animations:

I want to use the knowledge I learned this term as much as possible in this task, but it’s a little hard to start. So firstly I watched some performance animation videos on Youtube. What I mainly watch is the showcase of animation mentor, their works can show a storyline in a few seconds, with or without dialogue.

After watching some other people’s works, I was more interested in the works without dialogue, because they can express somethings or some emotions only through actions and expressions. This makes the animation more interesting.

After thinking about it in my room for a week, I realized, why don’t I just animate my own life? Because of the epidemic, I stayed in my room for a long time, and boredom became my main emotion every day. But it is also very interesting to find some fun in the boredom. Combining the knowledge of body mechanics, I decided to make an animation to tell an embarrassment about a person turning a swivel chair when he is bored.

I watched some animations of swivel chairs, although they were not too many, I still found some good works.

This will be a short animation, so I want to determine the rhythm of the entire animation first. Because it is from boring to finding the fun of the swivel chair, this should be an animation from static to dynamic, from slow to fast. I wrote a simple script from this thought.

Then I drew a simple storyboard in PS to ensure some shots and positions. The process of turning text into images was also a process of conception,, which allows me to have a more accurate imagination of the final picture.

Shooting reference is a bit difficult for me now, because I don’t have a gimbal or tripod to hold the phone, and I haven’t found a very suitable place to shoot. So I first took a video in my kitchen with the laptop camera. The picture was ok, but my acting skill was too awkward. I think this can only be used as a reference for motion. My expressions and actions may need to be shot separately later. And I haven’t thought about the ending action, so I haven’t shot it yet.

This is the reference video I took:

The task is to make Phonemes animation based on audio. One of the difficulties for me is the handling of some English continuous speaking, it is difficult for me to say it myself as a reference. So I found a video of a cover singer, her lip shape of the song In the name of love is relatively clear, which makes it easy to observe and determine the key pose.

But because the video is a side view, it is difficult to observe a clear frontal lip shape, so I searched for a lip shape diagram for reference.

In this task, I mainly focused on the changes of the tongue, because in many situations a simple change of mouth shape cannot accurately represent a voice, and the audience needs to see the movement of the character’s tongue, such as L of Love.

This is the aniamtion of mouth:

After making the mouth shape, I added some facial expressions and body shaking to make the character seem more engaged in the singing performance. The expression animation mainly focuses on the character’s eyebrows, because there are many parts that require strength when singing, and the changes in the eyebrows at this time can best reflect the strength.

This is my final aniamtion:

This week I polished the body mechanic animation. What I mainly did was fixing some poses and smooth motion curves.

There are two things that I have to notice.

First, the character’s hip and chest account for 50% of the rotation of the character’s body to achieve the correct rotation angle.

Second, IKFK switching is best done in one frame, which makes animation control easier. And the data in IK bones can be copied to the FK control curve to ensure motion consistent.

Here is my final animation:

This week’s task is body mechanic. As usual, I first need a good reference, and I also want to make some cool-looking actions this time. In the end I chose an action called macaco in which the character flipped back with one hand.

In order to make the reference clearer and coherent, I edited the two movements together for easy observation.

This is my reference video:

After analysis, I think the difficulty of this action is mainly the switch between IK and FK. When the character moves from standing to supporting the ground with one hand, his feet are in IK state and his hands are in FK state because at this time the feet must be fixed on the ground and the hands have not yet reached a fixed point of support.

In the latter part of the action, the character supports the ground with one hand and both feet are off the ground. At this time, the character’s right hand in contact with the ground must be switched to IK, and the feet must be changed to FK.

In the last part of the action, the hand become FK again and the feet become IK.

Therefore, it should be noted here that during the IKFK switching process, the matching of the character’s action can not show the incorrect movement.

At the beginning, I wanted to find a suitable plug-in to use. I tried the universal IKFK Switch tool. It has a good performance in converting FK actions to IK actions, but when IK actions are converted to FK actions, satisfactory results are often not obtained. .

But I also found out that I can manually copy the bone parameters in IK state to FK. Although this operation is more troublesome, it can be FK action or exactly the same as IK action.

IK FK key frames：

The process of Blocking is the same as before. I chose the basic key frame, which is based on the change of the movement trend. For example, 1-10 frames are hip down, 10-16 frames hip up and so on. The principles to be concerned about in this animation are Timing, Arcs, Slow in&Slow out, Stretch&Squash, Overlapping.

This is the blocking animation I did:

In the spline stage, I found that there are some small actions that need to be added, which should belong to the secondary action in the principal, which can add more details to the entire animation. And the timing of the entire action needs to be adjusted, and the part that needs to be more prominent.

This is my spline animation:

In addition, I also made another action blocking. I tried to connect the two actions, but I found that simple connection of this kind of action is not enough. The overall movement trend and power point need to be designed to make the animation appear coherent. I will continue to try.

This is my blocking animation:

This week I learned how to track object in 3Dequalizer. The task was to match the Ironman helmet to the head of a man looking at his cellphone on the street.I am familiar with the operation of 3DE through the study last week. The first steps are the same as before. First, you need to track the camera trajectory and select some clear points in the foreground, middle ground and background.

The difference is that you need to know the camera is fixed, so you need to change the positional camera constraint in the camera settings, and select the fix camera position constraint. In this way, the correct calculation result can be obtained.

Because the camera is at a fixed position and there is no obvious rotation, I did not need to  choose a lot of tracking points to get good results.

The next step is to track the object. The task is to match the model of the ironman helmet to match the movement of the man’s head, so the tracking points should all be on the man’s face. Here we need to create a new point group and choose clear points on the man’s head. The principle of selection here is basically the same as the camera one.

After that, we imported the helmet model into 3DE. Then you need to match the tracked points with the model one by one. The function used here is Extract Vertex. This is the effect after matching.

Adjusting the position and rotation of the model so that the helmet can wrap the man’s head. It should be noted that the scale should not be changed here, because if the size of the model is changed, it will affect the next step. The size of the model should not be changed during the entire process.

Then it can be exported to Maya and nuke. In Maya, the original obj model is replaced with the fbx model to make animation.

Finally, import the rendered sequences into nuke to get this.

Afterwards, some incorrect parts need to be deducted by roto. Here I mainly show the final tracking result.

Part 1: 3DEqualizer

This week we learned how to use the 3DEqualizer to track a shot and calculate the trail of the camera. I learned it quickly because I have learned the tracking tool in Adobe After Effects.

Compared to the AE, I need to do more manually in the 3DE, like choosing the track point and fix the result. It needs more time but the results are more accurate.

This is my final result:

In the class, Dom answered some questions that I thouht were very important and useful.

1. The tracepoint: We should choose points in the image that is high in contrast and clear, but not the edges of the wall. As the camera moves, the foreground and background change inconsistently. This causes the tracepoint to rotate, eventually produce the wrong result. So we have to pick points that are on the same plane.
2. Brightness and contrast: During tracking, we can adjust the brightness and contrast of the picture. However, it should be noted that the brightness adjustment here has no effect on the results, just to facilitate us to choose the appropriate tracking point. But if the contrast is high, then it may have some influences.
3. Foreground, middle, and background: Try to choose more tracepoints to get better results. It is important to note that the points on the background are likely to be occluded and should be tracked several times. It’s hard work. But we have to do it for a better result.
4. Deviation: It’s very important to get as close to 0 as possible but not equal to 0. Moreover, not all the tracked points have to be calculated, and some will increase the deviation.

Part 2: Polish stylised walk

First of all, I added some actions to the blocking animation last week. I want to study more about the style of Tom&Jerry.

About Luke’s feedback on my reference, actually, I also thought of the question when I was looking for a reference. When I wanted to make an animation, if my reference is an animation made by someone else, is this plagiarism? In this task, I want to imitate the original animation style of Tom&Jerry, but in my original production, I think I should avoid using other people’s animations as a reference, especially 3D animation.

In the spline pass, I met a serious problem. Tom’s arms cannot rotate in the right direction. In the beginning, I didn’t know what to do so I modified it frame by frame, but the final result was not good. Luke showed me the usage of Euler Filter, which is a very helpful feature.

before modification:

If the rotation value of animation curves are limited to a specific range, these curves may be damaged. The problem can be corrected by filtering these curves.

Euler angle uses three separate vectors (X, Y, and Z axis) to calculate rotation interpolation.

In the Graph Editor, select the broken animation curve (for example, Rotate X, Rotate Y, and Rotate Z), then Select “Curves> Euler Filter”. The filter is always applied to the entire curve, not to the selected curve segment within a certain period of time.

In actual operation, when you see a part of the curve that obviously has a big change, and it is in the opposite direction, it is very likely that you need to use the Euler filter to correct it.

After modification:

Part 3: Render farm

Finally I used the render farm

Connecting to the M311 computer through VMware, and then sending the project I made on my laptop to the PC through Onedrive, I can use the Deadline to quickly get the rendered picture.

This is my final animation: