3D Animation Project

The confident, bold walk is the third and last walk segment before the running animation. Here, the character adopts the personality of a celebrity or at least someone from the upper class in a society. The steps are long, knees are swivelled and feet are twisted towards the exterior. The chest is all the way up front, the shoulders are raised and the back is straight with the arms bent and fists clutching, executing an arching motion cycle.   The walk strongly suggests superiority, confidence and boldness. That is the personality I wanted to convey through this walk animation.   As I have previously said, this animation segment was the best realised one of them all and only required minor changes. The only issue I was able to identify was the simplicity of the walk, the lack of any secondary action. The character’s head was not moving throughout the entire animation segment, fact that made the model look rather stiff or rigid. I have decided to add to the personality of...

In one of my previous titles ‘ Animation progress status and observed issues ’ I have identified and discussed about the apparent issues found in each of the animation sets. In the last blog post I have addressed the problems found in the leisure walk animation - so naturally I will now discuss about the changes I’ve made to the sneak walk animation as part of the iterative (refinement) process. But first, I’ll briefly list the identified issues: ·          Excessive movement of the pelvis during certain frames ·          Excessive hands movement ·          Lack of any secondary action Here is an old render of the sneak walk before making any changes to it: Starting with the pelvis movement, as anybody could have certainly noticed during the 5 th and 6 th steps the pelvis (hips area) of the model rotates up and down in an unnatural fashio...

In the next few blog posts I will be discussing about the problems I have identified in one of my older blog posts (Animation progress status and observed issues) and how I have solved them over the past few weeks. The posts will each be focused on one of the animations separately, starting with the leisure walk animation in this post followed by the sneak, the bold walk and ending with the running animation. I believe that by organising the blog posts in this way will make it easier for me and anybody else to refer back to if necessary, as well as keeping the blog posting constant, tidy and succinct. The leisure walk The issues I have identified last time in this first part of the animation chain were that the walk is rather wobbly and some of the steps are unequal. The seemly unstableness of the model when walking was caused by the excessive movement of specific parts of the body. For example, upon taking a closer look at the first 20 or 30 frames I have noticed that ...

Since last week’s post I have been making progress on the animation and prepared the scene for rendering. I will however focus on the scene preparation in this text and on the animation part in a future blog post. My decision to take a short break from refining the animation in order to prepare and organise the scene for the final render was based on my personal preference and working habits. Therefore, the reason was that it allowed me to better estimate the time I have left to complete my project (or any other task) before the due date. Now, there are exactly two weeks left during which I can further refine my animation because I have already prepared the scene for the final rendering. This not only gave me a great sense of progression, but it also allowed me to better plan my next moves when it comes to the animation. I was also able to estimate the time it will take to render the whole scene that now features ray-traced shadows, a three-point lighting system and panels. As a m...

While I was animating the character I had some renders done so I can watch my progress and observe any mistakes I have done or on-going issues. In order to do so, I needed to set up a camera so I can track the whole animation of the character. In this post I will present the process of setting up the orbiting camera I have used in my renderings. Initially I have looked at some online animation demo reels and I noticed that most of the cameras are either completely static either move with the target. The static ones capture the whole action from a side-view most of the times and the mobile ones can follow the action on any axis, moving accordingly. As the walking distance covered by the character in my animation is rather large and it would be hard to fit everything in a static camera’s field of view I decided to go with a mobile camera that follows the character. Prior to that, I remember looking into the camera view modes available in 3DS Max and seeing the pan and orbit o...

For the past weeks I have been working on the blocking stage of the animation process. In the last blog post I had about 128 unfilled frames (most important positions, no transitional frames) and now the blocking stage is almost done at 407 frames. Although far from being complete or polished enough, the animation is now starting to shape. In the last post I was also talking about how I have changed my approach on the deliverables of this project in terms of animation composition. As I have started the demo with a walking animation and then had the character transition into a form of suspicious, sneaky walk, I have decided to have the model perform a few walk types that all display a different persona. The first is a natural walk, where the character peacefully walks along. The second one is when the character walks as if sneaking into a building or behind someone’s back, treading carefully and being extremely cautious of the surroundings to not alert anybody. In the third on...

Since the last blog post I have started the animation process after briefly checking the skin deformations one more time and conducting basic scene management preparations (organising layers, hiding unnecessary bones and goals, etc.) before finally getting started on the animation. As I have mentioned before, the aim of the project was to create a walking animation, a pose animation and a jump animation for the chosen (human, biped) model. The animations would’ve been presented separately by having the character walk first, then strike a pose and ultimately perform a jump of sorts. The issue was that no matter how hard I looked through other artists’ animation reels, I couldn’t find such simple and rather ‘secluded’ animation cycles. Most of the reels told a story, or multiple ones. The idea is the character was never ‘just’ walking or jumping, or striking a 3 seconds pose and then that was it. Most of the reels had the character/s perform multiple actions, they had the charact...