(Term 1: Week 9-14)

Our last animation task for this term is to make a 10 to 15 seconds character performance animation. It is the art of making a character or object to move in such a way to lead the audience to believe the subject can actually think for itself. The animation can be with or without dialogue.

When Luke briefs the task and show some examples to us, I immediately thinking to do my animation based on one of my favorite movie quotes that I like to use in real life as a silly joke to my previous fellow animators while we are working hard to finish an animation.

It was from the ending fighting scene of The Matrix Revolution (2003) when Smith says to Neo “Why, Mr. Anderson? Why, why, why? Why do you do it? WHY DO YOU PERSIST?!”. The people who know the quote will answer “Because I choose to”. And we will laugh as we persist in our interest to animation even it is hard. I think the quote would be great for the exaggerated character acting animation.

Okay, back to work. I remembered the quote from a very long time ago, so I went to YouTube to recall my memory of the scene and realised that the actual scene was actually a lot longer!

The video can be cut, but I think the sound of the rain and thunder in the scene are a bit distracting. I preferred to have a cleaner sound of dialogue.

Then I remembered another movie scene from Johnny English (2003) when Johnny tries to unravel the mystery of how a thief can come into the highly secured room to steal the queen’s jewels.

I think this scene is perfect for this task. So, I extracted the dialogue beginning from “Should I coming through the window” until Johnny almost fall down into the hole behind him.

References

Luke wanted us to act and record ourselves for the reference. He said that a good animator must also know how to act so we can understand more of how the character moves.

I then recorded several videos of me acting out the dialogue. I referred the original acting and attempted to make some tweaks. After lots of tries, I must say that it was very hard to do. Rowan Atkinson (Johnny) acting on the other hand was in fact very brilliant with his funny expressions and body language.

My acting was so bad that I decided to use the original video as the main reference or otherwise the outcome of my animation would be very bad as well. I will still use my acting video as reference for parts that does not showing the actor in the original video.

And below are the screenshots of the important keyframes from my acting video as storyboard

As we can see from the video and storyboard, there are several moving and hold motions happening throughout the scene. At frame 5 to 7 the character quickly raises the arms and hands, so I have to be careful with character limitation during the animation process. The character also changes the foots position on the floor for several times at frame 2, 8, 10, 11, and 16 . From frame 16 to 20, the character also make a body and hands swinging motion before falling down.

Character and Scene Preparations

I used same ‘Thepp’ character which I can say my most favourite character in this term as I used the character in most of my assignments. I’m very comfortable with its rig and controllers so I can focus more on the animation part which is more important than always trying to figure out how to control the character during the animation process. The character also has pretty good controllers for lip-sync and facial expressions.

As for character limitations, Thepp has four fingers only for each hand, but it shoudn’t be a problem since the scene does not require him to count his fingers to ten or something like that. I have also identified that Thepp don’t really have a visible shoulder and hip shape when they rotate or move. So, I had to use more exaggerated movements or other methods if I want to make the motion more visible. Something to take note to, Theep also has a very large and wide head, so it will become a bit of a problem if he wants to raise his arms straight or to touch the top of the head. Other than that, he can do pretty much any poses with no problem.

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As for background, I decided to make a very simple – not too crowded backdrop modeling so the audience will not get distracted and focus more on the character. Since Thepp is actually a mummy, I think the tomb like room is perfect for him.

I imported the audio file into the timeline and the audio ends at frame 430. Which mean the scene duration will be about 18 seconds in 24 frame per seconds animation.

Animation Planning

1. Body poses and basic facial blocking
2. Body motions splining
3. Facial expressions detailing
4. Lip-sync: Jaw motions > lip shapes > tongue > teeth
5. Final polishing for body and face

Some animators may prefer to animate the lip-sync first as its maybe easier to animate since the head has no animation yet. But I prefer to animate the body first because sometimes not all lip-sync has to be animated when the character is moving and the mouth is not visible to the camera.

Full-body Blocking

As usual, during this process I used the ‘Step tangents’ curve in the Graph Editor so I can focus on the pose-to-pose keyframes. I mostly referred to both my (horrible) acting and the original acting by Rowan Atkinson when blocking each pose. I made several pose adjustments since the anatomy of  the character was a bit different than normal human and also exaggerate some poses to make it look more cartoony.

And then I reached to the point where I had to pose the character for the dialogue “Should I drop down from the ceiling” where the character has to raise his arms and shoulders. For the shoulders I can raise them very slightly but the polygons around the shoulders would break if I went further. So, to give the illusion that the character is raising his shoulders, I lowered his head by rotating the neck bone slightly towards the front.

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For the arms, I had no option but to carefully intersect the arms to his large head a bit to make the pose looks closer to the reference. Since the view is from the front, the intersect was not very visible. I think the blocking poses for the dialogue part turned out pretty good.

The other challenge was when the character is almost fall down and trying to balance his body by swinging his arms. It was not much a problem during the blocking process since there are no in-between motions yet, but I had to spend more time in this section during the splining process to make the timing and direction of the swinging body and arms motion look proper and believable.

During this process I also included basic facial expression like eye direction, eyebrow and some mouth opening but not a lip sync yet.

Full-body – Splining

I was a bit nervous to convert the ‘Step tangents’ to ‘Auto tangents’ since I had experienced weird rotation animation problem when doing the previous body mechanics task. Fortunately, this time the animation had no such problem. If I could divide the animation into 3 sections, the first 2 were quite good and only need some minor tweaks to the animation curves in the Graph Editor to fix the timing for proper ease-in and out.

The last section on the other hand, was a different story. It was the swinging body and arms part that I already predicted during the blocking stage. I spent most of the time fixing the curves and even had to redo some of the original blocking poses multiple, multiple times to get the right motions.

And then the same thing happened to the falling animation. The timing and motion looked so fake. After doing too many revisions, I got a bit frustrated and then settled with the motion that I think looks good enough although I’m not really satisfied with it since I had to finish several more animation stages.

Throughout the animation, I added a subtle in-between arc motions each time the character changing its pose to another pose by modifying the animation curves or by adding in-between poses. The examples for this are the bouncy or up and down motions when the hip and head rotate from one direction to another. It will make the animation looks more cartoony and stylised.

Facial Expressions and Lip-sync

After the body animation finished, I proceeded to finalise the facial expressions such as eyes blinking, eyebrows motion, and additional fix to the existing eyes direction. For the eyelid, I made the eyes blink during the middle of rotating head from one pose to another. But not at each rotation, so it depended on the motion to make it looks more natural.

The lip-sync process was quite straight forward, and I still applied the same step-by-step process as the previous phoneme task, – which to finish the jaw animation first, to the lip shapes, the tongue, and finally the teeth motions.

Below are step-by-step videos for the lip-sync animation:

1. Animate the jaw opening and closing by rotating its controller

2. Animate the lip shape on top of the jaw motion

3. Adding tongue bending and teeth up-and-down (close and open) motion

Polishing Small Details

In this stage, I mostly made additional adjustment to the follow-through motions especially for the spine and arms. The tip of each body part (child) should move slower than its previous body part (parent). I also polished every small detail especially to exaggerate the pose and timing of fingers motion a little bit more and adding small squash and stretch to the eyes shape.

I also made some more adjustment to the falling down animation in terms of poses and timing, and extended the follow-through motion for the hand and foot a bit to make it appear until the last frame before the character disappear behind the floor. I think the overall motions were a bit better now.

Lighting and Rendering

Since I’m very new to Maya, I have to admitted that I’m pretty weak to its lighting and rendering engine. I have made a render in the previous animation task by some quick tutorials. I discovered that the Maya Hardware and Software rendering engines are not reliable and many suggested to use Arnold Render instead. But I think what I did before was not proper since I just put a very basic lighting and the scene did not have any textures which could affect the lighting and rendering look.

I watched several more tutorial videos on YouTube and read some forums to further my knowledge regarding this area. This time I made the backdrop to have proper shader and texture that suitable for Arnold Renderer. The Arnold shaders did have proper effects to the scene look like texture bump and color reflection on the surface of the objects. I used the Physical Sky as the main light for the hard shadow and low intensity SkyDome light as ambient to soften the shadow a bit.

What I managed to render is not that great, but the final look was sufficed and suitable for the animation.

Final Animation – Playblast

Final Animation – Render