Research & Prototyping For October Competition
Research
For this animation project, I chose to do a series of different types of research for this project to get a rough idea of what exactly I would want for my animation and to bring out my thoughts.
I also made notes while listening to the audio on what my foundation for this project should be:
Moodboard
While repeatedly listening to the audio, I started by creating a moodboard on the type of emotions and gestures to try and project types of emotions I wanted for the animation.
Storyboard
For the storyboard, I wanted to keep the storyline relatively simple as it would be easier to complete for the timeframe I have set for myself and sometimes, simple is better than having a complicated storyline.
I made the rough storyboard while listening to the audio while making notes as I was trying to project my thoughts onto paper in the moment.
Reference
I initially looked at different videos which were a combination of animations and live footage that conveyed similar types of conversations to broaden my research.
Some of the Examples are shown below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2qRDMHbXaM&ab_channel=Pixar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDpuTqBI0RM&ab_channel=BobTheHumanBeing
I took a few photo's and videos as reference to help with the animation process:
I also made a video as reference to help with the facial expressions and lip syncing :
Prototyping
Animatic
I created an animatic, which is shown above, to understand where in particular certain camera angles are and if what I originally had planned would work.
Blocking
I specifically used this to plan out the animation keyframes and see if things work as I planned it to be such at the distance subject 1 is meant to walk and if it is meant to be 1 or 2 steps to reach the table.
Spline
I created 2 spline animations, one shown above and one shown below;
The one above was meant to help me with the placement of the other rigs I was eventually going to place into the scene.
The one below is the more polished version of the spline above with the models added and I started to work on the facial expressions on one of the models first before moving onto the second model.
I chose to work on 1 model at a time when it came to adding both models into the scene especially the model that moves the most as it would take longer to animate, I chose to animate the more complicated one first as I thought it would be more convenient as I could as for help or feedback from the beginning than leave it towards the end which could possibly end up even more stressful for myself especially with the timeframe given.
Occurring Problems
Occurring Problems and How I Solved Them
Some of the occurring problems I had with the whole animating process are listed below:
- Adjusting to the new controls on the rigs
- Accidentally deleting the whole timeframe of the selected point
Adjusting To The New Controls On The Rigs
As I started working with new rigs I had to spend some time doing research and playing around with the rigs to grow accustomed to the new rigs. I started to look at videos from the original source of where the rigs used were created.
For the "Ray" rig, which is the model that is doing the most movement in my animation, as I was not used to the controls so I looked at the videos on the website of where I initially downloaded the rig which was very helpful:
https://www.cgtarian.com/maya-character-rigs/download-free-3d-character-ray.html
As for the "Dude" rig, which is the model that did minimal movement in my animation, I played around with the controls and did some research on the rig which also led to me watching videos to help me adjust to the new rig:
Accidentally Deleting The Whole Timeframe Of The Selected Points
With this reoccurring problem, it usually occurred whenever I would try to delete a specific or a collective amount of keyframes, as shown below, this is an example of when I accidentally deleted more keyframes than I wanted.
I solved this problem by using the graph editor to either move or delete keyframes to prevent this mistake from happening any further.