Alright, as promised in my last post, here is my Industry Review Portfolio.... Take Two!
Drumroll please!
This go-around, I worked more with walking and motion, as it was something I struggled on during the course of the VR project. I still have a long way to go, but I'm happy to watch these funny animals move around.
And I'm looking forward to learning more about animation tonight!
If you want to learn more about these animations and the what and why behind them, you can read up more on my last post.
Also, I think it would be fun to drop my old Portfolio from my first Industry Review here as well.
Let me know if you think I've improved. I definitely think I have. I took the feedback a little too much to heart from last time and I was really trying to emphasize motion and smoothness this time. If that gets me critiqued, so be it. I learned a lot about the art process this go-around, definitely more than the last one. And this time, I actually got to animate WAY MORE than the first time. My first animations in the demo reel from the previous Review were literally my FIRST EVER 3-D animations. And as a 2-D animator, I had no idea what it was that I was doing.
But, yeah, lemme know if you think I've improved! I am proud of myself no matter what anyone says!
This is going to be a pretty quick post for me, since I have Industry Review in less than an hour. And don't worry, I'll go ahead and post my industry review stuff here, once I'm ready and set to go with that.
But first, I've been busy at work this week with plenty of new animations to throw at you. Some of these are older animations with a new twist. So, get ready and buckle up! Because we are embarking on a truly wild ride of animated fun!
First off, we're starting with Boney. Thanks to Ankur and my awesome teachers, Johnathan and Cheryl, I was able to learn more about Maya this week! I got to apply some new skills and put them to the test. Thanks again to Johnathan for the in-depth help and some tips. Thanks to him, I was able to rotate my models for Industry Review, which looks super-spiffy!
Alright, now for Koko! I added the rotation to him. I didn't get around to changing anything about his walk cycle due to time constraints, so I will most definitely get some critique and feedback tonight!
I know he's not perfect, but I am happy with how much smoother his motion is compared to my earlier Hyena walk cycle. And I'm glad I could get him to smile and blink. He has his flaws, but I'm ready to fix them so I can show you all my next iteration of his walk!
And lastly, I have a couple of BONUSes! I'll share the first of them. I did a run cycle. It's pretty stiff, but I wanted some critique on the form, so this one went straight into my Industry Review Reel.
Look at Umbreon go! Wowza! I know it's stiff, but again, I'm happy this at least resembles a run and has motion. The parts I'm happiest with are the ears and tail. I just need help getting the legs to bend without them looking like they're breaking. They looked so floppy and broken that I took the bends out of them and just submitted this as it is. Yeah, it's stiff, but the arms don't look like wet noodles.
Alright, and a complete change of pace. Literally, because it's not a walking animation.
I have been silently working on the Bouncing Ball animations, trying to get them to look more natural. While I still have a long way to go, I want you to see what I'm cooking up now!
The one I made the most progress on was 100% the bowling ball. I worked with Ankur getting familiar with the graph editor and he gave me some excellent suggestions for this animation. So, thank you Ankur (if you're reading this!). I really appreciated the help and the graph editor tips. Now, I know a little more about tangents and what they do, too, so I'm going to keep experimenting with them in my animations.
So yeah, that's about it!
Stay tuned for my Industry Review drop in like a few minutes! That'll be up here in two shakes of a lamb's tail!
Wow, we're doing a lot of walking in class right now!
Not only am I getting plenty of gym time this semester, but I'm also gettin' familiar with the art of movement in the digital sense!
So, we are jumping right from walk cycles of the human variety to walk cycles of the animal variety. Straight from bipeds to quadrupeds... And boy, has it been a wild ride!
Okay, so where to begin?
So, this week's assignment was to turn in a quadruped walk or run cycle. I was able to finish a walk cycle and am going to try to work on a run or idle some time this week!
So, what did I do with this here walk cycle?
Lemme show you!
Meet Koko! He's my little buddy this week and boy oh boy was he a ball to animate! Not only does he have eyelids and funky fresh controls, but he's also very expressive and cute! I had a great time working with him this week!
Now, I know that this is more likely than not, not a completely finished product, so I am entirely open to feedback from my teachers, as I want to improve my craft! You don't stop learning until you stop, after all! And I'm committed to learn as much as I can!
So, obviously, I would like feedback regarding the positions of the legs, rotation, and hip movement. Hip movement especially is something I have greatly struggled with, so I am excited to hear from my teachers regarding that.
So, this is the progress of my animation. Obviously, there is still progress to be made, but I like showing the leadup to the work I present, so here it is!
I did play around with the Graph Editor for this one, trying to make the legs move naturally. I also edited the tangents, much like my Boney rig, to give it a more natural feel.
But yeah, I tried a few new, interesting things. From moving the snout to moving the ears and eyes, there was a lot going on in this animation. So, again, I'm looking forward to implementing on it even further!
But as the salesmen always say... But wait, there's more!
Prior to going with the Koko rig, I tried a few other quadruped experiments and I would love it if you saw them!
This is the first iteration of a Hyena Walk Cycle that I'm still working on! While it's jerky and a bit janky, this was actually the first walk cycle I worked on for the project. It is rigged with joints, not NURBS curves, so each part of the body was moved individually. Fun times!
I would like to continue to work on this character, as I had a lot of fun making her move! Also, I really like hyenas, so I'm always happy to animate them!
Next in line is a definite Work In Progress...
So, in Kingdom Hearts, there's a little kitty that carries a fish in his mouth. That kitty is ultra-adorable and I found his model online, so of course I wanted to animate him.
Unfortunately, the model was not rigged, but I tried to challenge myself to do it.
So, I tried rigging my first quadruped!
Which had slightly sad consequences... he doesn't animate right. I'm not sure if it's the topology of the model or my own rigging mistake, but his legs come detached from their joints. In fact, any body part I moved came detached from the joint.
So, he looks a little funky, but it was a shot!
So, without further ado, here was my first attempt at a quadruped rig and my first attempt at animating a kitty!
So, as you can see, he becomes a little paper-mâché-y when he moves. I would love to meet with my teachers to better understand the art of rigging because it is really fun! And yes, the kitty is weight painted and all the joints seem to be parented in a logical order.
I took a video of my setup, so if something looks off, I would be happy to learn more about the process! I'm always stoked to learn new things! We don't make mistakes here, just happy accidents! And this was definitely a happy accident (since he's my first quadruped rig- yay!).
Now, if you watched until the end of the rigging video, then you will see something interesting. A certain plane made an appearance as another rig I worked on. If you're a fan of Top Gun, then you probably recognized it... It was the iconic and awesome F-14 Tomcat! While my rig didn't perform as I wanted it to for my specific animation, I was able to cobble something together that you might like!
Cue Danger Zone by Kenny Loggins!
I want to eventually learn how to get the camera to follow the F-14 eventually, but this is good enough for me right now. The full animation shows it doing a vertical ascent and then barrel rolling, as it continues to climb. My clips only capture the barrel roll, as it is the most interesting part of the animation.
Eventually, I want to add a sound effect that travels closer to the viewer as the jet comes close to the camera, but I will work on that sometime this week!
Also, I would love to learn how to work more with the wings without the model deforming. A big issue I had with this rig was that it deformed when I tried to rotate the wings, so I just let them be. In reality, the F-14 Tomcat has variable wing angles, so pilots will often bring the wings in to make the plane more aerodynamic at high speeds. I wanted to show this, but since the wings are already pushed in, I just took the loss on this matter. It woulda been cool to see the wings quickly tuck in, but I'll have to seek help from my teachers on that conundrum.
So yeah! Plenty of walking and motion in the animation agenda this past month! While running at the gym is fun, running and walking in animation definitely have their respective learning curves. I just have to remember that I started out slow in my fitness journey and animation has been much the same. As I continue to improve, things will get easier. I just have to have patience and remain open to learning!
I hope you enjoyed my animations for this week! Thanks again for tuning in and seeing what I've been working on!
It's been a busy past few weeks, with many group projects taking up a lot of my time. Thankfully, due to the fact that we have finals coming up soon, 3 out of my 4 group projects are officially taken care of!
Which means one thing... More time to practice!
Practice makes perfect, as they say. And while I'm far from perfect, I'm proud of the progress I've made on my animation work!
So, just what have I been up to recently? Well, I'm glad you've asked!
I've taken some feedback from my teachers into mind and strove to improve my biped walk cycle from a few weeks prior. You know, the one with Mr. Boney in it!
I still have a lot of work I need to do on it, but I'm happy to be able to spend more time with the rig. I'm also going to keep tweaking this, based on future feedback I get from my teachers.
Without further ado, here's our old pal... Boney!
So, in this iteration of Boney, I attempted to play around with the animation layers, so that everything was separate. Additionally, I tried mirroring the animations on both sides... but I forgot the hotkey for this, so I manually wrote down all of the angles for each of the joints... And "mirrored" them that way. It was painstaking and took a whole sheet of paper, but it worked! And it could have been worse. Way worse!
I'm still not sure about the head movement and hip movement, so I'll probably have to do another iteration in the future. All around, this took at least an entire day of studying walk cycles, medical references, and animation guides. And then, placing each frame.
I played around with some of the tangents in this one, too. Which helped make the movements seem a little more smooth. A big issue I was having at the very beginning was how rigid the animation looked on the legs, specifically. This was such a problem that I iterated on this scene a lot. There are 31 files I created and 3 separate attempts for this walk cycle. I really wanted this to get done!
This video is of many of those 31 different edits and iterations, up until the finish line. The first 8 versions of this walk cycle I did not use, as they were really jerky. So, I started over fresh after about 4 hours of work on the first pass. The second pass is the one that has over 20 different iterations. The other several files I tried to create just ended up looking terrible, so I ditched them too.
Why am I rambling on and on about files? Well, because I spent a lot of time working, re-working, and double-re-working my animation. And each iteration is essentially a save state of a certain version of the project, so I was able to work as non-destructively as possible.
I liked working like this, as I was not afraid to "mess anything up" as I experimented with rotation and such. So, I will continue this practice in the future.
Alright. Enough rambling from me! I hope you enjoyed this look into my walk cycle! I'm sure you'll see a few more posts from me this week as I get ready for my finals and continue to implement feedback.
It's been a long time coming, but we finally made it to the end of the semester!
Thankfully, we only have a week left until the end, but don't worry-- I've been hard at work making animations and learning new things about Python and other fun things!
So, what have I been up to for this week's VR installment?
Well, mostly a lot of backend stuff, actually.
Bailee, Zach, and I were troubleshooting the issues with the State Machine and Blueprints, so that the character would animate in engine. Although I wasn't able to get the character fully moving when our tentacle monster entered his collision space, the State Machine does work and it cycles through the animations correctly depending on the variables.
This is tremendous progress since last week and I can only thank Bailee, Lisa, and Amritha for all of their wonderful help! I'm so thankful for all the people that help me wrap my mind around the wacky world of Unreal Engine blueprints!\
There was also another issue this week, namely Perforce. Last update, I detailed a Perforce issue that I was having, which was preventing me from saving my work. I was getting several Compile Errors, which I attempted to fix by uploading new animations.
Unfortunately, my Anim BP was not saving because it was allegedly "unresolved" in Perforce. So, I continued to try to upload, but to no avail. While I don't know exactly what I did to cause this problem, I know I did something because I definitely broke something in Perforce. I tried to check the file out and check it back in, but I could not do anything after checking it out. So, I had an unresolved, checked-out file cramping my style.
So, I worked with Bailee and my teachers to clean up Perforce. Bailee and I worked around the Perforce resolve issue and just did some general maintenance. We deleted MA, MB, and FBX files, only keeping the .uassets, as they were all that we needed in the project. We deleted old proxy folders, too, which had been duplicated when I was having my issues with Perforce.
We went from 43 error files to 1, which is awesome. We are still receiving some errors when the project starts up, but the main thing is that it works. I'm thankful that all of my teammates work really hard to make this project come to life. Without them, I don't know where I would be!
Oh, I have one more thing to get back to... Perforce! After working with the teachers, I discovered that I simply needed to resolve and move that file, so it could go to a "Graveyard" folder. It was checked back in, resolved, and is all out of the way now. Thankfully, I have access to awesome help here at FIEA, so the scary Perforce issue was less scary.
So, things I've learned from this project.
A lot.
This project has been really difficult for me, as I have really had to confront my lack of knowledge of 3D animation. I'm still learning and struggling, but I'm happy that I've been able to at least meet deadlines and make things move. Sure, I haven't been able to make them move all too well, but I'm at least thankful for the learning process.
I definitely need to use reference moving forward. I'm not going to lie, I'm not used to it. After coming from deviantART, where people cancel you for referencing or call you out in the comments, I'm a bit hesitant. But I think it's what I need to make my animations look better. I just need to get over the past and embrace the future... which I guess means better animations.
Perforce. It's scary. But you know what's scarier? Letting problems fester. I need to approach my team much more quickly in the future, so we can delegate solutions to tech problems. I shouldn't be intimidated by the technology, I should be approaching it.
So, am I entirely proud of what I've made for this round? No. But will I take the steps to keep pushing myself and trying to do more? Yes. I have come a long way from when I started, yes, but I want to keep pushing further. I want to stop being the "beginning animator who's at the back of the pack" and start being "Mackenzie, the animator who loves tech art." I don't want to let my past mistakes define me. I want to grow from them.
Sorry to get philosophical, but I just wanted to use this blog to reflect on my shortcomings and what I want to see myself doing for future projects. Whether it's VR or something else, I want to try to learn something new each project. And I want to surprise myself and others at what I can achieve.
But that's all for this post. It's been a long one. Thank you for sticking around and listening to me yammer on about nonsense.
