Some acting choices

Found a list by Marc about body language and what to avoid. Could be handy while planning animation.

Tomorrow

Starts the december contest for the 11 second club! This is what I've been preparing for.

Tomorrow I have to download the sound and start planning. I was thinking that this time I could really plan the animation. Maybe do some sketches, really think it through. Until this moment, I have been going straightforward with the animation, and I've had some acting problems with that technique. Animating comes to a stop and I really don't know where to go next with the character. If I would block it first, so that it would be a quideline for the animation, I could probably work faster too. And I think I can do changes to the block if required by the shot.

Also I was thinking about planning the camera properly. I figured out in one shot, that if I come to an long shot, further away from the character, I don't really have to concentrate on the subtle movement. Also if the shot is short, the viewers have less time to read the character, so they only catch the main poses. Then there is no need for complex facial manipulation. Less work, more efficient.

I noticed that I forgot the lip sync totally. And that's a big portion of the 11's clubs challenge. I'll have to do some of that before I start with the whole thing.

We'll see what happens. We = me and the bots.

Norman gets a little scared

I animated Norman getting contacted by a small ball. The reaction is not very big, because I'm still animating in small movements. I should try to get loose and try to make faster movements and bigger reactions.

I could also try with blocking, maybe it would help to make stronger poses.. Don't yet know.

FK shoulder weirdness

Here is the problem I'm figuring out at the moment.

I first controlled the hand from the shoulder control to front position and stop there. Then I move it down. For some reason there comes a sideways motion aswell. What if I don't want that?

I first used the GIM -tagged shoulder, then I tried with the "right" control aswell. But the issue stays put.

In the curves I see there is motion in the X and Y aswell. But my simple logic processor says there should only be motion in Z and X. Or Z and Y.. Why then does it..? What is this?

This feels like it's the root of the "problem".

Problems are nice, they make me think of stuff. It's always nice to dig in to a issue, do testing and rule out possible causes.



Edit. Problem solved.

I found info from some thread about Gimbal-controls. In the shoulder there is another set of controls, and using them I was able to make the shoulder go as I wanted. For the forward motion I used the regular control and for the down motion I used Gimbal.

This seems to be one solution but it's a tricky thought to use 2 different controls. That results in two different sets of keyframes in different locations. But, it works.

Norman flipping

With this exercise came a lot of problems. Especially in the shoulder region, don't seem to really understand that area and logic..  Rotations, which way and what and what? I was using FK for hands, and some motions were quite hard to manage. F.ex the right hand, while taking momentum is not in the right place. 

Also making the whole flip, and getting the centre of balance to the right place needed "keyframe next to each other"- technique. In the lack of a better word. Now, while writing this, I got an idea. I actually could've just changed the pivot point of the hip to the centre of balance. That could work better. And cleaner, keyframewise.

Anyhow, here it is and it's good enough for now.

flipping problems

Im having issues with the FK-shoulders. I'm trying to rotate shoulders so, that the hand would go in a straight line up, and a straight line down. But it's really not working properly for me. The shoulder joint should be straight in the beginning and the end, but in the middle it does this.

Also in the shoulders there seems to be two different sets of controls. When I click on on the shoulder control this becomes activated

Char_Norman_A1_v010:ctrlGim_Rt_ArmA
and sometimes this:
Char_Norman_A1_v010:ctrlFK_Rt_ArmA

In the beginning I didn't understand this and was wondering where my keys went. I made a quickkey for the FK shoulder, but still don't understand the function of the other. Maybe it could help me with the problem above?

Walk cycling

Walk cycle done. It's not the best walk, but it's a walk nonetheless. 

I have to do another one and see if the logic is getting better. I had problems figuring out the best order to start moving and again problems with the keyframes. I'm still not able to copy f.ex the first key to the last frame. I have to first create a key and copy the values of the first key into it. And it's not very handy compared to simple copy & paste. 

Solved: After copying keys, I had to simply unactivate the copied keys and then the paste would work as it should.

Also found the toe rolls from the VIZctrl tweaks, very helpful.

Good exercise, a lot of moving parts here.

The animation is not well balanced, I wasn't able to put it symmetric for some reason. I made rotations to the trunk-bones at some point, and I might've forgot to make mirror poses for them. At the moment he looks like he's limbing a bit.
Sure, it gives more life to the character, but still I would like to get to point where everything is controlled, no accidents, and start tweaking from there.

warmup with physical sun and sky

A casual pose.

I'm finished with the warm up. I got all the limbs loose, and managed to get some decent movement to the character.

I also played around with the physical sun and sky- option in the render menu. With mental ray, under indirect lighting there is create physical sun and sky. And that gives out quite good looking scenery. Very hot, mexican desert -kind of hot. Include wave warp from after effects to simulate rising humidity and you've got yourself a good start for a perfect movie.

But before all, I had to find this. I had a problem when rendering tiff-sequence, the background didn't get into the render. Or so it seemed. It was there, but not visible. I learned to take it to After effects and simply ignore the alpha to make it work. And it worked. You could render it out as jpg, because there is no alpha information, but I wanted my tiff-sequence.

Rendering with the physical sun and sky takes longer to render, but it's worth it. Man, I just looked what I did yesterday and it's already starting to look like a yesterdays video.

And I already feel that I need to put more into the scenes. I can make them look better, I now have the controls, and now I can fine tune scenes if I want. The weight of motivation is no longer purely on animation. I've drilled a tunnel through Maya, and now I could start expanding it sideways.

warmup, continued p2

I added some camera movement to the scene and continued with freeing the limbs.

I had problems with switching the IK to FK. There was two places where I tried with the switch. Everything worked, until I checked from the beginning where I switched the first time to FK. I had changed the position to what the FK position was in the end. I don't know if there is some kind of easier solution, but I did keys to the last FK position, went to the beginning and added keys there also. Then I did the switch again. Also had to make the first FK keys stepped, so they would not change in time and only follow the torso. 

I figured that IK skeleton and FK skeleton have their own keys, so this seemed like the most logical way to go.

Moving the controls is getting more comfortable, and I'm able to start thinking about masses and velocity. Soon I'll start getting into the balance business, when I free the hip and the legs to the game.

I did movement to the hands as well and learned to use the scale tool in the graph editor to reverse the movement. But I got a hunch. A hunch that there could be a easier way to make a fist. If I would make a fist often, I probably could make a slider for the whole hand? 

Im taking tiff- sequence out from Maya, took it to After effects, render it out as a quicktime movie, animation codec. Size, 300 mb. Then I took it to Streamclip and rendered it out as an h.264, with quality set to 75. And it came out as 2,7 mb. I guess that the camera movement in the scene is making the clip larger than normally. The earlier sets have been only under 1 mb.

They are not big numbers, but the compression logic should be the same when I move to bigger files. So with the small files is easy and quick to test out different compression options.

Warmup, continued

This could be a nice little exercise. Taking each limb into control, one by one. I had already pretty good facial expressions, found the controls for lips and learned to key them. I'm getting more comfortable with the graph editor. Though I'm starting to do as I was told, keyframe in the timeline and go to graph editor if something needs adjusting.

Quick keys , and .      I could really start liking them, they move from key to key. With ALT, those quick keys move only one frame.

I'm also getting pretty familiar with SHIFT + W and E. They make a key for position (W) and rotation (E). This helps in making some sense in the timeline. If I would use S for keying, it would put key everywhere and there would be a lot of keys in the end.

I'm also starting to get a feel for the graphs. Understanding and using the power of the curves seems superior to keys.

Close-up from the facial expressions.

He's getting more loose.
I haven't fixed anything from the beginning, just so that there is good referencepoints available all the time so I see my learning curve.

Also this is not supposed to be perfected, the point is to get all the limbs under control. The plot is perfect for this kind of controlled learning. If I would start to fine tune everything, I would not only lose time, but I might also lose momentum.

Tangets

I earlier had the problem of nice arc. Now I found clear solution with using IK.

In the first example the curve is in default. So this is what it is, when I make a key for the up position and down position. Problem is that Y-axel is going linear with the X and Z. So the movement is also linear, and I don't want that.

The solution here was to break the tangents. Then I tell the Y- axel to move faster in the beginning and catch the movement of the X and Z in the end. When Y is going faster, it naturally creates a nice curve to the movement.

Now when I've learned this, I'm able to use this same logic everywhere. Things are getting clearer, I don't have to change the IK to FK or I don't have to make extra keys in between the movement to make it correct. And I understood that less keys, the easier it is to adjust motion afterwards.

Good.

Norman warmup

First one of a set. 

I had some connection to the controls, and learned to animate the IK/FK switch. Which was pretty useful while making norman go up to the normal pose. 

I'm relieved everything went pretty ok. Only thing that was a bit of a problem, is how to make a good arc to the motion where IK hand should go.. in an arc. Could it be done with FK? Should it be done in FK?

I also made buttons to select hands, hip and legs. And they work a lot smoother for me than selecting from the character.

FKIK

Yesterday was a hard day. I was battling with the rig, didn't really understand how to do things in a proper way. I could move the rig around and pose, but it was really unclear where to start if I want to animate him.

Later in the evening I asked my Friend Jouko, who's familiar with Maya, what to do. Where to start, what controls should I use, and should I use FK or IK controls. Forward Kinematics and Inverse Kinematics.

Forward kinematics is a term that for example, from shoulder towards the hand, is adjusting each joint in order to get to a certain point in space. Inverse kinematics does the opposite. With the data of the point in space, it adjust all the joints. So in animation, when I adjust the arm and the hand, I understood it's easier to use IK. And for the feet FK.. I can see how it behaves different, but don't yet really really understand what's the benefit when using one over the other.

Anyway, Jouko told me some really good stuff. One of the best is making buttons with MEL. And it was so simple, I had to laugh. I wanted to make a quickkey for the hip control. I opened script editor and clicked on the hip control over the character. In the script editor there came a piece of code that I painted with my mouse cursor. Then I dragged that to my shelf. Hah! And now I have a button for my hip control! Hahaa! In an instant I realized the possibilities of this action, what could I do with this, everything! If I make some complex combination of things, then I could just paint the code in script editor,  and drag.

Nice, very nice.

Tests, tests and tests.

I have to update my objectives regularly as I get new information. Now I have to start from somewhere really small, like a wave and move forward from there. Before even thinking about pursuing towards an emotional movement, I have to get a very good contact with the controls. At least this is what I think. And starting with a standing position is easy enough.

So more testing and ..
I feel a little bit scared, what if I'm not going to make it? What if all this is for nothing? How can I be sure that this is.. Actually, now I notice what's the step in this situation. I realized that I have been wanting to learn controlling 3d character for a long time. For some reason it seems like a big step to do, and I notice I'm stalling, checking out the web and still preparing. Maybe I stall, because i feel the anticipation is familiar to me. I've always waited, in some level to do this, so now when I'm on the verge.. I still want to wait.

Now I just have to go over, and really feel that I'm doing it. Understand that I have come to this point through my own work and effort. Maybe it's not a big thing, but at the moment it sure feels like one. And it should.

I had to lay down for a while

But now I think this is going to work. After the first shock I got back to Normans controls, and found that you can activate the controls from that green box at his feet. Click on that and check the channel box/layer editor. There they are. All the controls, and after each control is a zero. That ment that the control is deactivated. With 1, activate.

Huh. Still have to find out what is the easiest way to access each control, surely it's not the most accurate to click on a control on the character when needed.

Now here I was able to pose Norman a bit, I animated the eyes and think that everything else will  follow the same logic. Just have to find the list where is all the adjustable possibilities.

This is a good start anyways. I'm really relieved that I managed to get some contact with the controls. Now I feel tired, I've been learning a lot of new things in a short period of time.

Here's Norman

He's bigger than I thought..

And he comes with a massive set of controllers! So many new words in the instructions and weird adjustments makes me wanna take a nap! Holy mama..

I tried to do something, get his hand or something to move, but there was only 4 things to be highlighted.. None of them was his hand. Man, I have some stuff to figure out.

swinging thing

This was also a very nice exercise. I had to parent the ball to the pipe, and found out that everything works in the perspective/outliner view. Also, in this view I see all my things. At last.. Took a while to find this one, but now I know where it is and I'll never ever lose it again.

Grouping, a very nice thing to learn aswell. In the same perps/outliner view, choose edit -> group. It gives you a null- object and I can drag objects, probably groups aswell, under it's command. Very nice. Now I can make groups and parent-relationships, so everything stays where I want them to stay, and moves when I want them to move.

And now I was able to make a swinging thing. Very simple, but still educative. With this object I had to release the tangents to adjust them toward a more pendulum kind of animation.

Also I included to this exercise the camera movement-goal. Made a camera, animated it with stepped-mode in the graph editor, and changed from the render settings this thing to camera1.

I suppose I could make multiple cameras to the scene, render all of them out and afterwards cut the scene with these cameradatas how I like. Don't know if that's smart, but it could be done?

I also found option for motion blur, checked that, tweaked it a bit and now there is some motion blur. I wasn't searching alot, but I believe the resolution of the "ghosts" can be adjusted.

And also, from lambert settings, found special effects, and there it was. Glow. Had to put it in, it's so prettyy.

As I'm getting deeper into the zone, I'll skip the floursac-exercise and import Norman for handling.

Bouncing with some interobjectial connections.

My first real moving 3d- animation short. 

I've done it, and it works and it shows in the air. With sound and all. 

This was a really good exercise, getting connected with the keyframebusiness more deeply. Keyframes look good, all the lines look nice and all the stuff I see in the grapheditor is put there by me. No accidents, no strange keyframes, nothing weird. 

Im getting more confidence through this, and Im starting to prepare for Norman-launch. It's still a bit scary field, there's going to be a lot more stuff to be controlled. But I now know, if I keep everything in order, things should go smooth. 

I see now there might be a frame missing after the "ball" jumps from the first "box". The animation jumps a bit, don't know why or where is the fault. Maybe maya left out one frame. But no matter, not going to fix that, forward I say.

Keyframing, bouncing and going forward.

I started working with the ball, now it's supposed to be moving. A lot of good problems and solutions.

I got a good feel about what happens in the graph editor when I move the ball. This ball exercise was very clear, so it was relatively easy to understand the keyframebusiness. X, Y and Z, positions and scale what I needed. 

Firs it was hard to get the keyframes to match each others positions, so that change in X starts at the same time than change in Y, for example. But then I found the snap-tool, which logically helped there. A lot.

Here is one problem I haven't figured out yet. How to copy keyframes? So that I would be able to return the object exactly to its original size. Maya didn't work how I supposed it to work, while I paste the copied key, maya doesn't put the original value, it inserts the value of the last key. Figure below.

A workaround: I first made the first and last frame. So they are the same. And only after this I started creating and manipulating the frames between. Works. Or I could try to copy and paste the exact values of the first frame.. And now when I wrote this, this feels like a more logical approach.

Below is the keys of my bouncing ball advancing in space. I learned that if there is spline, or curves in the X or Z keys, the bouncing is not linear. SO, the X and Z should be linear! Very nice, now it's exact and how I wanted.

Controlling the bounce is the first time I started to use different observation method. When the animation is technically in place, I started to fine tune it. And here is the point where it gets very exciting.
For instance, I get a feeling that the ball is hanging in the air a bit while bouncing. What to do?

I found that there is 3 controls to try to fix this. Figure below.

Control 1 is saying how fast the ball leaves the ground. 2 the opposite. And the third control says, how long is the ball going to stay in the air. I could adjust it a bit, and see from the preview what happens. Is the adjustment taking it to right or wrong direction? Maybe overdo it, so take the keyframes extremely far away from each other and learn what this does to the animation.

This is exactly where I want to dig in while learning maya. Of course, first I have to learn all the technical sfuff, so I don't bumb into any hard problems while staying in the fine tuning section.

And one hard(weird) problem is rendering. I managed to render tiff-sequence out before, when I told my firewall not to block maya batch render. Yesterday it didn't work though the firewall was told not to block maya. I pushed batch render, it didn't start, closed maya, opened maya and pushed the batch render again. And again, and again. Suddenly it started rendering some batch, what seemed like a few batches pushed together. Had to shutdown my computer to stop that madness.

Bouncing ball

A standard start with a bouncing ball. It's not hard to do, but while pursuing the end result, there came a lot of nice problems. First I did a ball with two sides, changed half of the faces to another material and changed their color. Just so if I would rotate the ball, I could see the rotation. Then I rotated the ball, and after that it was impossible for me to scale the ball in a proper way. I found from the scale-tool menu the options to change the scale-tool from objectmode to world mode, and that almost did the trick. But it didn't. While scaling in world mode, Maya is somehow forced to bake the scaledata into the object. So it seems I'm not able to keyframe the world mode changes. 

But, I did another ball, which I didn't rotate and it works nice.

With this exercise I was doing a lot of trials in the graph editor, playing with the tangents, learning how to release the tangent so I can move it anyway I want. Getting a feel what does what, what buttons do I really need to learn now and what later. And that's actually a very useful way to go forward. Skip everything that doesn't take you to your goal.

I still have to play around with the keyframes, grapheditor and the dopesheet. Have to figure out exactly what happens when I make a keyframe. 

Next I'll continue this bouncing ball and make it interact with the boxes.

Setting a scene and more lightbusiness

Lights are a tricky thing, there is a lot to do to get some decent results. I want to make an beveled box, that sits right on the ground. So there would be a small shadow indicating its contact to the ground. Though I didn't manage, I went forward.

I now found this raytrace options, so that would make the shadow break the further you get from the object. I managed to use it a bit, but didn't quite get good results. It almost seemed there was not enough resolution in the shadow.. but adding more didn't help either.

Also did the basic modelling part, learned to make a shelf for my most used tools, and learned to modify objects. What I didn't quite learn is how to get the stuff away from my objects! The menus on the right side are still confusing me, if I make a something, it's not just the something that appears on the menus. Shaders, and what else..
But! Hopefully they all will make some sense soon.

scene with a ball!

More light, more shadows

softer shadows and accidental reflection

I played around with the light-settings. Tried the mental ray- renderer, and maybe it did something better than the maya software renderer. Theres a lot of options to be tweaked, but I first checked on the "use mental ray shadow map overrides" from the spotlight options.
Then from the shadow map overrides section, I tried a lot of different combinations of settings. Change a lot, then render- kind of style, to get the feeling what does what. Still not sure, but nothing got broke, and I always got back to square one.

Which is, for me at least, a very important thing. When learning a new program, I always like to be able to backtrack my path. This way, I can go back and forth, tweaking and testing and not get into a situation where my project is totally filled with stuff that I don't know how to get rid of.

Though I like to do this, I tested putting a deformation attribute over my object. Or I think it's an attribute. After this, I wasn't able to take it off. Took a while, then I found a button, select, that selects something called a node. Then backspace and it was gone.

Lighting

Problems: How to get a light to my scene? How to make the soft shadows?

Found solutions from the Maya help menu, used directional light, adjusted the intensity, put on the "use depth map shadows" and it worked. Also learned that by adjusting the filter size on the directional lamp, the shadow gets softer. This is almost the basic adjustments what I need to proceed.I still have to figure out how all the hierarchy is working. I put one light to my scene, and in the attribute editor there is 3 folders for my light. Why? What? Also had some problems with finding the focus-dropdown menu, but after locating it, now I know where to look for my objects.

object with directional light! Colors!

Nice, also managed to bring footage from maya. With transparency. In the render menu, alpha channel tick, and yea. A real beauty.

It's important for me to manage these small steps throughout the whole way. Putting up this image gives me a feeling that I actually managed to print a final output. Very motivating.


(Could it also be possible to wrap the text around the alpha object...?)