I animated the beak today. I was mostly in for some feedback on how my work is going with mike and it was pretty much all possitive. Mostly we were just talking about improving voice acting for the script, but otherwise we could lock it down as we are all happy to work with this latest version.one thing to mention, where i point my arm to someone off screen, i am going to swap the arm around for the bird as i think it works better that way, it just didn't occur to me while I edited the footage.



I think i will get this lip sync done, and do another version using Clym's model. We will check with him to see how the new version with feathers is coming along. we need to know what Fahran is doing, whether he will be available for character texture mapping.
come Wednesday we plan to put together our schedule using Shotgun. Hopefully if we get it then, as we have needed this for a while to figure out the pipeline. I think we will get this done even if we have to do it in excel. I think the plan is to have some models we can animate by the end of term.

I think since next thursday a first draft of my dissertation will need to be handed in, I have printed out a copy of the blog i started around last summer's term break, it is very long but i need to remind myself of all the quotes and possible useful material i can draw upon which i will write. make a key for what goes in what chapter. i think I can do it, just going to set aside time this week as i will be in nearly every day. So now is as good a time as any.

Also i recieved instructions from Depa for what she would like me to do for the Leap of faith animation:
3/02/2011 - Meeting with Alex to go through animation.

As discussed please see below what is needed for the animation. The shots are heavily governed by extreme camera angles, stretch and anticipation.

Please see below what is needed as discussed last on Thursday.

Example animation using moom of a character sitting perched at a table studying with glasses. The pose is detrimental to the age and style of the character. So leaning over with head close to the book studying. I would like the character pondering head moving side to side and maybe pressing twill to her mouth. Secondary animation will occur with the twill. Writing whilst the feather moves. As she is studying her glasses slide down her nose and she moves them back up. She yawns looks at her watch and then stretches as she decides to call it a day.

Studying characteristics maybe tapping fingers on the page. Hands or finger pressed on the lips or face as she is thinking...pondering...eyes moving along page...eyebrows move up as she finds an interesting text. She looks over to the ink pot.


As the animation goes...

The camera looks up at the lectern....extreme shot of looking up......A lot of the animation is looking up at or looking down as in order of power. The camera looks up at the lectern as in the animation I showed you then fixed on the owl.
The camera pans closer to the owl (zooms). The owl is in shadow with a beam of light across his eyes. Lit by candle light...As the camera zooms the owl twitches looks side to side generally in a calm state.

Next shot librarian sitting at the lectern studying. Please see above description. Include blinking. and eyebrow moving.

Ariel. Next shot she is looking up at the camera with hand closest to the camera as she is stepping down the ladder. Background blurred She in focus. Close up. She is looking straight at the camera.

She climbs down the ladder

As she climbs down she stretches her foot and thumbles to find the next step. The camera is looking below her so the foot and step almost on top of the camera. She steps down to the next step very carefully as she is old. The ladder wobbles as she climbs down.

Owl is seen again in the shadow..blinks...slightly agitated....

Next shot looking up at the the foot as it reaches the next step it snaps....her weight drops...then she grabs hold to the side of the lectern as she manages to find the next step again. Lots of shake from the fall. As she falls her glasses fall off and falls to the ground...might have the camera pan on the glasses as it falls.

She looks down then the camera pans quickly to the ground and back again to just get the picture of how far the fall is. She looks scared as her body is stretched as shes hanging on for dear life...

Close up her fingers Ariel view as shes holding to the side. she knock the ink pot it wobbles slowly build up anticipation and then suddenly fall in slow motion...her fingers slide off one by one Then she falls....

Looking up you see the bottle falling in slow motion and the librarian falling in the back ground. The bottle comes towards camera getting larger in larger..
Please look at this animation for stuff we discussed and look at storyboard with link I sent


Animation example - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq9wivMLzd0


Animatics - http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6818115595987893694&postID=7245381244459543526




Cheers Alex

Remember to use the graph editor, and this will help. for instance, when the raven s walking, there is a bobbing up and down in the pelvis. It goes up slow and comes down faster, I started with a mechanical goes up and down at the same speed to make it easy to do a repetitive animation. Heres what to do, go into the graph editor, Highlight the Y axis, go into the curves menu and you want to turn on pre and post infinity, go to view and turn on infinity. BTW you only need a few frames, like 3, the beginning middle and end. once you've turned on the infinity and played with the tangents with the incredibly fiddly middle mouse wheel button. you can create an infinitely looking animation that makes the flaws easier to spot as well as make it easier to make changes.

once this infinite curve is switched on, you want to bake it into the animation, to do this, select the Y axis in the menu to the right, open up the bake menu, put in the time index from start to finish and make sure you put it on sparse. as you dont want a million frames to suddenly appear. once done what should happen is a whole bunch of duplicate frames will appear.

Pretty cool huh?

Anyway, this will be important when coming back to do some more walk cycles.







I recently completed this walk cycle with the basic raven model. From this picture I remembered how to up the quality on the depth map shadows. Since I had not rendered in a while i spent some time looking for this. i also created a tun table by key framing the bird mover to spin 360 degrees and 720, so it rotates twice. also the camera rotates 360 degrees, i did this by creating a curve, key framing that to rotate 360, and parented the camera (with aim) to it, and it works out perfectly fine. A technique i remembered from second year when I wanted smooth camera motion. Could be a useful technique come third term when i am animating the shots for real.

I did recently get soem feedback from Sophie along the lines of a great start - maybe damp down the Y on the pelvis?
and the feet should be snappie. So I will keep that in mind for future walk cycles :)