3D Animation Exercises
Have exactly 5 seconds of free time? Well then, right this way! These are some very small clips of animation I did while learning how to animate in a 3D space.
Pushing!
This, in a way, is my first real 3D animation - I translated shapes around before, but this is the first time I got to focus on character, and acting. First, the final product:
I was using the Goon rig (http://seanburgoon.com/goonrig/).
The technical lesson behind this was using constraints and locators to really pin and connect the hands to the couch, to sell the pushing more. So the hands are connected to locators, and the couch controls those locators. As soon as the hands are on the couch, I switch on the constraint, so when I move the couch, the locators follow, and the hands follow those. Which is all very... handy. (HA!)
However, you can see there's an issue when the hands first make contact. They don't quite make it! They eventually slide into place, and from there on out it's mostly technically sound.
There are other little improvements too, like the very end. Leaving the couch is a little unnatural in spots. And all in all, it's pretty fast, and I don't really hold on any strong pose. But lessons learned!
But all in all, I'm really happy with the finished product!
Now for some "behind-the-scenes":
I shot some reference footage of my buff self pushing my coach.
And after some basic sketching, I went into Maya and blocked it out.
And then from then one, I splined things piece by piece. First the spine, then the legs and feet, the head, then the hands. Then I animated the fingers and facial animation!
Talking!
The next project was to animate a little monologue. I've been using the Norman rig, and I chose a line from Seth Rogen in the film 50/50.
I came across the clip while googling around for clips from some of my favorite recent films. After I found the scene from 50/50 (Seth Rogen walks into Joseph Gordon Levitt's apartment and describes a date he just had), I purposefully never looked at the video again. I was going to just take the audio and act it out myself. I didn't want to just copy how Seth acted out the line.
Here’s the final product:
First I set up a camera, put the audio on my iPod, and looped it. And then I acted it out, again and again and again. I would experiment with different deliveries, and ended up with about an hour of footage until I found something I liked. Here are some .gifs I quickly made from some of the footage, as an example:
(I used a free software called Gifgrabber to get these; it's free on Apple's App Store. You can see I accidentally included other parts of my desktop in the last example, but hey, I thought the app was pretty cool).
And this is the one I was most happy with:
Next step was to think about getting this into 3D space. After some rough sketches and frame counting, I was ready to go!
First I animated everything but the mouth itself. This is the first pass of that; you can see how the hand resting on his arm really looks "work in progress" (later I would actually constrain the hand, through a locator, to the arm). (See Video 1)
Next I started working on the mouth, but really most of the mouth stuff in this iteration was chucked. It was too "jabber jaw" feeling; the jaw shouldn't move that much when talking! But the rest of the body is pretty close to final here. (See Video 2)
So I pretty much threw away most of the mouth from that and started over. This is an improvement, but still not quite there. The jaw still moves too much! (See Video 3)
And after another push, I have the final product at the top of this post. Phew!
TWO PEOPLE TALKING!
Finally, here’s a dialogue.
This time I pulled some audio from Parks and Rec; I chose this line because they went through a couple different emotions in a short amount of time.
I shot some reference footage of this, but it was really a jumping off point. It would've been better if I had two people to act together, but with the help of some space-age technology, I was able to act with myself.
I should talk to myself more often!