Year 3 Major Project: Narrative Animation Production Log

Proposal

The proposal for this project can be downloaded and read from the Word Document button below:

Introduction

During this project I will be producing five different animations that each have their own narrative/story. This page will serve to host production logs pertaining to the animations, detailing their production on a step-by-step basis. I am aiming for these animations to be to a higher standard than previous animations produced for past projects. As these animations are in the same vein as those created for my Year 2 Self-Directed Project, I have an example to follow and ultimately best when it comes to the production of animations for this project.

Skills I want to develop on this project consist of better character movement - to make the characters movements more believable and realistic. I want to develop my lighting skills further too, for example, having lights emit from objects/textures.

For more about pre-production and research, visit the Trello Page for this project.

Character rigs used for this project will be sourced from the internet, this will mean less production time as I won't have to create my own characters and can get straight to the animation process. Rigs are sourced from Christoph Schoch's Gumroad page.

Animation 1: Gamer Pad

After searching for audio to use for my animations, I decided to use dialogue from my favourite videos and content creators on YouTube. This way, I would be more inspired and motivated to create these animations, compared to using audio from media I am uninterested in. For this animation, I am using audio from SnapCube and their series named Real-Time Fandub Games. The audio I will be using for this animation is taken from the Sonic '06 Fandub featured on SnapCube's channel.

I will be using rigs created by Christoph Schoch for this animation (the same rig used for the VFX animation created for my Year 3 Contextual Studies project).

Gamer Pad Animatic:

I created this animatic on 05/02/20 for use in the project proposal presentation. As I'm going through with making this animation, I will be using this animatic to help with the blockout process.

Gamer Pad Blockout:

To begin, I created some simple props inside 3DS Max in order to flesh out the environment a little for the animation. I was able to create a desk and monitor, and get them imported into Maya.

To the right is how the scene looks at the moment, with planes to act as floor and walls so the void isn't visible during the animation. The two blocks to the left act as a wall and door, both to hide the characters when they aren't needed in the scene and to serve as a way for them to enter the room.

Once imported, I resized them and positioned them in the scene; I then began blocking out animation.

Animation staging

Whilst I was blocking out animation, I found out how to enable props and change the length of hair on the Zelda rig; with this I was able to use the same rig twice in the scene, one with long hair and the other with short hair. I found out about the prop settings by reading the 'ReadMe' that came with the rig and searching for 'cn_settings' in Maya's Outliner. This also means that if I ever need a prop for the animation, I might be able to use one included with the rig as a substitute.

Prop controls. A value of 0 is invisible and a value of 1 is visible.

Initial Animation Blockout

Gamer Pad Animation Progress 03/03/20

For the second blockout for this animation, I added some lip syncing and fixed long haired Zelda's fingers when she's peeking through the door. I also changed her posture a little when she says "Maybe they'll respect me.". Previously, she had both hands on her hips - in this blockout, she had one on her hip and the other that she brings to her chest at her side.

I still need to address her fingers clipping through her hips during this scene.

Posture in blockout 1 (left) vs blockout 2 (right).

Gamer Pad - Second Render

As mentioned before, some lip syncing was added to this blockout, I also had long haired Zelda's head bob a little while she's peeking through the door. This was added for later when I do more lip syncing - her head is going to bob a little while she talks.

I also plan in later blockouts to have her pull herself forward using the door, rather than just pop into the scene like she does here. Having her hands/fingers appear first, wrapping around the door, then having her head slide into view.

In future blockouts, I want long haired Zelda to be more articulate, having her move more whilst talking, even if it's just slight movements of her hands or shifting her weight from one leg to the other.

Gamer Pad Animation Progress 04/03/20

During this session, I completed the rest of the lip syncing for the animation as I find it one of the more enjoyable but time consuming tasks to complete, so I'd rather get it done as soon as possible.

I also moved long haired Zelda's fingers around the door more so they're easier to see in the shot. I added blinking during most of the animation as well as more motion to long haired Zelda when the shot is focused on her while she's talking. I feel like I need to add some more motion before she sways her hip as she's rather static before this motion.

Gamer Pad - Third Render

Gamer Pad Animation Progress 05/03/20

During this session, I added a walk animation for short haired Zelda as she enters the room. The method I used for this gave me some complications, as I moved her forward using the upper body controller (controls her shoulders, chest and hips). Doing this offset Zelda from her global controller, meaning that if she rotated, she would be massively offset due to me removing her from the global controller.

Due to this issue, I had to delete all keyframes I had put on the global controller, as well as keyframes on the hands for after short haired Zelda finishes walking (as they would drift over towards the desk she stands at during the final scene) and put Zelda back into position again, this time using each controller individually. As keyframes for the final scene were deleted, the blocked animation at the end for Zelda's hand is gone - this isn't really much of a setback however.

Upper Body Controller (red circle), Global Controller (blue circle)

On the other hand, an upside to this is I was able to have Zelda hold the sheikah slate properly with her right hand. Rather than have her fingers spread out along the back of the slate, they're now properly positioned through the handle, making it look much better.

Gamer Pad - Fourth Render

I'm not entirely happy with the walk animation I produced. I wanted Zelda to have a slower stride as she moves across the room, but for now I feel like this is serviceable. The turn to address the other Zelda peeking through the door isn't complete yet and needs some secondary and anticipation - mostly weight shifting before and after she turns. I also need to do something with the hand that she keeps in the air; maybe some motion when she says "get respect." and then have the arm come down to a resting position.

During the final scene, I'll try some more head movement while Zelda's talking and see how it looks when I add a slight upward nod when she says "you".

Gamer Animation Progress 06/03/20

Today I showed the animation I've created so far to Lee in order to get feedback. I voiced my concerns about the walk and how I thought it was way too fast. Lee agreed that the walk was too fast and suggested that I slow it down, he also mentioned that it was a bit static and that I was rotating the feet too much as Zelda brings her foot down. Positives were that the facial animation was very fluid and nothing needs to be changed regarding lip syncing. With this feedback in mind, I began to slow Zelda's walk down.

I began by selecting the controller I used to drag her forward when I initially created the walk, then selected the keyframes and moved them to a later point in the timeline, slowing the walk drastically. Before this adjustment, the translate Z keyframe was somewhere around the 70 - 80 frame mark, after the adjustment it now sits at frame 135.

I initially had some trouble with the timing and spacing of the arms and legs as I was slowing down the animation. I was able to get past this trouble by lining up the motions of the legs to match the pace Zelda was moving at, then adding new keyframes in place of the old ones to make sure the walk looks correct.

When I completed the slowed down walk, I thought it would be a good idea to have Zelda grab the slate on her belt when she finishes talking. Seeing as though she's holding it in the final scene, it makes sense to have her pick it up before the camera focuses on her. This helps the walk not look as static as before while adding continuity to the animation.

New, slowed down walk animation.

Unfortunately, due to the slowing down of Zelda's walk, some of the lip syncing isn't seen as she enters the scene much slower. I could change the camera angle to show this, however that would mean animating long haired Zelda more for her to correctly walk up to the door.

Gamer Animation Fifth Render

I'm really pleased with the progress I made during this session as I was able to fix the walk animation that I didn't like, as well as add in Zelda picking up the slate to have her look at as she's walking; making the walk less static .

As far as animation goes, I need to have the slate move at the same time as her arm, so it's not floating. I need to do some parenting to achieve this. I also need to correctly position the hand that doesn't grab the slate during the walk animation so it's not constantly raised at Zelda's side. The fingers on this hand also need posing. This is what I'll be focusing on during the next animation session.

As the animation is nearly complete, I need to focus more effort on the environment. I'm not sure about sinking too much time into creating an environment from scratch as I'd rather do what I've done in previous projects and get a stage from online. I'll talk to my tutor about this to get their opinion.

Gamer Animation Progress 10/03/20

During this session I will be making small adjustments to the animation that I mentioned at the end of the previous update - making sure Zelda's arm doesn't linger as she walks, and posing the fingers on that arm so they're not constantly straight throughout the animation.

Whilst I was working on making sure that Zelda's left arm didn't linger, I fixed the positioning of her right arm so she's holding the slate a little further away from her chest. Doing this made the pose look much more natural as where she is looking matches up with the tablet's location now.

I also positioned Zelda's left arm so that her hand is grabbing the slate now instead of floating next to it.

I was able to parent the tablet's controller to Zelda's right arm so it follows the arms movements; there were some issues with this however. I couldn't add any animation to the slate because of the parent constraint. This left the slate in it's default pose position with me being unable to edit it.

Slate in default position while parented to arm controller.

After looking at the keyframes for the slate in the graph editor, I found that the issue was with the keyframes assigned to 'Blend Parent 1'. This is an option that appeared in the Attribute Editor after parenting the slate's controller to the arm's controller. It allows me to keyframe the parenting for when I want to pick up or put down the object. After slightly changing the keyframes, I was able to add animation to the slate so it would sit in the correct position when Zelda is moving forwards.

Slate's "Blend Parent 1" keyframe before editing.

Slate's "Blend Parent 1" keyframe after editing.

Slate with corrected keyframes.

After I was satisfied with the changes made to actions during the walk animation, I wanted to make some small adjustments to the long haired Zelda for when the camera focuses on her. These were just very minor changes, such as: making sure the hand on her hip moves properly with the hip's movements, and animating her left shoulder so it goes up slightly when her hip moves.

Gamer Animation Sixth Render

As I'm almost done with this animation and most of what needs addressing is the environment, I will be moving onto my second animation, the progress of which can be found under the title "Second Animation Progress". I will continue to update this section of the project page when I get the environment sorted for the staging.

Animation 2: I Kid You Not, Sis

(13/03/20) Animation 2: Animatic, Staging & Block Out

The second animation for this project was inspired by a meme that's been circulating on Twitter recently, of various voice actors voicing a character from a series (such as Dragon Ball, Persona) who thinks the pickle rick meme is the funniest thing to grace this planet.

Audio for this animation was sourced from @AleksLeOV on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AleksLeVO/status/1237069116281737219

During this animation, I want to use some other rigs that the creator of the Zelda rig I've been using has created. It'll be nice to use some other characters, rather than just use the same one again. While they're still Zelda characters, the style differs greatly from the Breath of the Wild 2 Zelda rig.

I Kid You Not, Sis: Animatic

This is the animatic I created before the blockout process. I want two characters sat at a table, with the one on the left doing all the talking.

I Kid You Not, Sis: Blockout

Before I started animating, I wanted to sort out some staging and found some models online that I could use. Once the staging was complete, I posed the rigs and parented one of the mugs to Link's hand. I used the same method as I used for the slate in the first animation, adding a locator from the create drop down menu, parenting it to the mug, then parenting the mug to the hand controller.

After doing some blocking out, I found out that doing this would make the mug disapear whenever I hid Link's controls layer. This might pose a problem when it comes to a final render, as controllers don't get rendered, the mug also may not be rendered also. I will make sure to fix this in the future.

Staging and initial posing of Link and Zelda.

Comparison of control layers , with visible control layer (left) and hidden control layer (right).

Second Animation First Render

This is the initial playblast for the second animation. The entire thing hasn't been blocked out yet, but this is the majority of the block out. I stopped here due to the time (2am) and wanted to get a progress update out on a new animation - rather than leave it too late and forget most of what I did.

Due to the issues with the mug disapearing with the control layer being hidden, Link still has controllers on during this playblast. I focused more on facial expression and lip syncing with his block out, making the mouth movements more fluid than usual for a block out. The final shot in this block out will lead to Zelda getting up and leaving while Link laughs to himself.

The next update will have the block out finished, and I will then continue on to flesh out the animation more.

Animation 2: Completing Block Out 13/03/20

Firstly, I tried to fix the mug issue I mentioned at the end of the first render post. I found out that I can't fix the issue for playblasts - however, the mug doesn't get culled out during an actual render. Due to this, I will have to keep Link's controllers activated for playblasts, but the final render will not be affected by this.

I didn't have any major hurdles during this session that slowed me down too much, mostly getting lip syncing right which didn't take a lot of time to do.

I then moved on to complete Link's block out by adding in him laughing while his head is on the table. I added the motion by moving his chest controller up and down very slightly, adding in some shoulder motions when appropriate. There are still some shoulder movements to add towards the end of the laughing. I also moved his hair a little so it didn't clip through his shoulders at the start of the animation, but I need to make sure to do this for the rest of the animation. After doing this I slowed down Zelda's sigh a little and added in her getting up and leaving while Link loses it on the table.

I decided to add some cuts at the end to show that Link realised that Zelda left half way through Link talking, as she wasn't very amused by his story.

Animation 2: Complete Block Out

I understand that this is way more advanced than a usual animation block out, I got a little carried away animating lip syncing and fluid motions for Link in general. Next, I plan to move onto fleshing out Zelda's movements, adding more in-between frames. I'll be focusing a little less on Link during the next session, I will however make small tweaks to his poses and or movements when I see issues.

Animation 2 Progress: 17/03/20

During this session I focused more on Zelda's movements for when she gets up and walks away. I also made some small adjustments to link when he rubs his eye towards the end.

The first thing I did was change Zelda's right hand pose at the start and added some animation to the fingers so she's tapping the table as the camera pans in. I had some trouble with the same fingers clipping through the table when she goes to push herself away to get up. I deleted the keyframes on her fingers for this section and redid the animation, making sure her fingers weren't clipping this time. I also noticed that her hand would drift around, so I made sure to keep the hand in the same place whilst she was pushing on the table.

There's some clipping issues on Link's belt area where it clips into his leg. I tried turning off the belt's geometry, but the tunic geometry that lies behind the belt clips through as well. I tried to rotate his pelvis and chest, however nothing I tried would fix the issue. Instead of trying to fix the issue by rotating controllers on the rig, I rotated the camera so the clipping would not be shown on screen.

The only time the clipping is noticeable is at the start of the animation, where the camera pans in.

Camera angle before (left) and after (right)

Animation 2: Complete Motion

As of now, I'm pleased with where this animation is in terms of motion. This animation wasn't as complex as the first one due to the fact that the two are sitting for the majority of the animation. All that is left to complete regarding this animation is staging and lighting.

Animation 3: Defective Baby

31/03/20 Animation 3 - Defective Baby: Animatic & Blockout

I had to take an unexpected break from this project due to illness. I feel well enough to do more work on the project today so I will be starting by creating a blockout for the next animation. The creator of the rigs I'm using, Christoph Schoch, released a new Breath of the Wild (BotW) Link rig to go with the BotW Zelda rig I've been frequently using - I plan to use both of these rigs for this animation.

I sampled the audio from a video of out of context clips of the channel: Sam O'Nella Academy. The video can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_satm2rd7Kg&feature=youtu.be&t=101

I'm not too sure as to what the environment of this animation will be - at this stage the blockouts won't have any environment. I could have the animation set outside in a market area. When I was thinking of doing this animation, I thought of having Zelda talking with someone before Link picks her up - that's why she's facing away from the camera. Alternatively, I could have her looking at something that piqued her interest.

Defective Baby: Animatic

Defective Baby: Complete Blockout (Render 1)

I didn't have any issues creating this blockout, I just made sure to make this blockout more barebones compared to animation 2's blockout. In the next update, I'll have lip syncing animated.

Defective Baby: Lip Syncing (Render 2)

I didn't have any issues with lip syncing either. There was an issue with Zelda sliding a little while she was on the floor that I fixed, other than this and lip syncing nothing else was changed/added.

16/04/20 Animation 3 - Defective Baby Progress

During this session I will be focusing on animating Zelda being picked up by Link. I did try to do this a few days ago but got discouraged due to how difficult I was finding animating this motion to be. So instead of focusing on that, I made a few adjustments to Link's movement.

To start with, I went to frame 70 (where Zelda gets picked up) and moved the blockout keyframes along to have space to work on Zelda falling forwards towards the ground. This gave me issues whilst I was trying to animate, however; causing Zelda to slowly go into the sitting pose for when she's dropped. Animating the fall also made the rest of her animation turn out broken, with her getting crushed into a ball and floating next to Link at the end of the animation.

Due to these issues, I opted to delete all the animation for after Link picks her up and use straight-through animation instead.

I feel the reason I had to do this was due to the lack of blocking out for Zelda falling. In the block out, I had her go from standing to being held upside down by Link. If I'd had more poses, I wouldn't have had nearly as much trouble as I did.

Animation for Zelda being picked up. (The video is there, thumbnail is just black for some reason)

The only things I need to fix are: the obvious space between Link's hands and Zelda and Zelda's cape when she's upside down. Since she needs to be pulled back a little before being picked up, I should think about slowing Links animation down to match Zelda.

20/04/20 Animation 3 - Defective Baby Progress

I've been having issues with the animation for a few days now, mainly animating Zelda being dropped. For some reason, when I try to lie Zelda down on her back, the pelvis and chest controllers cause her upper body to do a 360 degree spin before continuing in the direction they're going. I think this is due to gizmo and controller placement. For example, there's a controller that manipulates Zelda's chest and pelvis that gets left in the air when she's picked up.

After moving around the gizmo for both the pelvis and chest controllers, I was able to somewhat fix the issue, and in the end was able to add some keyframes to her chest controller to negate her upper body from spinning.

Comparison of Zelda falling without keyframes on chest controller (left) and with keyframes (right)

The impact of Zelda hitting the floor is still lacking. I want her head to stay in place for longer, with her legs and chest being the weight to have her fall onto her back. Right now, everything kind of happens at the same time - although it's hard to work around the chest controller issues. Some secondary when her back connects with the ground may help too.

I was able to make Zelda's drop animation look somewhat better. Secondary was added to her feet so they bounce when they hit the floor. I touched up her cape a little to have it bend better and added some facial expressions to Zelda to show her surprise in being picked up and pain when her head hits the floor.

I still have issues with her upper body feeling too stiff as it moves at the same time. I want to find a way to fix this, but to reiterate, I am limited by the issue with the chest controller. However, this drop animation is much better than the first, and I'm pleased that I was able to work out some of the issues I was facing.

Improved drop animation. Zelda's legs bring her down now.

I plan on doing adjustments to Link's cape when picking up Zelda and animating in-betweens for Link during the next segment of the animation. I also want to animate Zelda sitting up and rubbing her head, but I don't know if there will be enough time in the animation to do so. Zelda was just dropped on her head so maybe she should just lie there for a while.

Defective Baby Complete Pickup and Drop (Render 3)

All that's left to do in the way of animation is animating proper motion for Link during the final part of the animation, and animating Zelda raising her sword behind Link. When Zelda gets up in the background, I want her to be stumbling a little since she was dropped on her head.

Things to fix would be Zelda's cape and hair clipping through the floor when she lands.

21/04/20 Animation 3 - Defective Baby Finished Animation

During this session I finished off animating, getting the animation to a state where I'm happy with it. I added secondary to most of the animation and polished any small issues. These issues included Links fingers being straight most of the time, Link looking directly into the camera during the close up, and having Link blink more often.

There was one issue where a pouch on Zelda's waist was clipping through her cape at the start of the animation. I tried to fix this by changing the visibility of the pouch from 'on' to 'off', however this didn't work due to the pouch being connected to the rig. As I already had the pouch selected, I chose to just delete the object instead.

Other issues consisted of Zelda's hair clipping through her cape as she stood back up, and the sword she's holding clipping through Link when Zelda goes to lift it up.

Sword clipping through Link due to poor rotations on Zelda's hand.

Like with the previous two animations, all this one needs is an environment. For now I'm going to move onto starting the fourth animation

Animation 4: Twitter Dot Com

22/04/20 Animation 4: Twitter Dot Com - Animatic & Staging

Audio for this animation was sourced from cl_animatr's channel on YouTube. This video consists of multiple animatics created using audio from SnapCube's Sonic '06 Fandub (links to both SnapCube's channel and the Sonic '06 Fandub can be found at the beginning of the Gamer Pad animation progress posts).

Audio Source for animation 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zF66kTA3wvY&feature=youtu.be&t=100

Before I begin animating I wanted to get some basic staging built for this animation, instead of being left with no staging whatsoever throughout the animation process.

To start with, I imported all the rigs I planned to use into a new file, set them aside and began to build an environment based off the sketch below.

For this animation, I wanted some characters to sit in a living room, each doing their own thing, then have another character burst through a door behind them. I drew a quick mock-up of an environment in Paint Tool Sai to get an idea as to how I wanted the scene to look before I began modelling.

Mock-up drawing of the environment for animation 4.

Twitter Dot Com - Animatic

Twitter Dot Com - Staging

For this environment I modelled everything inside of Maya, except for the TV, which is the monitor model from the first animation. During the modelling process, I learnt how to enable backface culling in Maya, as well as lock the walls and floor so I wasn't needlessly selecting them.

In order to lock the room, I had to add it to a layer and check the third box to 'R' for the 'Reference' display type.

Environment for the 4th animation.

Once the environment was modelled, I moved onto posing the rigs in the scene. I was able to use some props that came with the Breath of the Wild Link model (the one used in animation 3) to my advantage here, namely the Slate and Book. The only prop I had to model was a TV remote, which is just a box with no features at the moment.

I had some issues posing the Ruby rig, mostly with her legs clipping through her skirt. The main issue was with her knees clipping, no matter where I moved the skirt controllers, at least one of her knees would always clip. Even after moving her knee controllers and foot controllers around to try to reposition her legs, there was still some clipping. Ruby's thighs would also start to clip through at times as well, so I had to settle with one knee clipping a little.

Due to this, her legs also clip slightly through the chair. I doubt this will be seen on camera, but it's still a little annoying.

I had no issues with the other rigs and was able to get them setup in the scene without any setbacks.

Knee clipping through skirt.

Character rigs sitting in living room. There's some unfortunate clipping on one of Ruby's legs that can't be solved without her knees/thighs clipping through her skirt.

24/04/20 Animation 4: Twitter Dot Com - Blockout

Ruby Blockout

I began by blocking out Ruby's movement for the animation. In the scene, she's sat next to Zelda flicking through channels on the TV, visibly bored and not at all entertained by what's on. I came across the same issue for the TV remote as I did with Link and the mug in animation 2, where I parented the object to a controller. Due to doing this again, the TV remote was removed from the viewport along with Ruby's controllers and there wasn't much reason leaving her controllers on, as you wouldn't be able to see any facial expressions or her thumb tapping. I tested rendering in animation 2 and the object parented to the controller was still rendered, so there's no issue when it comes to rendering.

There's also an issue where her elbow controller isn't moved when she turns away with her hand on her mouth, so I need to make sure to move the controller in order to fix this issue.

Comparison of Ruby with controllers on (left) and controllers off (right). It's much easier to see facial expression and hand movements with controllers off for animation preview.

Zelda Blockout

After finishing up Ruby's blockout, I moved over to Zelda. There's not much to say for Zelda as she's the least articulate of the three. During the animation, she's reading a book and throws it into the air after she's startled by the other Link bursting into the room.

Aspects to improve upon for Zelda's blockout would be to have her breathing heavily after being scared - she does place her hand on her chest after all. I could sell her emotion more by having her breathing heavily; she could also turn her head away to look downward whilst doing so.

Maybe I could have the book fly higher, or have her arms move upward more when she's startled. At the moment, her arms don't move upwards much, so the force behind the book being thrown is much weaker than what is shown, so the path the book takes doesn't make sense.

Link (sitting) Blockout

I feel like Link was the most enjoyable to blockout. In the animation, he's going to laugh hysterically towards the end, so blocking out this part was the highlight of this session. I feel like I spent most of my time getting the laughing motions right for Link, as well as adding in other things, like Link hitting his leg as he laughs.

I was, however, having some trouble coming up with what he could do. I knew I wanted to have him use the slate but didn't know what to have him do leading up to the other Link bursting into the room. I opted to just have him blinking and move his eyes around a little, since he's watching something on the slate I didn't think there would be much going on other than eye movement. I tried to have him scratch his stomach, but it was hard to see the movement behind the slate, as well as the render not being at full resolution.

I could have him scratch his face or make a scrolling motion on the slate. I'll try some things out and see how they go.

Twitter Dot Com Blockout - Initial Render

The Link who bursts into the room doesn't have any blockout at the moment and just slides into the scene as his dialogue plays. I initially had the camera just focusing on the three sitting in the living room, with some room to the side for Link to slide into the camera's view. Since I already animated the door opening as well as model an interior for Link to stay in, I thought I might as well show that part of the environment.

I need to fix Link's (sitting) cape when he laughs, as it clips through the chair. I could also do what I did with Zelda and turn off the cape's visibility, along with any extra clothing that wouldn't be worn indoors.

27/04/20 Animation 4: Twitter Dot Com - Render 2

During this session, I'll begin the process of removing blockouts from the animation and getting some fluid motion situated. I'll be focusing on one rig at a time, like I did with the blockout. In this session I will be focusing on Link (sitting) as I found his motions the most enjoyable to create during the blockout process.

This video shows Link's (sitting) motions after in-betweens have been added. There are still some things that need addressing, such as the blocking on Link's mouth and some hair movement to react to his head movements.

Next I plan to move onto Ruby and get her animation to a more complete state.

28/04/20 Animation 4: Twitter Dot Com Progress

Before I moved onto Ruby, I decided to add in the changes to Link's animation I mentioned at the end of the last update, where I described adding hair movement and more fluid motion for his mouth. I recorded the animation much closer to Link this time, so you can clearly see the animation play out, as well as not be distracted by the other rigs.

I'm pleased with where his animation is at the moment; I'll go back at a later time to add more secondary animation.

I feel like I can make his hand motions while he's laughing much heavier and give off more of a feeling of impact.

Link animation close-up.

After working on Link some more, I moved over to Ruby. I added a few more blinks for when she's watching the Link who bursts into the room, I also made her chest rotation slower for when she turns away and added more facial movement before she turns away. Facial animation before just consisted of her smiling slightly and squinting her eyes a little, now however, I had her mouth open a little to show her teeth, as well as have her eyes close when she's turning away.

Other motions added consisted of her shoulders raising before she brings her hand to her mouth to accentuate the fact she's laughing. I could do what I did in animation 2 and move her chest controller around a little so she moves back and forth slightly, to further depict Ruby laughing.

Ruby animation close-up.

With Link and Ruby in a place where I feel their animation is good enough for now, I'm going to move onto Zelda. I want to change the final pose for Zelda, as what I've come up with at the moment doesn't really reflect any characterisation.

My initial thought was to have her lean forward more, but since I already had her leaning forward somewhat, it felt awkward to have her lean forward even more - it also wasn't very interesting either.

What I had Zelda do in the end was slump into the settee and put one hand on her forehead.

Like with Ruby, I added more blinking, though I may need to add more just after she's thrown the book.

There were some issues with Zelda's hair, where her pony tail would clip through her stomach at times. I was able to find the problematic keyframes and delete them. Some clipping occurs at the beginning, this can be easily fixed.

Zelda animation close-up.

Animation 4: Twitter Dot Com - Render 3

01/05/20 Animation 4: Twitter Dot Com Progress

During this session I will be focusing on animating Link so he walks into the scene rather than slide. To help with animating, I will be referring to the Animator's Survival Kit, specifically the section on animating walking. This will allow me to produce the animation hopefully without any issues.

This is the page from the Animator's Survival Kit I referenced while blocking out Link's walk. This helped immensely as I had key pose reference as well as a reference for what frame to place the pose.

Once I had each pose in the scene, I tried to copy/paste what I had done to save time, but ran into an issue. When I copy/pasted, Link's feet would both go behind him, breaking the walk cycle. After looking into the issue more, I found that the solution was to create mirrored key poses.

As I had made my key poses like those in the image to the right, I had to do the same for Link's other arm and leg. After doing so I found copy/pasting frames was no longer an issue and the walk works as intended.

Link's legs after copy/pasting before creating mirrored key poses.

01/05/20 Animation 4: Twitter Dot Com - Blocked Out Walk

Despite my feelings before blocking out Link's walk, I decided it was easier to just keep the camera where it is, and fully animate Link walking. Doing so means I don't have to try to time exactly when Link appears in frame to begin animating. I did try doing this before animating the walk from frame 0, finding I was wasting too much time trying to make it look like Link was walking before coming into frame.

In the following session, I will be adding more motion to the walk animation, removing the blocky animation. I will also be adjusting the walk, as I followed the reference sheet closely, Link goes down rather far on the 'down pose', so I may look into changing this so it isn't as radical.

I also need to complete lip syncing, as I only animated from when Link says: "Nudes"; this is due to previous camera positioning.

04/05/20 Animation 4: Twitter Dot Com - Progress

During this session I will be finalising Link's walk and the animation as a whole. Other than Link's walk, I need to animate the rest of his lip syncing and standing pose as he finishes walking.

I began by removing blockouts from Links feet and worked upwards. I had to reposition his legs at times as they would be too far forward. I also adjusted his up and down motions as I mentioned at the end of the last progress post for this animation. I mentioned that I felt that he moved up/down too drastically, and that I would think of reducing how much he bobs.

I had an issue where Link's knees would be too bent most of the time. I tried moving his upper body controller up more to solve this, but this just ended with his feet floating above the ground. I found that the issue was with his toe controller and that his foot was too far forward. His toe controller stayed rotated for too long, poking his knee out too much.

(Left) Link's leg before I changed the rotation of his toe controller and position of foot. (Right) After changes.

There were also issues with Links left hand clipping through a pouch that was on his waist. I solved this issue by looking into the model hierarchy, locating the pouch, and deleting it (the pouch can be seen in any previous blockout of this animation). I also animated the bottom of his tunic his legs wouldn't clip through it as he walked.

As Link came to a stop, I had some trouble with his legs as they would go for another walk cycle before snapping back to be zeroed at the center of the Global controller. I had to look into the Graph Editor and delete keyframes, as well as set new ones so there would'nt be anymore snapping. After doing so, Link now naturally stops walking.

Other than these issues, I had no more trouble animating the remainder of Link's walk animation.

04/05/20 Animation 4: Twitter Dot Com - Complete Animation

06/05/20: Issues With Rendering

I had some issues with the Arnold Renderer in Maya as I was setting up lighting. I had a skydome light in the scene and rendered using Arnold, but the render made the character rigs look glossy, unlike the environment models which looked completely fine. I'm not sure what the issue is here - if it's with the character's textures or the Arnold Renderer.

Image produced using Arnold Renderer. Character textures appear glossy, while the environment models appear normal.

I will have to use Maya Hardware 2.0 for the 'I Kid You Not, Sis' render. The final render will look like previous renders, just without the controllers visible on Link.

There was a small issue where the render output was much darker than the viewport. I looked for a solution on Google and found that I had to select "Apply Output Transform to Render" in the Render Settings. The page I found the solution to this issue can be viewed here.

Another issue I had with the render of the second animation is that the first 50 frames of animation would play backwards. I tried messing around with render settings but couldn't find a solution. Then it clicked that I had started the animation at frame -50. This meant that the image sequence was structured to begin at "Frame.0000" and then play "Frame.-0001", instead of going from "Frame.-0050", "Frame.-00049" etc. To solve this issue, I selected all controllers in the scene and moved them 50 frames forward.

The first render of the second animation I did had too much compression as I was using the .JPEG image format. I did another render, this time using the .PNG format, which solved the issue.

.JPEG image render (left) .PNG image render (right)

It seems I can use the Arnold renderer with the other models (Breath of the Wild models, meaning I can render animation 1 and 3 with Arnold), the issue here is with the graininess of the rendered images. If I change settings in the Arnold renderer to remove the graininess, it takes around 7 - 10 minutes per image to render. With 213 frames in animation 3, it would take anywhere from 28 - 38 hours to render. Leaving animation 1 and 4 to be rendered afterwards. This render time is with 8 samples on the skydome light.

What I can do is turn the amount of samples down on the Skydome light from 8 to 2, which will cut render time drastically. I want to use Arnold for animations 1 and 3 because these animations don't feature the more stylised models that had issues with Arnold (pictured above). Even if parts of the animation are grainy, the overall quality will be higher due to the Arnold render.

There were issues with the Gamer Pad animation (animation 1) render. I tried using Arnold again, but renders were too dim, even with the intensity of the skydome light turned up. Due to this, test renders of the scene turned out much grainier than those for Defective Baby (animation 3). Turning up 'Diffuse' in the Arnold render settings, as well as sampling rate on the skydome did improve quality at a cost of render time.

I scaled up the box area the animation takes place in and this seemed to solve the lighting issues. I'll render Gamer Pad (animation 1) over night and see how it looks in the morning.

Frame from animation 1, using Arnold with a Sampling rate of 8 and Diffuse of 4.

Render time: 8 minutes 16 seconds.

Final Animation Renders

Evaluation

During the start of the project, I set out to create five narrative animations, and develop lighting skills in Autodesk Maya for more portfolio worthy renders. Over the course of this project however, I was only able to produce four animations; unlike previous projects, I spent less time on the environment which really shows in the animations. This is due to wanting to focus more effort into the animation itself, and rely less on using online sources.

I was unable to work on this project for an amount of time due to illness (which I mentioned to Ben) towards the end of March - the beginning of April (24th March - 5th April). I was off and on with headaches and eye strain during the first half of April, so extended use of the computer wasn't the best idea. Despite this setback, I was able to produce four out of the proposed five animations for the project, and I'm pleased with the animations I've produced.

During this project, I hardly ran into any major setbacks whilst animating that halted progression (such as losing progress or having to completely re-animate a scene). The main hurdles I faced during animation were, again, producing walks, as well as animating Link picking Zelda up in animation 3. Animating walks is something I've always had an issue with (see animation 1 and 4 progress posts). With Lee's feedback for animation one, I was able to resolve the walk, slowing it down to look more natural. In the case of animation 4, I used the Animator's Survival Kit to reference key poses for walk cycles. I feel as though I could have added more character to Link's walk during animation 4, as it doesn't deviate from those key poses; there's not much of a sense of urgency or anger in his actions to match his vocal tone. After going back to the Animator's Survival Kit, seeing the walk blocked out gave me more confidence when it came to animating the walk for animation 4. I put off the walk animation until the end, but I'm glad I was able to produce a walk that looks half decent. Link's feet slide across the floor a little as he walks though, possibly due to him reaching his destination too quickly.

While the issue with animation 3 wasn't huge, it did take some time to get the animation of Zelda being picked up and dropped correct. With her upper body rotating as she fell, I lost some of my drive to continue with the animation for a while, as I couldn't figure out how to correct the issue. I did find the solution in the end and finished the animation soon after.

Another major issue was with rendering. Animations 2 and 4, which use the more realistic/stylised Link and Zelda, couldn't be rendered using Arnold, as these models would look glossy in the render. I can't say what the issue is with these models using the Arnold renderer, other than their textures. Due to this issue, I was forced to render animations 2 and 4 using Maya Hardware 2.0. I fortunately was able to render animations 1 and 3 using Arnold; they are a little grainy however. Animation 3 only took around 6 hours to render. I used the same render settings for animation 1 but for some reason it took substantially more time to render, finishing at around 18 hours.

There were plenty of scrapped ideas for animations that I had during the initial planning phase of this project, before proposing the project idea, which went unused either because of lack of interest in the ideas (the ideas were a couple of months old by the time I got around to looking at them again), or I simply found audio that sparked better ideas. I documented these scrapped ideas on a seperate page titled: Major Project - Scrapped Ideas.

I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed animating these pieces, as audio I used comes from content creators whose work I enjoy, or in the case of animation 2, memes that were circulating at the time.

Even though I wanted to put more work into the environments of these animations, I shifted to mainly focus on the quality of the animations (such as character movement and expression). I had originally wanted to create an environment from scratch, which I did for animation 4, however the environment isn't as complex as I'd hoped. The environment for the fourth animation does the job to set the scene - though I'd liked to have at least one nicely textured and complete scene to look at.

Despite the shortcomings for the staging, I'm pleased to have produced four animations for this project. During the early stages of production, I wasn't too confident that I'd manage to create this many animations. As mentioned before, I set out to produce five animations, each being six seconds long. I found the six seconds per animation I set myself to be too limiting, which is evident from the first animation being 10 seconds long, followed by the second being ~20 seconds long.

For future animations, I see myself doing more narrative pieces. I definitely enjoy producing narrative animations like these, as opposed to animation for games.