Unit Conclusion

I have learned a lot about animation and rigging in this unit.

With regards to Mixamo and Fuse, they are great time saving tools, though the produced rigs are not perfect and have some limitations.

Lip sync:

After feedback on my first attempt, people suggested that I add animation to the eyes to convey more emotion. I completed this and was happy with the result. The mixamo rig presented some limitations in this regard as the lips while they could sync with the speech correctly, there was a certain range of movement in the video I had chosen that was not available on the rig itself.

Character animations:

I am overall happy with how they turned out. In certain instances I couldn't get the range of motion I wanted out of the Mixamo rig due to it distorting. I feel this limited some of the animations I created, as I had to reel in what I was doing to avoid a distorted mesh. I feel possibly a custom created rig may have been able to avoid some of these problems, but time constraints meant we were unable to create these.

Asset animations:

I feel these came out very well.

Rifle: General feedback from peers is that this is a good animation and conveys the correct speed and weight to each part being animated. I am overall quite happy with how this ended up.

Melee weapon: Feedback from peers mentioned that they liked the weight and the locking motion between each weapon mode, which made it feel more realistic and believable.

The skills I have learned on this unit will aid me in future projects.

Lip sync - animation process

To animate my lip sync I used a special website which allows you to advance a YouTube video frame by frame.

I loaded the Bottom video into it and used this to help create my animation lip sync.

I also added the sound file to Maya to help with forming the words.

Here is my lip sync compared with the original video:

Lip sync - Animation research

For my lip sync animation I have chosen this clip from Bottom, because it is relatively short, you can see the face for the whole clip and there's a lot of expression in his face.

Before starting on the animation I did some research on mouth animations to give me a starting point. This is a reference I found relating to mouth positions in traditional animation, which may prove useful.

Custom animations - Attack animation

Starting with the attack ready pose, I planned to do a basic attack animation.

This would include raising the weapon, striking down, and resetting to the ready pose to loop smoothly.

The most difficult part of this animation was keeping the left hand holding on to the axe during the up swing. This required more adjustments and key frames than the right arm.

I added extra movement and twisting to the body and shoulders to give the animation more realism and power.

The final animation is shown below:

Custom animations - Attack Ready

My plan for this is to have an attack ready loop from which any attack animation can be transitioned from and into.

For this I created the static ready pose and saved it out separately for use later.

I then animated a short ready loop of a basic attack idle stance.

I put emphasis on realistic subtle body movements, so that it didn't feel too static.

Final animation video below:

Custom animations - Salute

The salute animation is designed to come from the idle guard duty pose. It's supposed to depict that maybe a superior NPC walked past and he suddenly had to show respect. It is more of an informal or tribal salute rather than a military style head salute.

The first part of the salute to be animated was the hand beating on the chest.

I created this first with just one hit, but I wanted really to hit twice, so I used the graph editor to extend the time the arm was up for, then added the extra animation frames.

I made his head raise up in respect and straightened out the pose to be less relaxed.

I animated the foot stamping down at high speed. I adjusted the curve in the graph editor to make this movement more sharp like a stamp.

The final animation can be seen here:

Custom animations - Idle Stretch

For this animation I wanted to depict a NPC guard on duty, maybe he has been standing there a while and needs to just loosen up a little.

I decided to focus on two areas, the head and shoulder.

The shoulder was a little more difficult than I had anticipated.

First I simply created 4 key frames at key points where I wanted the shoulder to rotate and move to, but this created a very rigid and unrealistic animation. I attempted to smooth it out in the graph editor, but nothing seemed to work, so I took it back to the drawing board.

I split the animation into two key movements, the back and forth movement and the lift to the highest point.

I first animated and keyed the foreward and back movement, making sure it was smooth and realistic.

Then I added in the shoulder lift, keying it in the middle of the movement.

This approach worked much better giving a smooth and realistic result.

The head and other movements were much easier. I added some body tilt and moved the hand into a fist while the stretch was going on to add some dynamics to the whole animation.

Finished animation available below.