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.

Custom animations - Walk Cycle

When planning the walk cycle, I quickly realised that the legs were essentially doing the same animation on each side, just at offset times.

I hatched a plan to animate both legs at the same time and use the graph editor to offset the animations to the correct time.

First I made the animation with both legs simultaneously. It looks silly, but you get the idea.

The next step was to create the offset.

First I copied the entire animation again further down the timeline using the graph editor so that there would be enough animation after I created the offset.

Next I used the graph editor to offset only the right side animation, making sure that the offset lined up correctly, exactly half way between the leg sweep.

As you can see below, this is the walk animation in a very basic form, before cleanup.

After that, it was the cleanup and detail steps.

When walking, more than just the legs move, so I created some movement in the arms, hips and upper body, as well as keeping the head facing straight ahead.

I used the relaxed axe hold on the right side because I felt an asymmetrical body pose gave a more interesting animation.

The final animation can be seen below. I wanted to give him a lot of bounce in his step, like he has a lot of weight and is quite cocky.

Custom animations - planning

The first step before creating the 5 animations is to research what kinds of animations appear in a game.

I created a mind map outlining the main basic animations that typically appear in a game.

From these choices, I decided I would take a variety from across most categories.

My choices were:

Walk Cycle

Idle

Salute

Attack ready loop

Basic melee attack

Based on the categories, I grouped the animations into two sets and created a static pose for each to aid animation looping.

This pose I used for the attack starting position, with a ready weapon. This way I can easily create the battle ready loop and transition easily into any attack animation.

This pose was created to be a sort of relaxed pose to be easily animated into a walk cycle, for say an NPC patrol, an idle animation, for guard duty, and a salute, for if this NPC met a superior NPC officer.

Animated axe asset - setup and animation

The basic parts of the object are the Shaft, lower and upper handle, lower blade and upper blade.

The animated parts are the upper handle, lower blade and upper blade. The other parts do not move.

As you can see from the outliner and screen shot, the bones are parented inside the object, relating tho the part that will be affected.

I have purposefully placed a bone in each handle to aid location on the character when in game implementation comes.

Based on the plan I already laid out, I animated the asset with key frames at each mode.

This gave quite a linear movement, but was a decent guide.

I added some space in the animation between each mode using the graph editor so that I could add a sort of 'locking' animation into the movement.

This is how the Graph editor looks:

And here is the final animation:

Animated axe asset - planning

I want to make a multi-purpose melee weapon, with multiple active modes.

I started with the base inspiration of an axe, and thought I could use a similar design to a Switch Axe from Monster Hunter.

I used this as a basis, but I wanted more than 2 modes, so I set about making a basic design.

Standard sword, long reaching weapon such as a pike or halberd, wide sweep weapon like a scythe and an axe.

My aim is to make a bone structure to animate the basic version, then I can make any design with the same structure and use the same animation.

Animated Asset - Lever gun animation

The animation I want to do on this asset is technically two animations.

Cocking animation

Firing

The setup process previously described made the animation process very smooth, as I had set all of the pivot points in the correct areas.

The only part I had to modify in the graph editor was the hammer firing, which I changed to linear motion, as it's very fast.

This is how the graph editor for all bones looks:

And this is the final animation:

Animated asset - Lever gun setup

This lever gun was an already created asset from a previous project, which is ripe for animation.

It only required a small amount of modification, as I already built it with animation in mind.

I had only to add a bar to the cocking mechanism to push the hammer back, seen here.

Setting up the bones, I ensured that there was a logical hierarchy and that the hand positions were covered to make it easier to implement into a game engine if required.

Outliner showing structure and naming:

An image of the structure:

And video showing how the bone structure can move each part and keeps the parts together when moved.

Fuse and Mixamo

For this project, the characters we are using are built using Fuse and Mixamo.

Fuse allows you to build a character from a library of pre-built parts, to create the desired character.

Mixamo allows this to be easily rigged using a script.

When you have completed this process you can download your rigged character from the Mixamo website.

The rigging options range from simple body only all the way up to a full facial rig with controls.

The full facial rig is the one we are using for our lip sync animation during this project.

When the model is downloaded and opened in MAya, a simple script is ran to make the character usable.

Rigging - Painting Weights

In this session we learned about skinning and painting weights.

We started off with a provided leg object, then added the bones in the orthographic view, named the hierarchy and added an IK solver handle.

Then we skinned the object to the bones , and as you can see, it works, but the skinning is not perfect.

To solve this, we can use the weight painting tool to edit the influence of each bone on what part of the object.

 As you can see, this is much more natural.

We were then given a character to perform the same task on.

Leg - IK and Solver

To create a leg IK solver, we were asked to follow this tutorial on youtube:

We started with a default character model and added a bone structure to it in the same method we had been taught.

We used vector objects and IK solvers to control the influence of the bones so that we wouldn't have to manually key frame every bone position to make an animation.

This allowed us to set limits and make it so that bones followed certain rules.

Here is a short video showing what I ended up with.

This lesson will help me in future when I come to rigging my own character, making it easier to animate and limit the bones.

Worm - skinning

For this session we were tasked with creating a 'worm' with bone structure and skinning.

To create the 'worm' body, I made a cylinder with a relatively large number of segments. This is due to the requirement of skinning that there are enough verteces in the object to manipulate and influence.

I added a line of bones using one of the othrographic views and vertex snapping to ensure a perfectly straight bone structure.

Using the Bind Skin option, allows the bone structure to influence the body of the object in a smooth manner.

While a relatively simple process in itself, it will be useful and interesting to see how this translates into skinning a character. I expect the process will be more complex.

Bouncing ball - Graph editor

To learn about the graph editor, tangents and linear movements, we were tasked with creating a realistic ball bounce animation.

The first step was to make the ball, which is just a sphere.

I pulled it up to around 25 units above the 'ground' then went about animating.

I moved it up and down, adding key frames and reducing the return height each time to try and get a realistic reduction in height each time.

At this point the graph editor looked like this:

And the animation looke likethis:

Quite unrealistic movement, though the height and timing look to be okay.

The next step was to improve the animation. As standard, Maya adds both decelaration and acceleration curves onto animation movement. I knew we needed some fast deceleration on the bounce, so I switched all the bottom curves to Linear.

This is the resulting graph editor:

And the animation:

A definite improvement, but it can be improved further!

There needs to be a longer platau on the up stroke and steeper accelaration/decelaration on the bottom of the curve.

To achieve this, I used the 'break tangents' option on the bottom curves to allow more freedom with editing.

Then individually edited the tangent lines for longer platau and steeper down strokes.

Here is the final graph editor:

The final animation timings:

And the final animation video:

As you can see, the movement is way more realistic than how it started. I feel I have learned a lot about the graph editor from this exercise and it will become very useful when animating the project models later.

Claw - Bone hierarchy

To introduce bone heirachy, parenting, skinning and bone animation to us, we were tasked with creating an animated robotic claw.

To correctly create this object, all parts need to be created in a straight neutral pose, pointing in a default direction, so that the bones could influence the parts correctly.

Next I added a bone structure, using the orthographic view and snapping to points to ensure a clean bone hierarchy.

Ensuring there's a logical naming convention to the structure makes it easier to follow.

Then we bind the parts to the bone structure.

Which allows us to manipulate the arm by editing the bone positions.

I then created a simple grab and move animation, to learn how to animate objects by manipulating bones.

This entire process was relatively simple and smooth. I think it will be extremely useful when it comes to making animated assets and animating my character later in the project.

Unit 74 - Plan

For this unit we have been tasked with the following:

5 Character animations

An animated asset

Lip sync animation

plus a presentation showing our work.

Though this is a large task, I we have been given just enough time to complete it if we use all of the time saving tools at our disposal, which includes Mixamo for rigging up characters in a short amount of time.