Mon, October 11, 2010

Oh my Jeebus, it's been a long time since my last animation update! (Every animation update starts this way, and now I think it's just a fun tradition.)

So... come with me all the way back to the first week of April, which was Class 3 of Animation Mentor: Advanced Body Mechanics. We had creative freedom to design our own shots – rather than picking off a list as we had before – as long as they had some sort of strong physical activity to them. Never having outgrown my little-boy fascination with dinosaurs, I thought it would be fun to cast Stewie as a paleontologist.

Here's the blocking pass for the shot.

Rather than blocking the shot in "stepped mode," which holds the key poses as static images to delineate the timing, this time it's blocked with the in-between frames animated by the computer. The movement isn't as crisp, but I prefer it because you can better feel the character of the action (slow movements read better, and "holds" actually show up) – plus when it's time to start animating, you don't have to adjust all your timing. That's a plus! (For contrast, here's a shot I blocked in "stepped mode".)

In this assignment, I learned about "prop hell" – I had Stewie interacting with the shovel with both hands, gripping and releasing it multiple times; same with his hat (hand and head); and then the bone at the end. There was a lot going on! All of this is accomplished with a system of "constraints" where you attach props to various parts of the character so that the shovel moves when you animate his arm (for example). Attaching a prop to a character in two places doubles the fun! But it was a really fun shot, so it was easy to stay motivated and just keep at it – plus I was paired up with Wayne Gilbert as my mentor, and he's a wizard. So he just kept helping me make it better while I fretted about making sure the shovel stayed connected to the hands. Computer animation is, at best, half creativity and the rest technical problem-solving. This is one of the reasons I gravitated to it: my mind is suited to both tasks and drawn to both equally. But you don't always get to choose which days will be creativity days and which days will be fighting with the computer days.

One day that was kind of both was the day I realized I'd constrained Stewie's left hand to the shovel in the wrong position. As I animated the shot, this was forcing him to tweak his wrist into an unnatural rotation in order to keep hold of the shovel, so I needed to do it over. Fortunately, in Maya, you can "transfer" animation from one character to another, so after I fixed things, I was able to preserve the animation I'd done so far. This leads to my favorite clip I've posted yet – the "before" and "after" characters, shoveling in unison:

Look closely and you can see the strained rotation in the green guy's wrist. (The hyperextension in his elbow is unmissable when he digs.) You can also see the bone, waiting patiently for Stewie to dig down and find it, as well as another shovel, hovering in the distance – this is the shovel that will swap into place for the "throwing" part of the action. Rather than detach his digging shovel and animate it flying, it's simpler to animate an identical shovel in flight and switch their visibility at the proper frame. All this nonsense goes into making a seamless shot; I don't know why, I find that hilariously entertaining.

Wayne has spent decades as an instructor in various forms, so he's happy to look at unfinished animation and know that it's going to end up in polished form. That's why the props and fingertips aren't all perfect in the blocking clip above, and that's okay. (I haven't had that experience with every mentor, and the alternative often means a lot of back-breaking late nights polishing a shot that's only going to get re-polished again when you make a bunch of changes to it based on new feedback.) After four weeks of adjustments and finishing touches, I ended up with the following result, which doesn't look drastically different on first blush, but hopefully has a more convincing sense of weight and force. (And – if you slow it down – lots of little polishing differences.)

And here's a frame from the shot I'm working on now – it's great to have all the expressivity of facial features and fingers and everything, but I sure do miss the simplicity of working with good ol' Stewie...

(You might recognize her if you've been reading previous updates or voting on dialogue clips. Her finale is Sunday – then I start my last shot at Animation Mentor: a dialogue scene with two characters. Yikes!)

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