Analysis of Final piece “evaluation”

Since this is the first time ever to do a sophisticated model/animation I am most pleased with myself with the outcome of the final results.

My main character isn’t as perfect as I would like him to be, but using image planes getting the topology right were things that I did not do before so I consider this a major breakthrough.  I have gone far and beyond as to how my character is rigged using IK/FK handles,  blendshapes, set driven keys, constraining controllers to joints, and using exrpessions made me realize the importance of rigging (thanks for the different tutorials throughout the web and library). From the beginning I wanted to have a rig that would give me the freedom to manipulate my character in the easiest and most efficient way. The part that I like the most are when my character reaches his pocket inserts the coin in the slot and presses the button for the soda can, I feel the timing is correct and looks natural although a voice in the back of my head tells me I could probably slow the whole thing down a little bit, at second 10 (right after he presses the button) my character places his hands on his hips, now that I see the whole thing I think I the transition too sudden maybe a pause should be present between poses I don’t know it just doesn’t seem right. 

Moving on to the head close ups (13-17 sec), here I wanted to show the emotional status of the character from being curious to being sad to being angry. Again here I think maybe I did too much on the emotion side of things, I think maybe because of the 30 sec limit I didn’t want to spend much time on the transitions and ended up speeding them up.

Next parts are the screaming towards the vending machine which I like the movement although I guess I could choose more expressionistic movements (after watching it 100 times I keep thinking it could use a different approach), and the part where the soda can hits my character. The last part could use a little bit more tweaking especially when the character falls to the ground (some further bouncing/ movement of the legs could be useful). 

Worst part in my opinion is the soda can when it hit the ground, it’s completely wrong. The timing, its speed and the way it bounces all tell me that I should have tweaked those parts again and again until they were correct.

I may be too judgemental on my part here but that’s my nature, I am never satisfied with my work as there are always parts and pieces that I want to change.
I got really good feedback from Jamie I looked through my animation and realized the importance of a good storyboard. Also doing an animatic just to measure the timing of the whole project is definetly one of my first priorities on any new projects.

Brief technical summary of scene and process

Since the module is focused on animation I spent a significant amount of time trying to get the rig of the character as complete as possible, what I mean by that is to have all IK/FK solved so that I can have absolute control over everything (hips, abs, chest, legs, arms, neck, head, eyes….etc.), expressions, set driven keys, and constraints are the most important points I put the most effort on, but for more info about that you can visit my blog.

The scene I wanted to keep simple, is consisted by a vending machine which was created from a polycube (vertices were shifted and a couple of extrusions made to simulate the shape of the vending machine -simple stuff). Extra polycubes were later created and parented for the various buttons. Walls are simple polycubes with small extrusions on the bottom and so were the columns with the difference that I used the bevel tool to smooth the edges of the columns.

Hardest part was the light since I had to render each and every time I tested something different, which lead to consuming a big portion of my time (each rendered scene took roughly 30 seconds), and made me reluctant to make any future changes after rendering the whole scene.

      Animation

 I did pose to pose animation for most part of it and used exclusively the graph editor to correct the timing and add subltle detail to movements.

1st RENDER SCENE

 Photo taken from Flickr posted on December 6.
Just to test how everything looks like I did a render of the scene, this is the result:

At first I really like the feeling to it but then realized lighs were missing and as a consequence the face was conpletely black when at closeups. Spent a significant amoun of time regulating the glow effect on the vending machine (big mistake)...

Scene & props

Before my animation began I had to construct my scene, I wanted to keep everything as simple as possible so everything is composed by a wall, a column, a floor/ceiling, several vending machines and lights (are and point lights).
The vending machine was a poly cube which vertices I manipulated to make a slight curve in the front, other polycubes were parented to it and had different textures on them to show the different labels of soda cans. Next to them I added (parented) buttons with a slight glow intensity.

Vending machines were later copied and had different texturesd applied on them for diversity.

View of my scene from a different angle

Model Rig Finished

The following photos show the completed rig of my character. 

Nurbs circles around the arms control the FK

The square indicates that you are on Ik mode for the arms, you can see the R and L letters behind the elbows for the vector controls

I have uploaded them twice to show the IK/FK controls for the arms (by selecting the wrist controller you can select further select the Ik or FK for the arms, I did that by adding an attribute and setting up set driven keys). 

The circles on the top of the head are to control the joints on the eye_brows. The Eyes are controled by locators that have been parent constrained and orient constrained with the eyes, as for the eyelids I added an attribute on the neck controller (R/L Eyeblink) and then set a driven key with the start Sweep of the NurbSphere (Eyelid),by a factor from 0 to 10 I can control the eyes being completely shut (0) and open (10).

The crosses are the locators and the cirlcles on top of the eyebrows control their movement

For a mouth because all decisions were of the last minute I chose to make a blendshape to emphasize the characters surprise, initially James and Jamie told me not to work on the mouth area because I had fallen behind schedule and to focus on my animation, but as I struggled to get everything done I realized my animation needed a blendshape (even a simple lame one) and did everything in my power to add one.

Mouth Closed

Mouth Open  - I  know it seems lame but there was little time to do any sophisticated blendshapes

 

The (S) on top of the shoulders control the clavical, I have 3 controllers (nurbcircles) for the FK of the arms one for the shoulder, one for the elbow and one for the wrist. The actual Ik handle for the arm goes from the shoulder to the forearm but I extended the end effector of the IK handle (selected it from the hypergraph) to the wrist, I did that because I can extend the control of the IK handle to the wrist and rotate the forearm independently, later on I add an expression for the forearm that was controlled by the wrist, because when you rotate your wrist your forearm rotates with it by a 3rd,  so when the wrist rotates on the X axis the forearm rotates /3, that way you get a more natural look of your character when moving.

Here the forearm is selected, notice the purple colour on the control panel that indicates an expression

I also made an IK controller for the arms with a  pole vector to control the elbows (I did the same with the knees) the letters L and R are to control them, I did that to avoid the elbows (and knees) being twisted when the arms and legs are being moved in extreme angles.

For the legs I have 2 IK handles that control the foot roll, again here an attribute and set driven keys were added to the R/L Foot controls. 

Although it is not quite visible the toes still stay in their position when the ankle is in this position (they lift when the foot rolls higher)

The joints that control the foot roll

The Wrists have set driven keys on them for various poses (the left hand has a fist shape, and the right wrist has a fist, Coin hold shape and a press button shape).

In the control panel you can see the various poses for the R wrist (the L wrist has only got a fist pose)

Button shape pose

Coin hold shape

The spine is contolled by an IK spline, I then selected the vertices of that spine and made a cluster deformers out of them and used the controllers for the abs and chest to control those clusters.

As for the textures, I did not use the texture editor to texture my character because I was't going to be graded on it so I had to do choose a fast way of doing it, instead of cutting and sewing UV's then exporting them to photoshop and painting them (then importing them back)  I did eveything by selecting the corresponding faces on the topology of my character, then assigned a different material to them, so I have Shoe_M, skin_M, shirt_M hair_M etc..., this saved time and I focused more on my animation.

Model -Changes & Rig process-

These photos are from Flickr posted on November 15,
they show the changes I made to the model especially  for the arms and hands, what I did was I found a decent enough photo of a persons arm & hand and tried to match the topology, then I had to scale it so it can fit the proportions of my model and attacheed it to its body, simple but very time consuming.
As for the Rig after I watched like a hundred of different tutorials on how to rig characters I decided to go with Digital Tutor's cause theirs seemed more professional and they explained everything more in depth than others. More on the Rig on my next post.

Model early era

These photos are from flickr posted on November 2, they are early models I used a T pose model (can't show any images of her since she's naked), couldn't find a male character so I decided to model a female instead, -that is why my model is kinda  strange looking.
Thanks for James who pinpointed the problems with the faceting on my model, thank God he told me about Mental Ray otherwise I would have to redo the whole model from scratch.
The hands and arms needed to be redone since I wasnt satisfied with them.

The image James helped me with I would have done the whole thing again if he didn't mention Mental Ray