Character Animation 2: Lip Synch Final

For my second and final project of the month, I was given the task of animating our character to a clip of audio, as well as animating the face and mouth to lip synch the character with the audio. I have to say that this was one of my favorite assignments of the last year!

More info coming soon!

Software Technologies: Houdini Marble Machine

My other class this month has been Software Technologies, a class that allows us to use new programs similar to the programs we've used cor the last year. This allows us to branch out in case we land jobs that do not support our accustomed programs like Maya. One of the programs we've been learning has been Houdini, which is like a mix between Maya and Nuke. The node based layout allows for you to visualize the edits you make to your scene, while the program reacts similar to Maya.

Our job for this project was to create a marble machine using rigid bodies which are already in Houdini's interface. Together with my girlfriend Kaycee Kendrick and our good friend Emily Childrey, we modeled out our pieces for our scene using Maya, a tool we were much more comfortable with. We then took all of our individual objects and imported them into Houdini using file nodes and transform nodes to place them in the correct position.

I wish I could say that everything went smoothly after this point to the end, but that could not be farther from the truth. That would be too easy, now wouldn't it? Houdini is such a very complex program, but a lot of the complexity runs beneath the hood, and everything usually works. Turning the marble into a moving rigid body worked perfectly, as it reacted to gravity and contacted other objects. The problems came when we turned the pieces of the machine into static rigid bodies. When the ball would pass over them, the ball would react to a non-existent bounding box that did not make sense. We searched high and low and eventually found that by playing with different elements of the rigid body solver allowed for the marble to react with the objects properly.

With that issue solved, the simulation could begin. First, an invisible cube on a motion path pushed the ball off the platform and into the machine. The ball would then react with, and roll down a slide.

 The ball then leaves the slide and falls onto a funnel, where the ball would spin around a few times until finally falling through the hole in the middle. We encountered a new problem here, as the ball would randomly clip through the funnel and fall to the floor. We found out that this was caused by the funnel not having very much topology, so when the ball would roll over a large face, it would not realize it was colliding with the surface, and would fall straight down.

Next, the ball would fall out of the funnel and into a tube where it would roll down and into a paddle. Simple, right? Nope. This particular piece did not get fixed as easily as the other objects and their bounding box issue. No, this time we had to change some settings in the ball as well to make it react properly, and it still has some issues. Regardless, it worked for what it was.

One problem that we noticed with this piece is that there was a clipping issue behind the tube as the ball fell. From the front, it is somewhat apparent during the final render. To fix this, I decided to do a quick camera cut which would not show the front of the ball falling through the floor for a few frames. I feel that this helped solve the issue easily, while keeping the quality of the animation.

The next piece of our marble machine was to knock over a paddle which would land on a seesaw. You'd think that hitting an object straight on would make it fall forwards? Well not according to Houdini. The paddle had a tendency to flop around and not even fall forwards at some points. I thought that it may have been clipping through the floor which was making it freak out, but I had lifted it up to avoid this. I actually had to lift it up very high and let it fall down. This allowed it to avoid the floor and fall properly on the seesaw.

The final section of our simulation is to have the ball launch off the seesaw into a cup. As the theme goes for this project, nothing worked as expected and this is no exception. We thought the force of the seesaw would be enough to launch the ball pretty high or forwards, but instead it launched it up about 3 inches. We worked with what we had, but found that the ball kept clipping through the cup. This was just a simple subdivide to fix, but it still clipped at the back of the cup. I decided to use another camera cut to avoid showing the back of the cup at all. After all was said and done, all I had to do was light the scene with 4 or 5 point lights and some visibility swaps.

And remember kids! Don't forget to set your project when you're rendering out! While I was doing test renders to see how Houdini's renderers worked, I rendered those images to my desktop. Stupid me forgot to change that output folder when I did the final render... And that's the story of how I had 450 files on my desktop that I couldn't stop.

All said and done, this project was honestly a big pain to work with. Compared to the rigid bodies, cameras, keyframe, lights, and just about everything in Maya, Houdini is not my favorite program to work with. Luckily, this was more about testing the program more than anything. Below is our final render! We hope you enjoy it!

Our team:
Drew Kedra: http://drewkedra.blogspot.com
Kaycee Kendrick: http://kayceekendrick.blogspot.com
Emily Childrey: http://emilychildrey.blogspot.com

- Drew

Character Animation 2: Pantomime Animation

Of all the classes I've taken over the last year at Full Sail, Character Animation 2 is by far the best class I've been able to take! As the name suggests, this class is all about animating a character to create believable movements and expressions. Along with this, we also needed to create pre-pro sketches/storyboards (as with any animation), as well as a character back story to help us understand the character more easily.

This particular project was to create an animation showing a change of expression while completing a task. I decided to take the task of receiving a box. From the start, I wanted to show excitement to shock, which I achieved by implying the misfortune of the animal in the box he's carrying.

I started out by sketching out my ideas into simple storyboards and exploratory sketches that would be the basis of my animation.

 Some of the sketches used for the final shot

As an animator, sometimes it's easier to film yourself for particular movements, and base you work off of that. Well that's exactly what I did! By filming myself, it was a lot easier for me to visualize exactly what I was trying do, and I believe it really aided in my final shot. And yes, it was embarrassing, but that's what being an animator is all about!

Shots of me acting out my storyboards for better reference

 Now that I had enough reference, I began working in Maya for the final shot. I worked a lot with camera posing, character staging, acting, and faces to complete this animation. My work flow starts with blocking out all the main poses in Stepped animation, as well as adding anticipations and moving holds to create more realism. Once everything is all set up properly, I switch into Auto animation, which allows me to create smooth movements. After fixing up any poses, I move to secondary action in the arms, as well as appendages like the character's antennae and tail. Finally, I animate the facial expressions to the character.

I'm more than happy with the result of this animation! Two weeks worth of work on top of another class and a month long art test, I couldn't be happier with the final shot. Though I feel like there is I could have done to improve the overall quality, I am very pleased with the work I put in and look forward to the next project!

- Drew

Motion Capture: Final Project - Bowling Barrage

I'm a little late with this post, but I feel like I needed to show my final project for Motion Capture here. This was by far one of the most fun projects I've ever worked on, and I enjoyed every single minute of it! Our job was to create a short animation using our own directed motion capture files. We would then take need to clean the files up and exaggerate them to make them appealing.

We actually started out in a bit of a funk, and had writers block for most of the first day. I randomly thought of the idea to have two bowlers competing against each other in their own styles after going bowling with my girlfriend and seeing how our friendly competition worked. After a group meeting, the idea stuck and the pre-pro began!

I first started out by drawing up some quick storyboards to plan out our idea. Below are some of the frames that I drew up that would eventually become our final shots.

Once our story was down, I worked together with my friend and colleague Taylor Gallagher to model assets for the bowling alley scene, as well as my other group member Sean Olimpo to create textures for the scene and the characters. We were really happy with the results and feel that the work we put in raised the overall quality of the project.

We then took our ideas into the motion capture room an with the help of our classmate Aaron Stoll, we recorded our motions into Cortex where we cleaned them up and fixed any issues with our data. Our next step was bringing it into Autodesk Motion Builder where we attached our character motions onto actor rigs.
With the actors moving, our jobs were to take all the clips, add the ball constraints to the characters, and add extra animation layers to better enhance the motions to make the whole scene more appealing.

Next, we took exported the actor animations as a .FBX and imported them into Maya with the characters and the bowling alley. All that was left to do was for me to clean up any problems with the layered animation in Maya, lighting the scene, creating the right camera shots, and finally rendering out the scene.

We had a lot of fun doing this, and we've been updated by our professor that our project was the best in the class, and one of the best he's seen! We're really proud of this and hope you enjoy it!

-Drew Kedra