CAGD 493 Fall & Spring

 CAGD 493 (Spring)

Week 15

With the very little time we have in this semester I continued my splining for my 495 class. this 17 second animation has taken me all semester and it still needs more work in my opinion. With only one week left to finish this we've decided to do a Arnold play blast in Maya rather than render it in marmoset since it will extend our time to keep splining and make any adjustments from our most recent critiques. I will also try to do another small little animation to go along with my final presentation. What needs updating in this scene are the last two shots of the 10 that I'm doing for this project and I'm hoping I can get to that this weekend. 

Here is my most current update on the 495 project for Team Sussy Chungus. 

Week 14

Being that we only have about a week left for smooth splining and with lots of work still left to do, I continued on my 17 second animation for my 495 class, continuing to add facial movements to the rigs and trying to fix camera angles. I also am focusing on the feedback given by Jeff who critiqued my work last week that I found to be very helpful. I went through little by little and made noticeable changes but i think it's time to nit pick at my work since till add up overall and show a better animation in the end. this upcoming week my focus along with my team's will be to start the rendering process and we've decided to do a basic play blast render which is a little less stressful than an all out render. Hoping that we can get all of this done in the little time we have, but I have faith!

Here is the updated animation for my 495 class

Week 13

This week I continued splining my 10 shots, I focused mainly on redoing shot 10 where I had to restart the shot since my old rig was not working properly so I had to find a new rig. The new rig was kind of outdated and had trouble with the keying process. We had a professional from DreamWorks critique our work this week, and to my surprise he ended up pointing out a lot of problems wrong with my animation, or places that could read better. My next step in this animation is to go back and fix curves as well as complete the facial expressions from the characters. the rendering process is starting soon and it seems like we'll have to do a bit of crunch to stay up to date. 

Here is my updated Spline on the 495 Project.

Week 12 

This week I continued splining, using the locator and the motion trail tool in order so ensure a circular transitions for my character stitch and other rigs in my scene. I also tried to cushion some of the movements and got to doing a rough start on the facial expressions, this upcoming weekend I will try to work on this more as out of the 10 shots in this scene I'm behind on one. One of my biggest focuses this upcoming week was mouth movements and cushioning. Its starting to look solid but I know I still have lots to due before its due date! I'm also working to help my teammates with any tips I could provide to them. I am looking at other animations to work on but I have not gotten to a place that feedback could be presented. 

Here is the updated of my splining with rough facial movements.

 

Week 11

This week I focused on updating my splining for my splining assignment do in a couple of weeks, I continued to smooth out curves and adding some keys to cushion some of the animation from the auto tangent tool. since the method of over blocking was used lots of the lines have bumps that need to be smoothed out before they can function the way they're intended to. For the update I also worked on starting the facial movements for when the characters are supposed to speak. So far I've been able to start on 5 out of the 10 shots for this. This is again a 17 second animation with 10 shots in total. Continuing on I will be focusing primarily on this animation since I underestimated how difficult and lengthy this animation is. I am also planning to meet with my team during the week to help them out with full body posing based of the reference they have, and help them fix any camera issues they may have. 

Here is the updated spline for scene 3 of my team. 

Week 10

This week for my 495 class we moved onto splining. I wanted to make sure everything was decent for the blocking stage before beginning splining. its clear that it still has plenty of room for improvement but when I continue with mouth blocking it'll start looking a lot smoother. I'm also learning a lot from the graph editor from smoothing curves to using new tools like the step feature to find any irregularities in the curves. My biggest challenge this week was trying to include feedback from my last critique session and improving on what stood out. This next part of my work I will keep adding to the facial blocking to convey more emotion. ill begin texturing and lighting so the work in later April is not too heavy. working on many shots has brought to my attention that it can be hard to keep up with so much splining but how fun it could be! 

This is my first spline. Hope to get more into this portrayal and piece. 

Week 9

This week I focused on finishing my blocking plus assignment which included adding and removing poses from 10 different shots. These shots were looked over by professor Pozzi and more feedback was given to me and my team regarding consistency with each of our shots. Camera angles need to be adjusted and more poses need to be placed in order to convey better movement in our team. My next objective with this is to move to spline and hopefully I'm able to detect problems with each of the scene.  For my part of the scene I'm supposed to repose two of my shots since they're a bit too busy. 

Here is my individual work compilation for what I was able to accomplish this week.

Week 8

This week I continued with the blocking plus assignment for my 495 class. The assignment is to add anticipation poses and follow through poses to the last blocking assignment. Things like drag and follow through motions are starting to show in my shots and all I have to keep doing is revise and fix until the animation starts to keep looking smoother than before. I was able to get through most of my shots up till now and will be done with all of my shots for this part of the assignment before the Monday of next week. Me and my teammates are also working together and helping each other out with any problems that we may have, one of our biggest resources to use has definitely been YouTube apart from each other. 

Here is my progress on my part of the project

For the ATST walk I had problems keying the whole model and rig so I chose to keep it short and manipulate the camera to hide imperfections that the animation had. I will fix issues based upon the feedback I receive in class. Here is my first spline

Week 6

This week I continued to work on my 495 scene project, I corrected some problems based on the feedback Pozzi gave me for my scene and I started the blocking plus assignment which involves adding more anticipation poses for example dragging the wrist and making arcs in the animation, as well as follow through poses that will make the animation seem smoother once we move onto spline. For 493 I started a smaller project with a rig i found online of a star wars ATST and the idea is basically have it walk a couple of steps then it gets hit and falls to the ground. Thankfully the rig is really well made and I am not having too much trouble learning how to use it. I shot reference and am going off of that but for the timing of a traditional walker I will gather some reference from the original movies and any other fan made animation that simulates the ATST's walk correctly. Meanwhile I began blocking the walk base of the reference I shot to start with something for now. 

Here are the two animations I am currently working on. 

Week 5

This week I focused mainly on my 495 project. I still had 6 shots to block out so that is what I did. Me and my team got together to discuss how we were all doing with our progress and most of us seemed to be a little behind though we assured ourselves that we were going to be done by the block out due date. Thankfully me and my team got to work and we gave each other feedback as we were completing shots. We all decided that we needed to set the render settings to HD so our blocking doesn't come out choppy. this Wednesday we met with Pozzi for our block out critique and received good feedback from him. the next step is to add anticipation and follow through poses so when we move into spline the animation looks smooth and we won't have to add extra poses to the block out.  

Here is the my individual shots I posed this week. 

Based off the feedback I got I will continue to work on this block out as well as add and take away frames to get the timing better as I add anticipation and follow through poses. 

Week 4:

This week I continued blocking for my 495 project. I tried to stay as close as possible to my reference and thanks to that I think that it is easy to read in the blocking phase. I still have another 5 shots to block but since they're 2 to 3 seconds long they involve less than 6 poses each. I plan to get the fist phase of blocking this weekend and get more feedback from Pozzi and Kevin during class. I am also communicating my progress with my teammates to ensure a smooth compiling process when we put it together. 

Here is my progress for my Blocking.

for this week I continued animating my splining for my floss dance and it does seem smooth but I'm kind of stuck in terms of I don't know how to improve it. Any feedback I get in class this Friday I will incorporate the following day. I want to try and see if Mark can give me feedback on twinning between the poses so that my movements finally become solid. 

Anyways here is my progress on splining. 

 

Week 3:

For this week I started the blocking process for my 495 project which was to do the first poses of the stitch rig. I had a quite difficult time with learning how to use the rig since its IK functions were really confusing and buggy. After discussion with the group we figured that that best way to use this rig is to set its movement to FK. Even though it will take more time to animate it will translate its movements much better. Apart from that I got to work and incorporated all the knowledge I've been using to get to posing. During the middle of the week I got feedback from Pozzi from these poses so they are subject to change this weekend. 

Here is the first bit of blocking I was able to do this week. 

For 493 I continued with my floss animation and it served as great practice for splining since I dove into the graph editor more often to smooth out transitions between poses and add in between posing for some of the key elements like the wrist and shoulders. My next objective is to add facial expressions to take it from a vanilla floss animation to something that could convey a story or a different thought process than the default emote dancing. 

This is the floss animation splined. 

Week 2: 

For week 2 I got with my teammates for 495 and shot reference for our 495 animation production class, I can say that it was a lot of fun and I took Kevin's advice by drinking an energy drink to record the reference. My group, Sussy Chungus, were able to summit our reference in time and I was able to compile them with little to no problem. Some of the issues we ran into was some miscommunication because for the beginning we had previously discussed a different intro to our reference but we cleared it up once Pozzi gave us feedback. Our next step is to start blocking out our characters and sync them to the audio. 

Here is the reference I managed to do for my scene of the complete animation. (note this is towards the middle of the animation)

For 493 I took the references I gathered last week and completed the blocking for a simple Flossing dance loop, The next step in this short project is to spline the animation and refine the movements. 

This is the Blocking for the Floss Dance

Week 1:

This week I went back to my current resume and revised what I had. I feel like I've been neglecting it for some time now but I'm Glad this class gives me an excuse to put sometime into it again. I also gathered some reference for a animation I want to start. 

For another class which is 495 I was able to gather models and rigs for an upcoming animation. The audio clip I'm using divides multiple animations for five of us and gives us roughly 17 seconds to complete on our own with the help of the teammates. 

These are some of the assets we've gathered in order to get started

  

 
to organize this project we are using trello to keep up with current tasks. 

 

CAGD 493

Final Blog Post 

            My goals this semester were to get a better understanding of 3D animation process including blocking and splining as well as the process of working with others to get a piece done. In 495 I had the opportunity to figure out and improve my teamwork and communication skills while on the other hand in 493 I focused on what I wanted to do which was great. Both  of these goals are aspects of my real goal which is to just end up doing better work as an animator and I think that I have improved. My improvement I think really came from working alongside great teammates for 495 and receiving and giving lots of feedback in 493. through inspiring conversations from mark and key advice from a few selection of classmates I know this is only the beginning of my path and I can improve so much more. What worked this semester is my ability to navigate Maya with little to no problem whenever I did encounter a problem the solution was a YouTube video away or feedback session away. Things that didn't work was sometimes the ability to pose from reference since sometimes I got confused after working on a project for long periods of time. Although I am getting used to the graph editor more and more I acknowledge that I need more time working with it. Another thing that I could improve on, although its not part of my desired skillset would be lighting and texturing scenes because it could come in useful in the long run. What I would do differently in the future, since I am taking 493 again would be staying more organized then I was this semester due to the fact that at sometimes I saved my files in a folder I wasn't able to find when I wanted to continue my work. Before I started saving my work every two to five minutes Maya kept crashing and I'd lose hours of work so that's definitely something I should keep doing. I also want to get really good at time management because although Its been one of my best semesters for time management I could definitely get better at it. I also want to connect more with my classmates and network with them because I networked with a few people and they really came in clutch when I was stuck on a problem showing me that the best resources are the people around you and I think that is something that reflects in the industry. 

Week 14:

Final Presentation

Throughout this semester I received the freedom of choosing what I got to work on, and I chose 3D Animation. I still have a long way to go but this semester and my 493 class have provided me with countless feedback in order to improve my work. This Compilation of work is what I have Accomplished. Although it's not the best work I am eager to keep learning and growing my skills beyond this. note to self one thing to keep in mind when animating is to keep everything organized because turning in things is much harder when you don't know where every thing is. 

Compilation

Week 13:

              This thanksgiving break has gave me time to relax but as I head into the final weeks of class I have done so by continuing to refine my animation for 495 and 493. I took Mark's recommendation of getting rid of a weird pose that didn't read at all towards the very end of my scene. Anyways, I took away the pose and it ended up reading better. I also tried to match the lip sync of both rigs and I think it reads well. 

This is my progress for 495 as we turned it our second pass. 

               For 493 I continued to refine my doja cat dance. And although I think it looks good I can still add more refinement. I am looking to get one more animation done before the semester ends so I will be working on another animation while I'm working on this one as well. As for this one I will be taking feedback until i feel it feels complete. 

 

This is how the dance looks!

Week 12:

              This week in 495 I went ahead and did my remaining shots and lip synced the audio. I think it came out pretty good and errors are not as noticeable due to the dialogue being fast paced in the animation. My critiques included mainly just continuing to smooth out transitions between poses. My biggest problem with that is that the Diana rig kind of broke for a section of the animation where she is backing away from David. 

This is my current play blast with the lip sync

                       For 493 I just continued to smooth out transitions. I added frames and took away some. I feel like I understand how to use the graph editor a bit better since it helped me fix a blown out hand and the swing the rig does. I also added some facial animation so it doesn't look as stale as before. I think I am close to finishing this animation and I am aware that the end could be better so that's what I'm focusing on during break.

Week 11:

              This week for 495 I continued on my second pass for my scene so far  I was able to animated and lip sync two shots out of five for the scene. I am pretty content with what I have so far. Lip syncing has always been an issue for me because I tend to overthink it but watching youtube tutorials and looking up guides to what sound correlates to mouth shapes also really helped when I started the lip syncing process. I will continue to lip sync the sound in this next week. If I am able to complete this my next step would be to focus on facial expressions alone. Me and my team are doing well in my opinion and are caught up for the most part. 

This is what I have for my scene

             For 493 I continued to spline and render my Say so dance. I still need more hand movements, facial expressions and continuos refinement but with what I have so far  I think its looking good. The ending of the animation is off since the feet of the model are sliding and the hands sometimes spin outa place. This is something I hope to fix for next weeks presentation.

This is what my Say So animation looks like.

Week 10:

             In 495 we moved onto facial animation with me beginning the process of animating the facial features for shot 1 of my scene. I say it went pretty well. I worked off reference guides for lip syncing my characters. I also looked at reference pictures to distinguish what mouth form made the certain sounds found in the English language. I have yet to perfect shot 1 but I say I have a pretty good start. I have the advantage of my character talking pretty fast so any imperfections will be hard to notice when i complete the facial animations. 

Here is my facial animation in progress for scene 1 shot 1.

            In 493 I continued on the splining for my say so, Doja Cat dance that went viral on tik tok. I'm having lots of trouble animating when my character punches so I am planning on looking at other references since there are thousands of people that imitated this famous dance. For the most part the animation doesn't really start breaking down till my character does the roll with her hands. I also worked on the hand animations though it still needs some refinement. I think i am progressing with this animation much faster and am learning more things about Maya and how to use it. 

Here is my progress on the splining.

Week 9:

             In 495 my group and I were tasked with the completion of the first pass of animation for our project, The main critiques were that it read really well and that once again I need to work on the final pose for my scene. I also need to show why the David rig gets upset since my shot is the only shot that represents him as calm and happy so I need to make the transition to upset and demanding before scene 2.

This is my scene for the first pass

For 493 I went ahead and finished my blocking for my say so tik tok dance. I made sure to get as many poses as needed for this 10 second animation and put it in splined. I only worked in spline for a bit since I wanted to make sure all of my poses were correct and spaced out correctly aligning them with the beats of the audio. I also payed attention as close as possible to the reference to be able to get as much detail as I could with each pose. there are a total of 15 plus poses for my blocking. The original splining doesn't look bad at all, and I think that's due to getting lots of poses into this dance. 

Here is my progress so far. 

 

Week 8:

             In 495 this week I continued to refine my scene of animation. I incorporated the feedback that Kevin gave me which was more expressive head movement. I have yet to incorporate feedback from mark where he based it off an episode of friends where poses with facial expression tell the mood of the actors and in this case characters. I plan on working on this as much as possible during the weekend to be able to summit a good first pass.

Here is my progress on the scene. 

 For 493 I decided to try and tackle a dance. I remembered the infamous tik tok dance that people invented from doja cat's song "say so" I gathered a reference video and got to blocking. I am about half way done with the blocking and Im positive i was able to get lots of good poses in there. I made sure to do poses where there is beat drops to match the animation as best as possible.

Here is my reference and my progress on blocking. 

Week  7:

             In 495 I incorporated feedback from previous weeks onto my animation. I also moved on and splined my remaining shots for the animation. On Monday in 495 Kevin gave me some feedback on headmovement and on Wednesday Mark gave our team advice on transitioning between poses better. This upcoming week I plan to improve on that feedback as the final week approaches before our first pass is due. So far what we've done right is that our narrative reads clearly and our transitions have little to no problem so now we will focus on getting our transitions between poses down and I will incorporate feedback for headmovement.

This is my scene from our project.

For my jumping animation I tried and correct the anticipation of the jump and added a bit more following head movement to before and after the body leaves the ground. I also went in and animated the hands with the opening and closing movements in the anticipation and landing poses. I would like to get some feedback on how complete this looks so I can move on to my next animation. I will be shooting reference this following week of a spiked celebration of a football player.

Week 6: 

             In 495 this week I started the splining process animating my first two out of 5 shots. I want to say it looks correct to me but would like some feedback in our next critique. I incorporated feedback from my block out critique and worked upon that to start the splining process. My next step is to finish splining my movement for my whole scene and present it on Monday. Once I get the movement splined I will move on to the facial movement. 

Here are my first two shots splined.  

For my Jumping animation I kept working on my splining. I am comfortable finishing this animation and continuing onto my next piece but I will still incorporate feedback given to me at a later date. 

This is how the jumping animation looks like. 

 

Week 5: 

             This previous week me and my team from 495 went back to our block outs and redid and added some suggestions that were given to us last week. From there we got to splining and we have until Monday to get to work on the splining portion of this assignment. I began with my first shot and this is my progress. I will be trying to finish multiple shots this week. 

Here is our redone block out.

Here is shot 1 of my splining.

Here is my  current play blast for my splining jumping animation

Week 4: 

            Week 4 of this semester I worked on my 495 project and took notes on what I should change before I continue to splining for the group animation. Overall My poses were well timed but on my last pose it was too static so I have to add some facial movements so exaggerate the craziness of Pepe our character. This weekend I will work on adding a few more poses and start on splining the movement.

Here is the block out for my group:

          For my jumping animation I took my block out and began splining. I was not able to get feedback during class since I missed it accidentally. While splining I ran into a couple of crashes and I have learned to save work every few minutes to keep my progress. I added the rebound of the head as the head follows the body. 

Here is my progress on splining the movement

Week 3: 

              Week 3 of this semester was packed with more work and revisions. For 495 I had to revisit my audio and restart on the blocking process. I spent time on relocking new poses to add more movement on my character though I failed to realize that the problem was my reference and that though I was working off the reference my movements were kind of static with no clear poses. So in general I ended up with more poses than I needed to for my block out. 

This was my block out for 495. My professor advised that my head movement was to erratic and unnatural he suggested that I reshoot reference and figure out my key poses for the animation. Going into the weekend I will be working on this piece of animation since a block out draft for this animation is due on Monday. 

This is my jumping block out animation I am working on for 493. 

Week 2: 

            For this week me and my 495 team were tasked with gathering reference created by us for our part of the animation. This was my audio along with the reference I acted out so then I could put it together. 

Now that I have my reference I will be moving forward on the blocking phase. as well I will start on another blocking phase with this tutorial that shows the basics of a jumping animation. I will also use other reference to polish up my movements. My work will be done in Maya but this tutorial is just to guide me through key motions.

This pretty much has me caught up with everything I've done so far in the first two weeks back in school. here are both of my trello boards showing progression and my schedule for the next week. 

Week 1:

           - My intentions and expectations for what I want to accomplish for the class include including work from 495 to be able to polish my animation as much as possible, learn how to gather effective reference, and animate game character movements. 

            Goals for 493

                    - Include week by week work from CAGD 495

                    - Learn how to animate game animation movements

                    - Enhance my Maya software knowledge and just overall improve my skills.

Timeline

My timeline for game animations would be to have one done every week or two. Every week i would provide my advancement of work in 495 from the blocking phase towards the tweening end portion.

This week for my 495 class Me and my team chose our piece of audio that we were going to use for our production project. We then broke down the audio into 4 different parts and we each ended with about 14 - 18 seconds of animation we were to complete together. Dyanna one of my teammates edited out our audio so we had our own file to work with. We then discussed the starting and ending positions of our characters so our transitions would be no problem. For now we look toward next week when we will begin to gather reference. Rigs were chosen and tested as well as acquiring the environment our characters will be animated in. 

Here are a few pictures!