The goal of this document is to track my progress and development of my workflow. By doing this I can find ways to work faster and more efficiently. By sharing I can help others who are just starting or want to see a certain perspective. Written in mostly real-time during the project so expect to see changes in my thought process.

Lupin House Anim Challange 

Requirements : 

1) Use Bleu rig to animate an acting piece with dialogue.

2) The shot must be a minimum of 200 frames.

Idea

Bleu goes to a bird bathing fountain that is turned off. Upset, she tells off the statue figure and flys away to find somewhere she can bathe.

Challenge

- Creature

- Wings/flying

- Object interaction

RIGS & Props

-Bleu (character)

-Glasses 

-Book/Reading Material

Reference, Study, and Inspirations

Birds are very unfamiliar territory for me so I wanted to do alot of research into flight and behavior. I've been looking at real life footage for the behavior and body mechanics of birds. Then, I looked at some of my favorite animated films that have birds such as Angry Birds, Spies in Disguise, and Rio I watched how appeal was given to the fingers/wings, feathers, mouth shapes, eye movement, and the feet. The part I needed to understand the most was the wings, there are groups of feathers labeled Primaries, Secondaries and Tetrials I noticed from Angry birds they styled the primaries into a more human like hand, whereas Spies in Disguise and Rio kept the winged  look, but treated the primaries as dominant fingers. This was an important note to make for me since I have Bleu holding an object, and being expressive in her gestures. I also started a reference board for expressions that I liked and body shapes with birds. Bleu is a round ball but resembles more of an Angry Bird to me, so I leaned a bit more in that direction for the expressions sheets. Anyways, heres a bit of reference compiled that I'll be referring to when I begin blocking.

Layout

Basic scene layout, some basic materials and complex models from sketchfab. Did a basic rig setup on the glasses and book. Messed around with the camera & set. I may change the camera to be in closer for a better look at the expressions, however I do like it being wider so that the viewer can immediately recognize the situation and story. Maybe after a first pass on story telling poses and lighting I will adjust it but for now this is where I am at.

First Pass - Blocking

Excuse the video format, I playblasted the first pass wrong and it wont load correctly in any of my video editing programs so I had to screen record the only only version I had. Anyways, my main focus on the first pass was getting down the general story telling poses. I want Bleu to fly off at the end but I didn't want to block in the mechanics of the flight yet, I want her to have a more unique and delicate flap of her wings, something I'll need to experiment with in spline- I also might run out of time and need to cut the ending! Im also playing with camera shots, I may start wide then cut to a medium shot. I really want to keep it simple though so I'll be experimenting in later passes with the camera.

Second Pass - Blocking Plus

Blocking Plus. I went back over my major story telling keys and pushed expressions and silhouettes. After that my focus was to really sell the personality of the character and shot, so to me, this meant adding in little things that complimented my major poses. If I felt a pose needed more breakdowns or energy I spent more time there, I tried not to get caught up in a formula and just add a pose that felt right and ignore parts that didn't. I have a habit of overblocking to the point where I end up just wasting time that I could've been in spline SO the goal with this shot was to spline as early as possible. I splined immediately after this pass.

Third Pass - Spline

This pass I took it very slow, going from blocking to spline without extensive breakdowns I knew it would be very rough in certain areas. I splined 50frames at time. Refining the keys and breakdowns I already blocked and straight aheading the inbetweens and the holds.  I'll be taking this pass into dailies and getting feedback.

Fourth Pass - Spline+

Went to an Alumni dailies session hosted by Beau Pratt at Animation Mentor and received lots of great notes. Since the competition was coming to a close soon I asked for the major notes to address. We talked about Bleu's facial expressions and pushing them (their wasn't enough of a contrast in several moments) a foot pass and working through the ending where she flies away.  We also talked about some minor notes to polish the performance and some environmental and camera adjustments. The more obvious areas are lip sync, hair and tail -those areas I planned on straight a heading for my Final Pass.

Fifth Pass - Submission

Addressed major notes, did a pass on the hair, tail and lip sync. This will be the pass I submit for the challange. For my final pass I want to add some water splashes, more feather polish, lip sync polishing and whatever else I can get feedback on. 

Final Pass (WIP)

Conclusion (WIP)

Learned a lot from this shot. I should note that unfortunately I didn't make the cut for the deadline (I posted 10PM EST on the 21st) but I didn't factor in timezones so my post most likely showed on the 22nd (past the due date). Thats okay though! It was still a challange for me and I can put something I think worth adding to my demo reel. The winners work was really amazing you can see their post here : https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lupin-house_massive-congratulations-to-this-months-competition-activity-7122930642471800833-kSiN?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

In the future I'd probably spend a tiny bit more time in blocking plus. I missed a few breakdowns but I enjoyed straight aheading from spline. I think my key poses were strong enough, and not too complex to work inbetween them without a headache in spline but I think if I had a much more complex character that I would've had a harder time straight aheading so I got lucky this time around. On to the next!

The goal of this document is to track my progress and development of my workflow. By doing this I can find ways to work faster and more efficiently. By sharing I can help others who are just starting or want to see a certain perspective. Written in mostly real-time during the project so expect to see changes in my thought process. 

Audio

https://youtu.be/69cDEJpX_nk

Challenge

I felt like I needed to try my hand at a longer dialogue piece, I enjoy emotional dialog or scenes with drama. I also wanted to add more movement and focus on performance of the character as a whole.

1. Emotional dialogue
2. Lip sync
3. Performance

RIGS

Morpheus By Josh Burton - http://www.joshburton.com/projects/morpheus.asp

Thumbnails

Quickly sketched out the important story parts for general performance staging of the characters.

Still trying out new ways I can plan my shots out more. Dissecting the audio.

Ref

Looking for weight, body movements, and a general timing. I wish the room was evenly lit so there wouldn't be as much shadows so that I can grab more subtleties in the face but I'm hoping my drawings and the reference will be enough.

Blocking

Just body,head and hand movement. Rough timing that I'll clean up and breakdown more for in the next blocking pass. Decided not to include the handcuffs because I felt they restricted movement to the character and given the location ( a visiting room ) I didn't feel they we're necessary as It could possibly heighten the threat level of the inmate. I re-shot a few hand gestures for reference.

II

Broke down a few of the major poses to get a better feel for the timing. I feel confident enough to start blocking out the face. The lip sync will be after I spline the body.

III

My favorite part of blocking is adding in the expressions. I'm ready to see where the spline will look like.

Spline

No adjustments, this is what it looked like immediately after splining. 

I wasn't too happy with the result. Some parts were okay but I thought that overral it wasn't a successful blocking to spline. Took a few days to recharge after the disappointment and tried to see where I think I went wrong in the final phase of blocking:

1. Too many key poses with not enough breakdowns lead one action to another either feeling too floaty or too fast. 

2. Too many breakdowns without enough time for pause.

3. IK/FK switching during complicated movements is really hard (I tried fixing this for so long in spline).

4. Moving everything is a waste of energy and confused the focal point of the shot.

5. Breakdown fast movements in blocking more, this doesn't mean more keys just make sure the action is as close to spline as possible.

I

I'm much happier after cleaning up the initial spline. I re-timed a lot of things, held poses for longer, tried smoothing out the jerky movements and made a few changes in the acting choices. I want to make the part where he gets up less robotic and then I can begin putting in the small details, tightening the timing even more and lip sync.

II

This is the final spline pass before I ask a few peers for feedback, then I'll go into the polish phase. While I wait for feedback I'll start on the second character, the son who responds, "I'm not going anywhere".

III

I added the son, I splined him all the way through while I waited for feedback. Then went back to add in the notes I received. Going to polish everything and then flatten out the environment.

Polish

I went over the facial and main controls and tweaked the timing of certain things I felt could be better. I'm going to render it out with lighting and then add some minor things Davinci Resolve and that'll be the final.

Final

Conclusion

I had a lot of fun with this one. I got to take some steps into acting with a performance and a two character interaction. In future pieces I would like to perfect my final blocking -> spline  pass. I also think my mouth shapes could be stronger especially when the characters talk fast, I found that difficult to time and look good. I also would like to see if I can do something cartoony with dialog in the future. I think I did well to dissect the audio I could probably work on making the process faster by combing a few elements such as making the animatic with more facial and body detail or skipping it and working straight from reference. Either way I'm glad to call this done and ready to move on to the next challenge.

The goal of this document is to track my progress and development of my workflow. By doing this I can find ways to work faster and more efficiently. By sharing I can help others who are just starting or want to see a certain perspective. Written in mostly real-time during the project so expect to see changes in my thought process. 

Process

For this project I really wanted to challange myself with something "cartoony" while also not making it too long. I had an idea of a chase scene in my head so to help solidify it I went looking for rigs that I could build a story around. My chase scene idea changed when I came across a Goblin and Faun rig by Thomas Vialetto.

Rigs

Faun: Model made by Victor REGIS Concept Art: Johannes Helgeson Rig: Thomas Vialetto 

Goblin: Model: Victor-Emmanuel Pancrazi Concept Art: Youssef Zamani Rig: Thomas Vialetto

I'm not sure if there is any stretchy controls or duplication limbs in the rig, if there aren't - even more of a challenge! I decided the story would be the goblin has stole gold, jewels or whatever fauns like that have value (?) and uses his magic to escape while being pursued by the faun. For the environment I went to pinterest and went through a few images I liked, I wanted something small and contained so I can really focus on one character at a time. I came across this amazing small field by ZandraArt, https://zandraart.tumblr.com/post/146049129391/path and thought it would be a good start for my storyboard.

Boarding

I'm not the best draftsman but I still wanted to plan as much as I could for this shot and fast. I enjoy Krita so I began boarding there, I did all the major poses and a few breakdowns. Since I was drawing stickmen this allowed for me to really focus on appealing line of action poses. I did the whole shot on ones then re-timed the drawings because I knew my real life acting later on wouldn't be as much use in "cartoony" timing.

Scene Set Up

I set my bookmarker keys up for every second and half second frames for the first 100. I quickly modeled the environment using basic shapes and messed around with the rig I noticed that the . There are stretchy controls which is awesome but no bendy controllers unfortunately, either way I'm ready to begin Blocking Phase 1!

Ball Reference

I was going to start blocking the goblin rig but I was lacking some confidence before even starting, I needed to flesh out my timing more, my reference and boards weren't doing enough. I didn't feel like I could jump right in, and that's okay I just needed to start a bit more simple and test out some timing and spacing. 

I liked the timing in this and it was strong enough for me to start blocking with the Goblin.

Blocking phase 1 : Goblin Body 

I like this blocking pass but I noticed I could make a few of the silhouettes stronger for the key poses. I didn't really use the bookmarkers for this phase I was focused more on following my ball reference which I decided to tweak a bit.

For blocking phase 2 I want to go in and add breakdowns and mess with the hands and fingers. I won't worry about the cloth, tail, and ears until either phase 3 or spline.

Blocking Phase 2 : The Body

I'm pretty happy with how phase 2 of blocking came out. The timing a my ball reference helped a lot but I fear when I spline that a few parts are going to feel too fast so I'm preparing for that. I played with some stretching of the limbs and the props with the character but I'm a bit upset that their isn't anyway I can scale/stretch the feet. Their aren't any bendy controls on the character either so that was a bummer but like I said before, it's a challenge! I'm thinking of adding squishy geometry and duplicating some limbs for a couple parts when I hit either phase 3 or spline. I also didn't pose out the hands or fingers this phase it didn't feel right since the blocking still felt rough in the beginning. To recap, Phase 1 was to block out the storytelling poses. Phase 2 was to add timing, a bit of weight, and fluidity between the key poses. Now I'm moving on to Phase 3 which is where I'll prepare my character for a clean spline preview. For me, this means getting my pauses and shot rhythm right and adding in things like clean hand poses, tighter in-between and complimenting the smears.

Blocking/Spline Phase 3 : The Body

Welp, blocking for this phase didn't really go as planned, I wanted to add more inbetweens and breakdowns but the more I tweaked the harder I felt I was making it for spline. I couldn't really grasp the timing to be able to tweak anything without going into spline so instead of noodling on blocking I thought it'd be faster to just go into spline. When I splined the timing wasn't too bad but major things I missed, or could've focused more on, was settle and anticipation. I thought since cartoony animation was big on timing and poses that the anticipation and settle wasn't a big part of it. I was wrong. When I splined my animation felt zippy, while also being slow. It had decent poses, while also being lifeless. I cleaned up my spline for the first 100 frames and came to this result.

There's a few things I'm going to tweak when I polish spline but I think it's good enough to move on to the next 100 frames.

Frame 100-300 Goblin Body

Finished splining out the body and working on the timing. I had to readjust the camera so everything is in frame. I also changed the ending bit so that took some time as well but I'm pretty happy with how it's coming along. I also have been watching older cartoons and animations centered around the style im going for. Next is adding in cloth and facial animation which will all be splined. I think I'm going to save the tail for last as I'm not exactly sure how I want to  animate it yet.

 1-200 Frame Splined Body+ Cloth, + Facial

Pretty decent progress I think, it was pretty fun animating the overlapping action of the nose and the cloth. I think it removed a lot of the rigidity and made the goblin more fleshy. The last thing before I go back over the controllers in the graph editor is to tackle the tail *dread*. The tail is pretty skinny and long with a nice poof at the end. The tail reminds me a lot of a lion's tail or a elephant's in terms of shape and design. How it will function in zippy motions is something I will have to figure out. I'm going to do a bit more research but for now, here's most of the Goblins animation!

1-300 Frame Splined Body+ Cloth + Facial + Tail

*Groaning* The tail is done!I tried to make sure the that I didn't move it too much, only when it needed to.I also tried to make sure the tail supported the flow of the action or pose. Though it took awhile it was fun straight aheading the shapes for it. If I were to save some time in the future I would have blocked out the tail shapes beforehand because there were a couple points were I got stuck in terms of rotating too many controls. I also added some more facial animation (eyeslids, eyebrows). The next step is polishing the Goblin. I'll head into the graph editor and smooth out/ tighten whatever I can find on all the controllers before moving on to Faun.

Goblin Polish

Polish went well, I kept the graph editor open and made sure to smooth out the curves while also keeping the timing tight where it needed to be. I also made minor adjustments to the finger and hand placement. I've learned a lot so far that I cant wait to wrap up in the conclusion. 

Faun 

Since Faun's animation is pretty straight forward and short I thought it would be interesting to play around with a animation tool I don't use too often. In the past I had a floating character and I used animation layers and it was much easier to work with so I'm gonna use that with Faun. I'm not going to cycle the cloth and hair as I'll do that last, straight ahead like I did with the Goblin.

I put the timeline on 24frames and animated the cycle, then I looped the cycle infinitely and re-timed the arms and legs so everything didn't move at the same time. I did all of this on animation layer. Instead of blocking I'm just going to work straight ahead and begin with Fauns entrance.

Spline 1

I went back to the Base Animation layer to spline out the movement and I think the movement looks decent so far. I had to ask myself how do floaty characters move. I thought back to my work on floating robots and from watching superheros. I didn't want it to feel as though she had a jet pack so I reduced the hover a lot, I wanted the floating to feel magical, I think the second major pose could use some more work to really achieve that effect. I will be touching up the second pose then starting the cloth and hair on a different animation layer.

Spline 2 

After reviewing my first spline pass I noticed Faun was looking decent but lacked more anticipation between her poses. I noticed she was going from pose to pose with very little momentum , especially in the first pose. I added more follow through in the legs for her second pose as well to help sell the floating. I also tweaked her blade(scythe?) animation. It look a bit lifeless and stiff so I had it correspond with her body angle and added a bit of drag. The hair was fun to mess with and wasn't as bad as the Goblin's tail. From this point I'm going to finish up Faun with polishing in the graph editor. Oh! and here's my layers I used for Faun. 

*Base Animation is where I animated the main body controls during and in-between poses. 

*Float I animated an idle float animation on major controls which help keep the character alive with minor movements that were set to cycle infinitely.

*Hair and Cloth are self explanatory, towards the end I accidentally did some hair animation (the strands of hair that lay on her shoulders) on the base layer but since all of the weights of the layers are the same this didn't cause any issues. 

*Face layer is where I did all the facial animation.

I got lost a few times when working in layers, forgetting which layer I was working on sometimes. To help control this, if I wasn't working on a certain layer it was locked.

Polish

Polish went pretty smooth. I worked on the hair controls a bit more and tried to keep the movement flowing and but less distracting. I felt it was taking a lot of attention during certain parts. Now that both characters are done I could start with either FX ( the magic sprites faun shoots and the flower transformation) or I could work on the environment. I think I'm going to start on the environment first, it'll help guide how stylized I want the FX to be instead of vice versa. For the environment I want to compliment the characters hand painted style so ill start with some rough shaders and geometry. 

Rough Environment and FX

Surprisingly the Microsoft Video Editor has some really great stock FX and animations. I played around with a few to get an Idea of how I want the FX to look. 

The background is simple enough but I'm thinking of adding in some rocks. I'll have to paint the backgrounds a bit as I think the ramp shaders could use a bit more help. While thinking about further rendering I thought of Dungeon Defenders artwork. I'm not a painter by any means but I'll be trying my hand at something similar. Some cool work by Daniel Diaz and Jesus Diaz : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/o8yZO

Environment Final(ish)

Roughly the environment is finished there's a few things I want to fix with the leaves on the tree but that would be it. I added some rocks and some lights to brighten up the scene. I painted the textures for the grass and trees in Krita, the mushrooms and rocks are ramp shaders, for the road I found a cobblestone texture on texture.com. I'll fix up the leaves then handle the rest in post.

Final Shot

 Composited in :Davinci Resolve 17 FX : Boris FX

Completion In : about 3 Weeks (procrastination included)

Conclusion

Well I started this project with the challenge of doing something cartoony and fun and at the very least I can say I had fun. When working on the Goblin I had to really work on timing and spacing and deepen my understanding of it. For my previous shot I used bookmarkers a lot and found them to be super useful but for this shot I barely used them so I guess it depends on what I'm doing. I got to play with multiples by duplicating the mesh, separating the limbs and stretching geometry which was a bit of work but a cool end result to see. I tried really hard at understanding when to move certain things and when to give certain actions priorities. 

Faun was also a learning experience, I wanted her to have a contrasting movement to the Goblin so bother characters didn't feel the same and their would be some visual contrast added. I used cycles on her main animation which I found to be super useful at keeping the character alive between her pauses. Having a layer approach with her hair, clothing and body made it easy to manage as well. 

For improvement and moving foreward I could've did a lot more planing for Faun. I didn't know the exact poses I wanted with her and I spent more time than I wanted to on her arm placement, line of action and hair. I could also improve on my final blocking passes before heading into spline. Faun didn't have a blocking phase because her animation was shorter and simple. However, Goblins key poses and inbetweens were fine but I could've done better with anticipation from one pose to the next and settling in the blocking  phase. Though it's not perfect ( and I can't wait to receive feedback on it) I can say I'm happy with the end result enough to move on to the next challenge.

The goal of this document is to track my progress and development of my workflow. By doing this I can find ways to work faster and more efficiently. By sharing I can help others who are just starting or want to see a certain perspective. Written in mostly real-time during the project so expect to see changes in my thought process.

Audio

 Woman: We were friends, how could you betray me like that?

The Process

    First I wrote down the audio in my notebook. I drew lines under moments in the audio that varied from relaxed to stressed.  The more lines, the more stressed the audio was.I feel this will help me when I shoot my reference. 

I also wrote down the tone of the woman speaking. She sounded sad but stern with whoever/whatever she was speaking with. This is important because it will help me make a matching mannerism.

Lastly, I thumbnail the angles and rough character layout of the scene. 

Rigs

David & Dana - Gabriel Salas

Going with Ol’ Reliable for this one. I’m familiar with these two rigs and they’re one of my favorite pairs to use.

Reference

I decided that I wanted a closer view and focus on facial animation and emotion when I began my reference. My thumbnail sketch showed more of the body but I think moving forward I will isolate the upper body and face for the first shot. Looking back I should’ve taken my glasses off for this.

More reference, mouth shapes.

While looking for more female  emotions and faces I came across a cool study titled “Compound facial expressions of emotion” - https://www.pnas.org/content/111/15/E145

Scene Setup

I began by hiding most of the controls I didn't need and putting my camera on a layer. I will also hide the facial controls as I start on blocking out the body.

Blocking Phase 1 : Body Pass

For this shot I blocked out the body poses for every 1 (24 frames),  ½ (12 frames) and ¼ (6 frames) seconds. I also added in poses every 4 frames for smaller actions. I stayed organized by using bookmarks on my timeline. 

Yellow : Start and End of Shot#

Red: Indicates 1second or 24 frames

Blue: Indicates ½ second or 12 frames

Orange: Indicates ¼ second or 6 frames

Green : Start and End of dialog

Blocking Phase 2 : Body + Face

For this phase I cleaned up the body a bit more and began blocking the face which included the eyebrows, eyes, nose and opening the mouth.

Spline Phase 1 : Body + Face

For this phase I splined the body and face whilst cleaning up the timing for certain parts. I was surprised at how little I had to tweak and for the first pass I didn't think It was too bad.

Spline Phase 2 : Body + Face + Mouth

For this phase I worked in spline for the lip sync and continued to make minor tweaks to the face. I wanted to exaggerate a few mouth shapes as I felt my reference was a little too boring at towards the end.  For this phase I introduced purple bookmakers that were used for the really tight movements in the mouth shapes (1-3) frames.

Final Pass

Before this point I tweaked minor things in the graph editor but for this phase I wanted to work entirely in the graph editor for "polish". I went through all the major controllers first then the minor ones smoothing curves while paying attention to the timing of the audio so as not to offset anything.

Render

Nothing too fancy, in the end I didn't end up adding the second character or the scene. Initially, I thought it would be nice to add a second character or a second shot to tell a story but decided to just focus on the performance and not get carried away. A simple 3-Point lighting set up with smooth render settings inside the viewport will suffice for this short exercise.

.

.

.

Conclusion & What I Learned

I learned a lot, I like the phase approach I took with this shot. I also enjoyed using bookmakers it really helped staying organized with my keys and allowed me to re-time things easily towards the end. One thing I struggled with was eye darts early on and a few mouth shapes. When I got stuck I took a break from working to really look at my reference and watched a few videos online on what I was stuck on. I wasted the most time on feeling like something would be easy and end up noodling micro movements.