Week 15 assignment related

So my assignment is to create a scene of about 10 - 25 seconds (600 frames) worth of animation using a robot arm I used last week. There are 5 scenarios to choose from:

Scenario 1

There is a long line of GREEN boxes, as if on a conveyor belt. (You don’t have to model the conveyor belt – just pretend it’s there.)

The robot lifts the box at the head of the queue and stacks it in a pile at its side.

Once the robot has finished stacking a box, the rest of the boxes move forward one place, and the process is repeated.

Suddenly, a RED box appears at the head of the queue.

The robot appears confused – all the boxes are supposed to be green! (You may change this to be another type of object if you like.)

Animate the reaction of the robot, and how it deals with this sudden turn of events. (When something unusual happens to start a story, this is called the inciting incident.)

Scenario 2

The same as for scenario 1, the robot is busy stacking boxes.

However, the robot seems tired of its work, as if unfulfilled in life.

The robot wants to rebel and break free!

Animate how the robot attempts to rebel – or at least to break the monotony and grind of its work for a short time. For example, does it go crazy and throw boxes around, or do a robot dance, or stack the boxes in some unusual way, or what?

Scenario 3

The same as for scenario 1, the robot is busy stacking boxes.

However, in this case, the conveyor doesn’t wait for the robot to finish stacking a box before moving the queue – it keeps moving the boxes forward, slowly at first, but getting faster and faster, as if there’s been a malfunction.

Animate the reaction of the robot, and how it deals with this sudden turn of events.

Scenario 4

The same as for scenario 1, the robot is busy stacking boxes.

However, in this case, once the robot has finished stacking a box, the remaining boxes do NOT move forward.

Animate the reaction of the robot, and how it deals with this sudden turn of events.

Scenario 5

The same as for scenario 1, the robot is busy stacking boxes.

The robot lifts a box, turns to place it on the stack – but the box is stuck! The robot can’t drop the box!

Animate the reaction of the robot, and how it deals with this sudden turn of events.

My storyboard

I chose scene 3 and this is supposedly my storyboard.

Name of Robot

For starters, I think I would name my robot arm: Homer.

Because the Homer Simpson from The Simpsons portrays some anger emotions when the time comes.

Here are a few angry homer moments:








The character of the arm is anger.

Homer is angry and frustrated that he has to do this same, routine work everyday and he is getting sick and tired of it. He is very fed up with his work that he doesn't do it properly; he picks up the boxes suddenly and drops them at a height, not caring whether it is fragile.

To quote a thought from Homer the arm:

"I want to do something different instead of this same old crap that I have been doing for the past 20 years god-dammit. I should get a medal or something for doing this all the time! ARGH!"

Darksiders 2 and Red Faction

Image by BenJi-XD at devaintart.com

Hello once again gamers. I am now busy with lots of school related work as you can see from my blog but I will not forget my hobby of putting game news here too.

Halo: Anniversary has new comparison trailers that showcase the Halo from 2001 and the new Halo in Anniversary.

Not a lot of new happenings so far. But I did see the new darksiders 2 trailer and I wondered whether I should get that myself. I saw this quote from a comment:

“before time was born is from mythology ,

the immortals lived before time ,

shaped by their own will,

and forever as they where.

humans came after the birth of time.

so all gods had their pick and chose what they would do to fill the boring life they had.

for suffering does not exist when you are ever unchanging”

And this left me thinking of the legend of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse: War, Death, Famine and Pestilence. I do not know the legend itself but the whole story is in Wikipedia if you are interested. 

The darksiders story revolves around the 4 horsemen and the second game involves the horsemen: Death. See below with my other funny video. Enjoy!

machinima July 19 2011

 

 
GamerSpawn May 31 2011

Week 13 (Animate a moving robot arm)

Exercise 1

So first exercise is to watch how the lamps have a bit of personality to them. Here's the video.

Exercise 2

And exercise 2 is to view a tutorial on how to proper move a robot arm and to make an in-animate object come alive.

The first thing to do is to add joints to the object. So off the wireframe, select Skeleton > Joint tool and keep clicking four points of intersection to show where the joints need to be moved.

Then, click on Panel > Hypergraph panel > Hypergraph to view the parent and child relation. The parent has to be selected and clicked first before the child so the order is correct.

Next is Skeleton > IK handle tool. Then we click on the joint of the arm to the swivel at the center. This ensures that the joints will lie along a single plane and it does not go off course. Next is to click on bind > smooth bind to bind the object itself to the joints so that when the joint moves, the object would move as well.



Now to assign a smaller object so that moving one point does not mean clicking any un wanted pieces.
Once that is done, click Constraint > Parent. Clicking whichever object first is important so as to de note who is the parent and child.

Now, we must make the movement more realistic. It cannot turn 360 degrees at a joint unless I want it that way. By clicking on the right of the attribute editor, I can lock attributes of the X and Z rotation so as it does not turn any other way except up and down. The below pictures should illustrate that perfectly (by moving the arm up and down only, it does turn anywhere else even if I tried!).

Exercise 3

This exercise asks to move the arm to pick up a box and move it around. However, I have issues with that so this is postponed till another day.

For some reason, My playblast is not working. As a matter a fact, my animation overall is not going according to plan either so I will show you screen shots of the movement first. When I have consulted my teacher about it, I will see whether putting up an animation can be done.

Exercise4

1)  Apart from their different sizes, it is obvious from Luxo Jr. that the big lamp is “older” and that the small lamp is “younger”.

How is this communicated by the animation? Give at least THREE examples.

Do NOT say because the small lamp is playing with a ball, or that its name is Luxo Jr. – you should be looking at the animation, how the lamps move and emote (emote means to express emotions).

Ans: The small lamp appears more childish to play with the ball while the big lamp just watches his "son" play with it.

The small lamp shaked his body to show it's kid like actions while the big lamp is more calm and still.

The small lamp jumped on the ball to exert it's curios-ness while the big lamp may have known what will happen.

2)  Give an example from Luxo Jr of how timing is used for comic effect. Explain how the timing decisions contribute to the humour.

 Ans: When the small lamp jumped on the ball and after a while, the ball made a sound and deflated. 

The timing was right as I knew something was going to happen to the ball so the time was right to show the consequences of a lamp jumping on the ball.

3)   When you create a joint chain, these form a hierarchy, with the first joint at the top and the last joint at the bottom. Explain why this is necessary for the joints to work properly.

Usually, the first joint chain at the top should affect the rest of the body. Think of a snake; when the head moves, so will the body according to the head. The secondary joints should not move first because that would look very un natural.

Week 12 short exercise

Exercise 1

We had to watch a series of 13 videos on how to do a proper ball bounce. It was altogether 2 hours long. Here is one I found interesting. I believe this was part 10. It's great to know we can add in lighting to make the scene more life like.

Exercise 2

1)  Do you need to be able to draw well to create good 2D animation? Explain your view.

For 2D animation, I do not think the drawing needs to be done well. In 2D, it is hard to see any perspective so it would be easier to not draw it well.

2) Do you need to be able to draw well to create good 3D animation? Explain your view.

For 3D however, I think it is very important because people can associate it with real life objects and we can see it with more perspective and the 3D object or animation can be done with more realism than 2D.

3) What do you think would separate a piece of poor animation from a piece of good animation? In other words, how would you go about deciding if a piece of animation is good or bad?

  I would go about deciding when I see whether the animation imitates that of real life or it is realistic enough to make it believable. If the object is supposed to have mass, it must show squash and stretch and the movement must be constant, not exaggeration at one part and not realistic at another.

4) In 2D animation, you need to be very aware of timing at a frame by frame level, using timing charts and other techniques - but for 3D animation, this is handled using the graph editor, which is more concerned with manipulating rates of change over time.

Does this affect how you approach your animation work? Explain.

  No it does not. I have already learned how to properly use the graph editor to manipulate timing and especially acceleration and deceleration of certain objects.

5) Give a brief critique of Maya as an animation tool. Don't just say Maya makes animation difficult, or easy, or that you need to learn a lot of stuff to use Maya - explain what Maya does well and not so well in terms of creating animation.

 Maya is great at creating animation because we can set key frames when we are happy with the position of animation we placed and setting of key frames is flexible to use. Then the play button is there so that we can review what we had accomplished and able to make the necessary changes to it. It is not that difficult to use because I find it easier and smoother to use.

Week 11 Animation time!

Its week 11 of IN3D and we finally learn how to animate things properly!

Exercise 1

Here is the first few lessons we learned:

First, we have to set key frames for the animation. To press S is to save a key frame. The ball is at the edge of the table and I want to bounce it to the other side. The first key frame should be at frame 1.

The next position the ball should be is in the air when the ball bounces of the table. This is the second key frame.

The third key frame should be set when the ball touches the table and bounce off it again.

The fourth shows the ball bouncing off again, only to be hit by a tennis player in real life.

To make  the ball more smoothly and to make it look more realistic, I open Window > Animation Editor > Graph editor. Then I clicked only translate y to show the bounce of the ball. I click on the vertices to elevate it and change it to make it look more linear.

Then the final step is to save the animation by clicking on any key frame and clicking Playblast to play it and save it.

Unfortunately, my computer has a problem and is unable to save the animation. Do not know why.

 Exercise 2

If you look at all this in continuous motion, you can see the ball bouncing off the ground and bouncing a few more times before it comes to a halt. This is how it should it look like.

Well, that ends another week of 3D!

Week 10 Animation Principles

 Exercise 1

This is the video which show cases some footage of actions that probably has the 12 principles of animation in it.

1. Squat down, jump as high as you can go, then land on the ground (it’s better if the person has long hair)
2. Stand some distance away, run towards camera, then come to a sudden stop just in front of the camera (with your whole body still in frame)
3. Repeat actions 1 and 2, but this time with a bag hanging from your shoulder
4. Do a robot dance or chicken dance J
5. Pretend to get really really really (!) angry, then pretend to punch your friend standing in front of you
6. Drop a ball and film it bouncing a few times
7. Throw a ball up (not too high), and film it as it goes up and down
8. Stand with a partner about 3 metres apart and throw a ball to each other a few times
9. Repeat the ball throwing action, but this time try to surprise your partner by pretending to throw the ball a few times before you actually do!
10. Repeat the ball throwing action, but this time make it bounce once on the ground before it is caught

Exercise 2

http://frankandollie.com/PhysicalAnimation.html

- The 12 Principles of animation: 

Squash and stretch

Anticipation

Staging

Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose

Follow Through and Overlapping Action

Slow In and Slow Out

Arcs

Secondary Action

Timing

Exaggeration

Solid Drawing (same or different as Weight)

Appeal

  Explanation of Video and How Principles relate

1. Squat down, jump as high as you can go, then land on the ground (it’s better if the person has long hair)

Explanation: I guess this has two principles; Squash and Stretch and Follow through and Overlapping action. Squash and Stretch to give mass and weight to the object or person. Follow through and Overlapping as if we had done it with a person with long hair, the hair will fall down a few seconds later than the person.


2. Stand some distance away, run towards camera, then come to a sudden stop just in front of the camera (with your whole body still in frame)

Explanation: The Principle here is Anticipation as all of a sudden, the person just stops in front of the camera because people would anticipate the person to smash into the camera or to run past the camera.


3. Repeat actions 1 and 2, but this time with a bag hanging from your shoulder 

Explanation: The principle here would be Follow through and Overlapping action. This principle states that some parts of the person does not keep up with the rest of the body. For example in this video, the bag follows suit after the person lands on his feet.


4. Do a robot dance or chicken dance

Explanation: I think this part is Staging as it clearly shows the exact action it is telling us and that is dancing.





5. Pretend to get really really really (!) angry, then pretend to punch your friend standing in front of you

Explanation: This should have Secondary action. I say this because I see the angry expression on the face as primary action while the arm swinging and punching the person's face will be secondary.


6. Drop a ball and film it bouncing a few times

Explanation: This should fall under the category of Squash and Stretch. This principle gives the illusion of weight and volume to the ball.


7. Throw a ball up (not too high), and film it as it goes up and down

Explanation: This should be the same as no. 6 as it features a ball bouncing up and down.


8. Stand with a partner about 3 metres apart and throw a ball to each other a few times

Explanation: It has a bit of Staging as well as Squash and Stretch as the action clearly shows the passing of the ball and the ball is made to believe it has weight and mass.


9. Repeat the ball throwing action, but this time try to surprise your partner by pretending to throw the ball a few times before you actually do!

Explanation: This should also be Anticipation because although it is a bit too fast, We are anticipating when the ball will really be thrown at the other person.


10. Repeat the ball throwing action, but this time make it bounce once on the ground before it is caught

Explanation: The same as no.8 I believe.

Exercise 3

I do not know whether this clip is counted as pointing out 6 out of 12 principles of animation so here goes .  . .

Time:

1. All the characters in the animation has Appeal as it tells us their character; whether be it heroic or villainous.
2. Also, all the characters has Squash and Stretch as it gives us the illusion that the characters has mass, weight and volume as they move about.
3. Arc is used everywhere to express a human's natural proportions and turns.
4. Follow through and Overlapping action is used because their cloaks turn a few seconds later as they swivel around like at 1:54 where the character's cloak follows through the blast of the explosion
5. 00:53 - 01:10 - Anticipation because when the female character says she sensed something and the horned character goes to the glass to see what it might be. This anticipates us for the sith's arrival.
6. 01:50 - 02:00 - Slow-In and Slow-out because it is to show what that particular character can do as he walks slowly towards the enemy.
7. 02:36 - 02:46 - Secondary action because the primary action was that the walking and the secondary was the arm gestures and the drawing of their weapons.
8. 04:50 - 05:05 - Timing because when the horned character died, the timing was perfect to show the female's character's reaction.