Expression Change example for "Les Popettes" program at Squeeze Studio Animation

Expression Change exercise done at Squeeze studio animation for "Les Popettes" program.

I showed the different ways to go from a pose to pose blocking into a polishing final pass.. favoring this 3 poses and expressions according to the 2D rough planning.

2D Rough blocking breakdown:

G = Golden Pose (Story Poses)
BK = Breakdown (as important as the Golden poses to determinate timing, spacing, drag, weight and volume from one pose to another)
K = Key (Important Inbetween to favor and add more consistency to the BK and G poses)
I = Inbetween (simple spacing between two keys, keeping clean arcs in shape and spacing.)

I hope it helps! :)

Daniel.

QUICKITME: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pxnsjxl8gtox0m9/Facial_animation_Test_02

Gangnam Style 1 Billion views Animation Tribute!

My Animation tribute to the most-viewed YouTube video of all time!! "Fernutz Style" 

Gangnam Style 1 Billion views Animation Tribute

—  animated at (Squeeze Studio Animation).

Toy Buzzer FAIL! :P

Finally finished this small animation test, trying out Norman's power in Maya... so far so good.. great controls ;)

I found this audio clip that was very 'animatable' and easy to understand in terms of emotion and message for its only 4 - 6 seconds... the subtext was too obvious and hard for me to come up with something somewhat original.... so I asked for ideas on how I could deliver this audio clip in a way that I could play basically in one pose (cuz too short ammount of time to move around the character), and easy to read the situation from the first couple of frames.... so thanks to Simon Girard (a friend from work) and his very original and unusual ideas.... he came up with this Toy-Buzzer Fail thingy.. I loved it and tried to take the juice out of it! :)

http://www.danimating.com/buzzer_fail.mov (right click & save target as..)

Now.. I know what you are all thinking.. I thought that too... but NO!... the situation is that he was in the bathroom.. and forgot to take the buzzer off his hand before doing the number one! ... there you go.. a more friendly interpretation ;P... and Where is the bathroom environment?? well I suck in Maya so it was hard for me to model all that stuff... hehehe.

It was fun to go back and animate in Maya after a full time job in 3dsmax.. I had some problems and missed some 3dsmax tools that I depend on nowadays.... but sometimes is not bad to go back and animate 'old school/rotation/translation/scale' :)

Animation Progression Clip:

Basically another layering aproach.. started animating the beats and accents of the shot applying movement to only the body parts that were important.. and then layering where the forces were coming from for those movements... kinda a backwards layering method aproach for the body :P

for the face I make sure i don't go too layer-ish.. so I work in stepped mode (pose to pose) for the facial expressions and mouth shapes that i consider important and i want the audience to read... and start to break it down from there..

so here it is! :)

Thanx for reading and I hope you guys like it!

Bale rant Animation process: 'Animation'

ANIMATION PROCESS BLOCKING AND ANIMATION


BLOCKING:

I wanted to start testing how far and how well the layering method would work on this one… so I decided to work only on about 40-50 frames and try to finish it up… at the same time I was experimenting on the settings… rendering quality… so I could think and try to imagine how it would look as a final product or final “drawings” for the whole shot. Here are the examples:

When I started to go further on the lipsync, I realized that I couldn’t push as much the mouth shapes with this technique… so I started a clean slate in the lipsync and with the help of Flipbook and Jason Ryan’s lipsync webinar I had this done in about 30 minutes:

I think it looked waaaay better than the versions before… so I went back to my shot and polished this up until I have something I was happy with:

At the end after having this 40-50 frames “done” in the layering method… it took a lot of brain power and concentration to really see what I was animating and not getting distracted for the rest… I realized that I could get a bit lost in the performance on the whole clip and my acting pattern could suffer because of this… so I decided to have a complete rough blocking of the main idea of the shot:

The rest of the process was similar to the many pose to pose or layering tutorials on the web, so I just had my important key poses and expressions down and started working in small chunks until the end… and of course after switching from stepped to flat splines, I went back to the layering method… working my way up from the root to the face :)

After a few notes I got from friends and animators, I changed a few things and this is what I can call “the final version”:

Well… that’s all I can say about my animation process on this shot.. it was pretty fun and challenging for me to present it to the spline doctors, and I want to thank all of them and all my friends for the kind feedback! :)

I hope this was helpful.

Bale rant Animation process: 'Planning' - 2/2

PLANNING PART 2 (FINAL)

VIDEO REFERENCE:

After sketching for a few days and trying to act out how the character would behave and perform, I had a clear “road map” of the overall acting… so that’s the time when I decided to shoot some video reference at home.

I picked some of the clips where I found more interesting acting choices and also included a hand reference shot at the end. All this really helped me solve some motion problems in the animation process when I started to struggle with posing or acting patterns… looking at this reference was always inspiring and problem solving for me :)

After watching this reference over and over I came up with a list of parts I liked the most:

-Line: "What the F*** is it with you"? - Clip 4

-Surprise take on Line "No...NO!.." - Clip 2

-Line"The..the F*** are you DOING!? - Clip 1

-Keys pressing and "Gimme a F*** Answer.." - Clip 2 or 4.

TECHNICAL PLANNING (3D SOFTWARE):

For me, this is very important in the planning process for a 3d animator. After I got the planning down for the performance (sketches, thumbnails, animatics, video reference, etc.) I wanted to prepare myself to fight the computer and its restrictions in terms of rig, technicalities, controls, IK/FK choices.. etc etc.

So I made a list of animation/technical choices for this animation shot:

- I wanted to go between subtle and cartoony animation. The shot layout is very close up so I didn’t want too much movement. Trying to concentrate on the facial animation performance… so I decided to start out with the “Layering method” (even though I switched later on to stepped mode blocking “pose to pose”)

- Considering that the character was going to be seated and typing most of the time I decided to go with IK hands in the whole shot.


- I also wanted to try to go clean on the rotations and dealing with only one axis at a time so I could have better control on the rig… I used to animate in local mode for the rotation, but at the end I ended up having influences in the other axis as well… probably the rig… but to go super clean I chose to go with Gimbal-mode rotations for the whole shot.

- For the translation part it was simpler… I just used the regular ones (world and local) for posing and in-between… BUT, I knew that in the polishing part I was going to change to “screen-mode translations” which translates from the flat camera view so you could track your arcs way better.

I will post my Animation process step by step on Sunday... thanx for stopping by and..stay tuned! :P