Final Animation

This is my final animation, I'm pleased with the overall outcome, and I believe the animation movements, I look fairly realistic although I tried to add exaggerated facial expressions to add some comedy to the scene. There are many thing I would change if I we're to do this again, I would make the scene a little more interesting, add more props, use the graph editor more, to create smooth animation movement.

Lip Sync

Here I have added lip-sync, I think this was the most difficult part of this module so far. The way I did this was importing the sound file into Maya, which made miming the lip syncing alot easier,I could simple key-frame when a word starts and end, repeating this technique.

Animatic - Inbetweening 1

Here I have completed the in-between for the animation. I feel its starting to come together now, however, i still need to add lip-sync and facial expression to bring more life to the characters.

Animatic - Key Poses

This is my improved animatic with key poses, this time in 3D. Once I have these key poses I can now begin to animate between these key frames (in-betweening).

Animation Scene

This is my finished scene for my animation, it is a basic office room, I could have spent more time improving this however i wanted to focus more on the animation itself. However I believe I have modelled enough to for people to understand the basic story between these characters.

Facial Expressions

Happy

Sad

Angry

Surprised/ Fear

Disgust

Here I have began to experiment with facial expressions using the Morpheus rig. I took my own pictures of me posing different expression's and used them as reference when moving the rigs facial features (Eyebrows, Lips)

Key Poses

Here is a video of me falling backwards of a chair, I did this to use as my own reference, drawing stick men over the top of the key-frames of the video in Photoshop. I could apply this technique to my animation by recording myself re-acting the scene and then use them for reference when I begin to animate.

11 Second Animation - Animatic

This is my first attempt of a animatic, using the storyboard as reference to ensure my poses are in the correct timeslot.

11 Second Animation - Storyboard

This is the basic storyboard concept for my animation, with keys poses to show a basic story.I

11 Second Animation - Script

Bouncing Ball

The second task set for us was to create a basic bouncing ball animation, this will help me understand the basic animation principals, allowing me to develop a sense of timing, weight and balance. Although I have had previous experience with animating with key frames in 3Ds Max, Maya provided new tools such as the graph editor which I was new to.

Here I created a basic sphere, snapping it to the center of the grid. Before I add any key-frames I need to extend the playback range, I do this by typing in the values on the animation time slide to 72, this gives me more frames to work with.

Now I need to animate the ball bouncing, to do this i must add 'key-frames' at the points where the ball changes direction. First of all I freeze transforms and then ensure that I have the first frame selected, hold Shift+W, if done correctly it should create a red felt on the time-slide which represents a key-frame.

Using the same process as before I have created a key-frame in frame 20 at the point i want the ball to stop and begin to fall. This is the same process with move, rotate and scale tools.

Again I created another key-frame of where I want the ball to bounce. I'll repeat this process over again to create another two more bounces, but reducing the amount it raises on each bounce.

History of Animation Presentation

The first task for this module is to split into groups of five and create a short-10 minute presentation on the history of CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery). Our group divided the topic into the different CGI film era's and I was set with the 90's.

In the early 90's CGI technology allowed a major expansion  into film and TV production. The films in this decade that have been recognised as being pioneering in their use of computer animation.

Terminator 2: judgement day, released in 1991, first to have realistic human movements and morphing effects on a CGI character. It was also the first to use a personal computer for 3D effects on a blockbuster film.

Jurassic Park: released in 1993, was the first film to create photo-realistic, CG dinosaurs.

Casper was released in 1995, and it was the first CGI to be a lead character in a feature length film.

6 months later, Pixar released toy story, it was the first feature length film, made entirely with CGI animation, this was particulary significant because it was a new way of producing films.

Pixar later released their 2nd movie, a bugs life in 1998, it was the first wide-screen animated film.

The last film in this decade is star wars, episode 1: the phantom menace.  CGI was used throughout the movie, for backgrounds, vehicles and environmental effects.

Several CG characters stood alongside real actors in many shots of the movie, making them the first CG 'supporting' cast members.