Group animation planning and production blog

For our group animation we have decided to create a story about two girls who are in a park playing with a football. One of these girls accidentally kicks the ball too hard and it hits an easel on which an old man is painting. This man then kicks the ball back and hits one of the girls on the head causing them to fall over.  I am in charge of modelling all of the scenes in which the older man appears, so I have him painting and the ball hitting his easel, and then him running up and kicking the ball.

As I was absent through the planning phase of this project, this story was created by the other people in my group. I think the target audience would be young people aged around 10- 15. I decided this because the story is not very complicated and quite self-explanatory. It could also be more relatable to a younger audience.

I did a few quick drawings of what I was looking after in a 3d model . I wanted to give the impression that this older man had let himself go a bit and wouldn’t have it in him to retaliate after being hit with a ball so I made him quite big and in my opinion very granddad like:

I had a look online to see what other people had done but most of the results came up with really well sculpted faces like this:

Although I really like these types of models. I didn’t think it would be very practical to use something so very realistic and highly detailed for a animation that is aimed at a younger audience.

One of the models that I found and loved is this:

I don’t think it’s too far off from my designs and to me it looks like it would be in a cartoon or a children’s animation. The texturing, although very good and realistic is a bit too detailed compared to the other models that are being used in our animation so I would maybe replace the texture of the shirt with a solid colour to make it look simpler. As good as this model is, I couldn’t find a download link for it.

It took a while to find a rigged model of an older man that I didn’t have to pay for. The model that I had decided to use originally had different colour hair and a better posture but to make him seem older I made the hair grey and the shoulders slightly hunched. Its hair and moustache are quite similar to the other model I really liked although it is defiantly less detailed:

Both of the female models that we were meant to have, were meant to be quite young, however I thought that one of them appeared to be a lot older, with skimpier clothing and make up. I didn’t like the way this model had been sexualized, however the other members of our group disagreed and the model was used anyway. After finding a suitable model I created a brief animatic in Photoshop to give me an idea of timings. Although it was not very detailed it did help me a lot with the timings.

I did some brief tests on the model to check the facial controllers and other parts of the rig. At this point I discovered that the hands on the model were not rigged but I spoke to my group and we agreed that this would not affect the animation majorly as we could use other objects to cover them up at certain points.

PRODUCTION

The first thing I created in Maya was the easel. I wanted to texture it properly with a nice wooden texture but I had trouble unwrapping the uv map so I decided to keep it a brown colour. I added my model to the set and animated his arm to give the impression that he was painting, I had to set a camera up so that you couldn’t see the actual hand as I couldn’t deform it.  I then added the other movements in for his other arm and legs to make it look a bit more natural. After doing this I realized that I should have done these two steps in a different order as when I moved the hips and feet the arm that was meant to be painting could be seen a long way away from the easel. I moved the easel a little closer to the model however it looked odd at the beginning of the animation when the model was closer to it.

Once this part of the animation was done, I wanted to do a close up of the man’s face to show just how happy he was with his work before it got destroyed. In the viewport it looked like the models face showed a lot of emotion, however when I rendered it out because of the shadows and lighting you couldn’t really tell that his facial expression had changed.

 Also when I was doing the tests on his facial rig, I thought that I could move his moustache around, but when it came to animating it got in the way as every time I wanted to open or close his mouth I really had to exaggerate the movement to make it visible. This meant that every time I made a slight change I had to render it to make sure that the movement was viable and not to drastic.

After I was happy with the facial expressions, I had to add the football. The model itself was nicely textured and bumped, but I had to reattach everything when I imported it into my scene.  I have played around with motion paths in cinema 4d before and decided that this was probably the easiest way to animate the ball. after finding several tutorials online about how to do this in Maya, I created a spline path that came in from the side of my scene and went through the easel. I found that animating along a spline path was a lot easier in Maya as I could set the start frame and the end one. Once the football was attached I had to move the spline path around because the football didn’t follow it directly. I also curved it around a bit more so that it looked more natural. I managed to find the frame on which the ball first makes contact with the easel and from this I started animating the easels movement. I wanted to make it look natural and just have it topple over, however I couldn’t time it to not intersect the football.

This is why I opted to make the movement as dramatic as it looks. I think it adds more comic value but also the different objects do not overlap each other. At this point my scene does not yet have a floor so when the easel fell it looked fine.  I wanted to make sure this worked properly so I added in a flat plane to act as the floor. I matched the level to the feet of my model but when the easel falls the white canvas sinks into the floor slightly. I didn’t think this would matter much as I was going to add grass onto the floor so it would cover it up.

After the easel falls in such a dramatic way I wanted to carry on this comical theme. I wanted to make the man fall to his knees to show just how much this painting meant to him.  The first thing I did was make his facial expression change to show shock. I then made his hands come up to his face. After I started moving his legs and hips I realized that I should have moved his hands after I moved his body because as his body got lower his hands stayed at the same height.  Timing the hands to come down with his face was challenging as even when I set a start and end frame for the moment, on some of the in-between frames the hands would overlap with his face. This is why there are so many key frames a this particular part of the animation, because I have to go through almost each frame and make sure that the hands lined up with the face correctly.  I did most of the animation for the legs and hips from a single camera angle and when I moved the camera around I noticed that the poles for his knees where pointing in different directions so it looked really weird. This also meant that I moved the hips too low to make the knees fall to right level. This caused problems because I then had to go back and change the frames for the hands as well as the hips, feet and knees.

At this point I play blasted the animation to check that everything was in time and worked well. I had to tweak some of the movements slightly but apart from that it seemed to work well. The only problem was that I thought the animation was a bit short. Because of this I decided to add an extra bit where the man stands up and glares over at the girls. I wanted to make the man have to use his arms to help him up to show his age a bit, however I couldn’t get the right movement with the hips and the knees kept sinking into the ground. Also because I couldn’t add any movement to the hands they looked a bit funny.

Once the character had got up I put him in an almost superhero type pose as I wanted to the camera to zoom in on his face. And to make it look a bit dramatic. Trying to get the facial expressions right for this part was tricky as again I couldn’t tell whether they were done correctly unless I rendered it out every time I made a change.

After this part of my animation was completed I added in several different cameras and there movements at the different stages. As I was going to use the same scene set up for the next part of my animation, at this point I added in a sky and made the floor seem earthier. I also used the fur tool to add grass onto it. I wanted to make the grass a lot thicker but because the plane I was using for the floor was so big, when I put the density up it took a lot more time to render so I decided to leave it as it was. I also found some models of trees to add to the scene. I was using one of the default lights before so I added in some directional lights to simulate sunlight. At first I made the sky a curved object that fit around my scene well, however when I did a test render of one of the frames, I found that the trees left shadows on it.

Once the scene was set up properly and I was happy with it, I then saved it as a different file name and deleted all of the key frames I had. This gave me an easy base for the next part of my animation. With this scene I had to make the man run up and kick the ball. To help me with my leg positions I imported a walk cycle guide onto the right view plane to use as a guide. In the past when I had done walk cycles, I started off by moving the feet and hips first and left the other elements such as arm movement for after. As my character was moving in a diagonal line , every time I moved one of the legs I had to make sure that the poles where lined up properly because a few times I had problems with the legs overlapping or being too far apart.

I never really had that much trouble in the past creating walk cycles, but when it came to making this man run it took a few attempts. On some of the frames I forgot to set the key and I wouldn’t notice this until after I had finished which meant that between some of the movements parts of the body would move when they shouldn’t. also I found that I had made the character walk instead of run. I tried to fix this by adjusting the frames on the timeline but it wouldn’t work. Also another problem that I had was that I made the steps too far apart and the hips would come down way too much. This made the man appear to do a set of lunges rather than run. To fix the problems I was having I decided to cut down the amount of steps that he took and to have the camera move around so that if there were any bad mistakes they would not be visible.

 This solved the major issues I was having with the legs; however the arm movements looked very static because I couldn’t move the hands properly. Another problem I encountered when doing the arms was the shoulder poles kept moving and making the elbows go into the side of his body. This also made his arms “pop” when they moved a certain way. I got around this problem by adding more frames in between the movements that I already had. I also set the poles to one point and avoided moving them unless it was necessary.

Getting the ball to kick the ball without overlapping it was also a challenge. I put the ball on another motion path however I needed it to start of a lot quicker. I changed the end frame of the motion path several times to get the speed and height right. I tried to adjust the foot roll and toe tip to make the kicking motion seem as realistic as possible, but I did this before I decided to use a different camera angle so in my render you can’t really tell.

The in the final part of this scene, I wanted the camera to zoom in onto the man’s face and have him pull an almost evil grin of victory. I managed to get the eyes to squint properly but eyebrows wouldn’t come down any lower so it didn’t look quite as I planned it too.  Also the moustache got in the way of his mouth movement again, and with the shadow that it creates you cannot really see that he is grinning.

After I finished the final facial expressions, I set up multiple cameras so that I can have it cut between them at different parts. However when I play blasted the animation I decided to remove them as the animation was too quick and having these different camera movements would be very confusing. Rendering my work will take a long time because of the grass and trees in the scene but I don’t want to get rid of them as I think it makes it look a lot better. 

Although I made quite a few mistakes when putting this animation together and had to back track at some parts. I am happy with how the finished play blasts and renders look. I think I portrayed the emotion well through the movements and expressions. If I had a chance to go redo this project I would have liked to have had a part in the planning process as I was not too keen on this story idea. Also I would have liked to use a different model that was rigged a bit better and that had hand deformers set up.

This is what the two final files looked like: