Oil Paint on Glass - Potential & Limitations - General

For the special effects in our animation we have decided to do them with paint on glass to add to the hand painted aesthetic. Animating with oil paint on glass is much more time consuming than other types of animation but it has a very distinct and rewarding aesthetic which can really aid in telling the story. One of my favourite oil paint on glass animations is the rendition of the old man and the sea by Aleksandr Petrov, this is a beautiful animation which really makes use of the medium. Oil paint on glass practitioners usually will scrape off only a portion of the paint which needs to be changed as this is more efficient than painting the entire scene for every frame. The advantage of using oil paints over any other type of paint is that oil paints take a long time to dry which makes it idea to animate with because it can be changed and reapplied many times. The medium itself is alot more practical and organic than other mediums such as computer generated animation which is why we think it will be interesting to try and combine them in an animation.    

 

 

Character and Narrative - Week 10 Summary

This week has mainly consisted of finishing the blog posts and getting all the work into order but we did also finish the paint on glass portion of the effects and finished compositing the animation on premier, this was a lot more time consuming task that i previously thought it would be as we had to mask the fire to fit into the scene and also added a glow to the fire which took me and Brenda a while to get it looking right and not too overpowering. Me and Brenda have both worked hard on this project and i really feel i have achieved a step in my storytelling abilities, working with Brenda has had a big influence on this. The aspect of this project i enjoyed the most was rigging the characters, working on this project made me realise this and i am going to pursue this area much further and try to learn as much as i can about it.

Character and Narritive - Study Task 4 - Doing DUIK

i didn't expect to like DUIK because I'm not a fan of 2d computer animation that much but when using DUIK i began to like it alot, this is most probably because of my interest and brief experience with 3d rigging in Maya. For this reason i also found it quite easy and very enjoyable to rig my character. I found that working with DUIK was just like a 2d version of rigging in maya. My character was a chicken character that i designed quickly by using reference images from google to help, when rigging my character i put too many joints in the feet and didn't want to put ik chains on them all so i just parented them in the suitable hierarchy to the foot joint. I only added controllers where i needed the character to be controlled from, this ended up being the head, each wing, ribcage, hips and each foot. This added enough functionality to make a simple animation with my character. I then parented joints together to create more of a skeleton structure and to connect the different parts of the character.

Character and Narrative - Study Task 3 - Puppet Master

I found the puppet pin tool in after effects easy to use, all i needed to do was to make sure my picture was a png so it was only an image of the parts i wanted to deform. Then i placed the puppet pin tools on the 2d mesh and set key frames on the puppet pins to animate them. I think this is a ok tool for after effects and definitely would be useful in some very basic instances but in most cases i think the puppet pin tool produces quite unrealistic deformations when used to fully animate a subject.

Character and Narrative - Week 9 Summary

Since we both finished animating last week this week has been mostly rendering, we are rendering out in arnold because it has a good realistic lighting system which helps set the mood for our story. Besides rendering we also started working on the paint on glass effects such as the fire and the spirits. After a couple different linetests we decided on the best fire and painted it in the stop motion studio where we captured the frames with dragonframe. I like the aesthetic that has formed from the hand painted textures and the oil paint effects, i feel like the animation has a well structured aesthetic. I also began compositing the animation, masking the fire to blend in with the scene in premier and cleaning up the paint on glass frames in photoshop. We also made a last minute change to the animation, we added a shot before the previous first shot to help establish that Totsi is looking through the tent because otherwise it might not have been explicitly clear to the viewer. Also this week we booked the sound studio and recorded our sounds with the help of Max, it was very rewarding and really brought out the characters personalities when the sounds were composited with the animation.

CG - Potential & Limitations - Versatility

Computer generated animation is very versatile, it is used primarily in 3d animation, Movies and video games. CG is used extensively in each of these massive fields and this is a big advantage of learning CG animation skills because they are transferable to alot of different areas of the creative industry. I found a talk from Naughty Dog studios on the Autodesk youtube channel, it shows how they make realistic rigs for the characters and about how they use other programs such as mudbox to edit the corrective blendshapes. I think CG animation is more versatile than other mediums such as hand drawn or 2d computer animation because although both these mediums can be applied to the game aesthetic there is no real link to the scripting side of video games in the mediums themselves unlike CG. In addition CG has been used to simulate other more traditional mediums for example cut out animation for south park. 

 

Character and Narrative - Week 8 Summary

This week we started animating, we found the Maya animating process really fast and easy. First of all we split the scenes so we each had an equal amount of scenes to animate, we also decided to use different maya scenes for each scene. This was to make Maya run faster and also incase a scene gets corrupted or errors occur at least its just one scene and not the whole animation. When animating i began by blocking out the key poses for the characters first, working on stepped tangents and then when the key poses were good enough i started animating the overlapping action which i found easier with smoothed out tangents. I really wanted to try and push the poses so when i was animating i had my sketchbook next to the keyboard and i would draw the poses very fluidly and try to achieve a heavily exaggerated pose to try and get the most out of the poses in Maya. Some scenes were harder than others to get organic movement so we recorded each other acting out the scenes for reference. for the more emotional, impacting scenes me and Brenda helped each other out alot trying to capture what the feelings actually feel like and how they can feel right visually. The rigs i created only had a few squash and stretch features but for the scene when Totsi enters the tent we needed a much higher level of deformation so i used a lattice to get the stretching that we needed to make the animation look pleasing. 

Character and Narrative - Week 7 Summary

This week wasn't that productive because of Manchester animation festival taking up the majority of the week but we still have our time managed. we were going to start animating at the end of this week but i needed extra time just to make sure the rigs are safe to give to the animation team (me and Brenda), i did this by checking all the controllers and locking and hiding the unused attributes to minimise potential mistakes and confusion for the animator. I also made sure everything was named correctly and put the meshes, skeleton and controllers into groups just to organise everything in the outliner and to make it abit easier if i need to correct rigging errors and mistakes during the animating stage.

Also this week i added the required functionality for the props, such as the tent door swinging open and closed and the windchimes swinging, i did this with blendshapes and used controllers with set driven keys. Due to some of the shots needing to be filmed from different angles i made a switch which toggles the tent to opposite sides, i also added switches to toggle the visibility of each character.