3D Animation for Games
Brief Breakdown
We were assigned to create 4 individually animated cycles
for games and then place these together in a themed cinematic as a group. It is
also required to have a short voice over for the character.
Plan
For this project
the base assignment is to create minimum 4 good looking animations, however to
make the cinematic I think it is necessary to create several more to give a
better and more flowing animation.
Team Plan
For this project we sat down as a team and decided the story
for our cinematic. Wed did this so we could each plan for the amount of
animation needed. The initial idea we came up with was a thief robbing a store
however I wanted to give myself a challenge in this module as I really enjoy
the animation aspects of this course. So to make the project more challenging,
I asked the team if I could animated an older character who changes between movement
characteristics. She would start as a frail old lady, then as she was affected
by the robbery, she would change and suddenly become a nimble track star with
no physical issues. This would be a challenge to get the viewer to believe in
the stance changes but a great example of this is the character Yoda during his
fight with Darth Sidious in the Star Wars Saga.
As you can see in this clip Yoda starts of as a frail older
character with a walking stick but when he is attacked he suddenly develops the
ability to move around fast and flip across the room even after struggling to
stand up.
Animation List
The list of
animations that I think will be required for this project are:
- · Walk Cycle
- · Run Cycle
- · Jump
- · Slide
- · Idle pose
- · Lip sync
- · Fall
- · Push
Initial animation tests
So for my
character I chose to use the Norman old lady rig (http://www.romanim.com/norman_database.php). This is a fairly simple rig however
the start poses is already key framed which might cause me some issues.
-Walk
First off I
started looking at the walk animation, for this I tried to reference videos of
people walking using Zimmer frames however there wasn’t much referents so in
the end I used a tutorial of how to use a Zimmer frame.
From this I
quickly create some key poses. The only issue I had with this is that I
couldn’t get my head round how to loop the animation as she lifted the Zimmer
frame forward as she stood still. However I soon realised that it was needed to
slide the feet back as she place the Zimmer down then move the Zimmer back as
her feet moved forward. This took a little bit of tweaking to get the time
right but here is the final result.
-Fall
From this I
started to work on the falling animation again I struggled find reference of
someone being pushed over a Zimmer frame. So to work out how she would fall I
repeated the movement with a chair and tried to visualized how someone would
fall with the frame. Here is a test of what I produced.
So as you can
see this is a very broken animation however this was a test so that I could
work out how she would fall but get back up as she fell. In terms of movement I
think this worked really well, it just needed some major tweaking including
keeping the character central which would be the biggest challenge.
-Rig Issues
After the 2
animations I did using this rig I soon realised that the rig its self was
broken and causing me a lot of issues. I tried many ways to fix the rig however
each task was taking me several times longer than it should have. So I decided
to scrap the work I had done and find a new rig, this is a big risk as I have
already wasted a lot of time on the first rig.
Rig Two New Animations
After the issues with the first rig I chose a rig called
Morpheus (http://www.joshburton.com/projects/morpheus.asp).
This was a more advance rig and meant that I could tweak the character to my
liking.
-Walk new
For the new
walk I took exactly the same approach as I was quite happy with my first
attempt on the previous rig. The only thing I changed majorly was the Zimmer
frame movements as it hits the ground there is now a slight bounce also the
timing of this animation is a lot better from the first. This is my final
result.
-Fall New
For the fall
animation I decided to go back to the drawring board as I wasn’t fully happy
with the outcome of the previous animation. So instead of looking for people
falling over with a zimmer frame I decided to look into break rolls. With this
in mind I created a pose story board combining the Zimmer frame into the poses.
From this I decided that I wanted her to push herself up into more of a flip motion to return to standing. This is what I produced using my new reference.
There are
still a few errors in this but for now it works from the camera angle we are
using.
-Run
When I started to approach animations with the new rig I
decided to start with a different animation as I wanted a break from the walk
cycle. With this I decided to work on the run animation. For this my old lady
had to look like she was running like an Olympic runner but still displaying
some of the structures from and old person. I decided the key feature to keep
the same was her arched back. I started to look into Olympic track runners for
reference because the movement of the body parts were over exaggerated.
As you can see the main distribution of weight is through
then as the feet leave the floor the weight is carried all the way through the
spine and into the neck then back down the spine as the next foot impacts the
ground. Whilst used the arms to counter balance the weight. This creates a
slight head nod and a very flexible spine movement. This is the run I produced.
As you can see is this video I’ve really exaggerated the hip
movement, this is because I felt that it made her feel more loose as an
animation. Another thing I implemented was a finger bend. This is actually
impossible bend in real life the fingers would break, however when we look back
at the Olympic runners the speed in which them move create an optical illusion
of bending almost as if they were morphing between key frames. I also gave the
run a breathing animation in the centre of the loop too appear as if the
character is gasping for air. She also has a look of determination and focus to
catch the thief. Overall I think the outcome of this run works it looks
slightly cartoony with the exaggerations I implemented but that is the style we
chose for our cinematic. If I have time I would like to go back and tweak the
arm movement a little and add more flow to their movement.
-Slide
For the slide I wanted to make her knee slide along the
ground. In theory this would not work as she will be sliding on concrete
however as our style is cartoony boundaries can be slightly pushed. During the
research for the knee slide it was another animation I found tricky getting
hold of one that I like so to get around this I combined to animations from
references to create the slide I wanted. These are the videos I referenced
from.
As you can see I created my own pose from two existing
poses. Realistically this pose would not work because of weight distribution
but again you can get away with this in cartoon style to an extent. In the
final animation I intend to exaggerate this bend even further. This is what I
have produced for the slide starting from the running pose.
This animation does look slightly weird when it is
standalone but I have tested moving the base controller and when I do this the
slide works. Again this animation is still a bit too rigid if I have time I
will go in and edit however it is not one I will be using for the 4 chosen
animations.
-Jump
For the jump there are many different approaches I could
have taken but I decided to use a form of Parkour which is also known as free
running. There are many different styles of jumps however I wanted to use a
Dash Vault. Finding reference on this was really easy as there are a lot of
Parkour tutorials online. I found a video that had already been slowed down and
the animation was exactly what I was looking for.
From this video this is what I produced
I am quite happy with the outcome of this however the hands
need a lot of work and the ground push needs a few minor tweaks. I may use this
as one of my 4 final animations.
-Push
For the push I decided I wasn’t going to use this in the
cinematic so I decided to make a really short standalone cinematic. The
approach I went for during this was a cartoon style animation. I started looking at cartoon push’s but
couldn’t find one that looked exactly how I wanted it to. So I drew up my own
story board.
As you can see I wanted the push to consist of two boxes,
the second of which would fall on her as she pushed the bottom box in the
stack.
This is the result of my animation. As you can see this
animation works fairly well there are a few minor timing issues towards the end
of the push but as this is not going to be in the cinematic I decided to use my
time more efficiently.
-extra anims
-skateboard anims
For this
animation I decided that we needed more action within the cinematic so to
extend and break up the chase a little more. So I chose to incorporate a
skateboard into the scene for this I broke it down into 3 animations; Mount,
mount to loop and loop. For this I looked at skateboarding tutorials.
From this I
noticed that there are 2 main sequences; the foot push and the two footed
mount. Here are the two images I took from the video as reference.
Here are the
3 animations I produced.
-tackle
We decided to
add a tackle at the end of the cinematic where my character catches the thief.
For this we decided that it would be easier for one person to animate both so I
took a copy of Alex’s rig including his run animation and added in the tackle
between the two rigs. This was a challenge as his character set was created all
in one file. To rectify this issue I set the keys within the clip to active
then duplicated the run frames so that I had a loop of 3 runs. From here I
simply timed my animations around his run then animated frame by frame as the
old lady tackled the thief. For reference I looked at American football tackles
I decided to base my tackle around this video.
I decided to
angle the tackle slightly differently as she was coming directly from behind so
the fall would be slightly different this is the outcome of the tackle.
I think this
worked fairly well again there are a few timing issues but from the angle we
are going to be using this animation from it works.
-Lip sync
Though this
was originally one of the primary tasks I wasn’t entirely sure which part of
the cinematic the old lady would talk so I waited till I had finished all of my
other animations. The dialog we decided to use for my character was “Not today
sonny, I ran track in school bitch”. To match up the mouth to the dialog I
simply kept saying the quote out loud to work out the mouth moment for each
word. This is what I produced.
Cinematic
During the process of putting the cinematic together as a team .First compiled all the teams’ animations into one file then built the scene around them. We then created 3 separate files to produce the cinematic faster so that it could be worked on by multiple people. The first contained most of the cinematic which we set up with the camera sequencer. The Second was the coffee shop scene with the police officers. The final file was the tackle at the very end. We chose to do it this way as the two scenes we did separately were easier to render separately and edit back together in a video editor.
Overall the final cinematic came out fairly well there are a
lot of changes that we could have implemented and I would have like to have
spent more time on sound. Challenge during this project was team work as we all
had different ways and ideas on how to animate so there were a lot of compatibility
issues between each character. If we were to redo this again I would create a
character set first rather than making multiple animations in separate files.
