Walking Animation Submission

Over the last month I have been working on a walking animation, this has been a lot of trial and error to get this right but I ended up really liking what I had done overall, especially for a first proper attempt at one. What I had learned from the walking animation is that it is not only the legs that move when a character is walking, every part of the body must move as it would in real life. This also adds to the principles of animation as it helps it look more flued and cute.

I created this animation using point to point, the first thing I animated was the legs. I put in the key poses, and then added the inbetweens later to make it look more smooth flowing.

I then did the same with the arms and legs however I forgot to animation block these without the inbetweens.  Below is screenshots of what the animation looked like when it was half done, I had added the inbetweens and also added motion to the arms, hands, torso and head. One key thing that I had learned from my research is that the head moving up and down is essential to make it look realistic, as if someone was walking there head would not stay still, same goes for the rest of the body.

This is a playblast of what it began to look like.

This animation took me more than three attempts to get right as there was a lot of trial and error involved. The first major problem I had was a trying to use the Moom rig which for some reason kept deleting my key frames, however once I got it working I had noticed that I got the timing way off and it ended up looking ridiculous.

Nearer the end of the production of the animation I ended up tweeking a few things such as making the arms move more exaggeratedly so that he looked more enthusiastic, it also added to how well the animation flows. Once I was happy I batch rendered frames 1 to 23 using turtle; I had also placed some lights into the scene. I then imported these images into premier and added a white background in that as it has the same affect.

If I was to go back and re do this animation I would add more of a swing into his arms to make him look even happier as my goal was to make him express happiness, I would also add a slightly bigger spring into his step. When it comes to rendering I would also render having shadows turned on for that extra piece of detail. Within this animation I think I have hit many of the principles.

Animation Walk Cycle

The final steps for this animation was to add in a few more frames to make it look more fluent, I also added movement to the hips and the shoulders to make it look realistic. I am pretty happy with how this turned out overall and for a first proper attempt I think I have done well.

Once the key frames were all inserted and all of the animation within the graph was curved I added some lights into the scene and batch rendered using Maya Software. The reason for this was because I preferred the cartoon look of Maya rather than going for more realistic with Arnold. Also I couldn’t work out why but turtle did not look very good even after I had turned the sample rates up. Even though I have used the standard renderer I still like the look of it. Once this was done I imported the image sequence into Adobe Premier and within this I added a white background into the project to add appeal. Once this was sorted I exported from Premier in HD 1080p and set the frames per second to 24 as this is what the animation was created at.

Evolution of Games Design – Resident Evil 7

The resident evil franchise creators have always tried to base their games around the horror aspect being the key theme.  Resident evil 7 did a good job utilizing the newest technology within consoles and PC. Due to this graphically it turned out to be amazing. The game is made up by many different small spaces rather than large open spaces, because of this the developers could make each area very  detailed and atmospheric. In the mansion each room tells the player a different story through the items and props within them. Due to the amount of resident evil games that had been made and with the failures of the most recent ones the developers took a rather large break from the franchise and they re invented the game with resident evil 7. This was the first game to utilize a first person atmospheric style and in my opinion it helped return the franchise to what it was on the ps1. Resident evil 1 was also a very good game and the developers gave it a fixed point camera style which would move with each room the players move into. I don’t think this style would work today but back then they may have been limited so this is why they took this approach.

The graphics for resident evil 7 console for this game look amazing but they are slightly restricted due to it being on console but the game can be played in full HD on powerful PC’s. Developers always give PC players the option to change all the graphics settings as it depends on the persons PC. Whereas you do not have these settings on console because they are capped. Resident Evil 7 was also made to be used with Playstation VR. The graphics did decrease significantly and the game only works with looking around however due to it being a horror game this was an amazing touch. You can feel immersed into the atmosphere and the environment that the developers intended you to be sucked into.

Resident Evil 5 & 6 was a very low point for the franchise as the devlopers went for more of an action approach to try and stay up to date with other shooters. However because of this the franchise started the lose its horror edge. By being able to add more to games due to newer technology this is why the game may have taken a 3rd person appraoch for these titles which may have pushed it towards it losing its scary feel. Resident evil 7 went for a compelty new approach which shocked its primary audience as it did not look like the typical game; but it paid off in the end.

 

 

Art Essay – The Use of Art Deco Within Bioshock

My chosen Art Movement and game were Art Deco and the game series Bioshock. I chose this because I was already familiar with the games art and some of the building that structure was inspired by Art Deco.

Art Essay

Robot Ident – Improvements

I had finished the Robot Ident a couple of months ago now but looking back on it I thought it looks pretty plain overall. However rather than going back and changing the animation I chose to import it into after effects to give a new tool a try. I had recently seen some music videos use a sketch sort of look and have lines appear over the footage; this is where I have taken inspiration from. Whenever anything in the scene moves quickly I have added lines to make it look more animated and to add emphasis to the movement of the robot and the domino. It’s a very small change that did take me a while as I had to go through frame by frame, but overall I think it makes the animation look more alive, it also helps me hit more criteria of the 12 principles.

Doing the lines themselves was not that complicated. All I had to do was open up the video as its own layer within After Effects and open up the “Paint” window. I then made it so what I painted only lasted a single frame. This allowed me to change the lines on every so it wasn’t just the same pattern over and over again but instead every frames paint was unique.

Walking Animation – Leg Inbetweens

 

Unity – Sphere Coding

Walking Animation – Restart

After a little bit more research into the animation walking cycle I had decided that my walking cycle was too slow, because of this I decided to restart and use a different character model. I used a model called Boney from Moodle. Rather than a full cycle take 48 frames I changed to 24 frames for this new one. now the steps look fast but in my opinion better. So far I have only inserted the key poses on its legs but later I will be adding the inbetweens and also animating the rest of the body such as the arms.

Other than taking a gif of the fluent walk cycle I also did some animation blocking to show the key frames.

Star Wars Inspired Intro Card Finished

Following on from last week I began to further develop my star wars title card. Last week I thought I was close to being done however I did not like the sound effects I was using and I also thought the writing simply changing from yellow to red was rather boring.

Because of this I opened up the colour changing after effects project and downloaded a plugin called Saber. Using this plugin I added a red light-saber behind my name that activates as the words change colour.  Rather than it being silent I added some star wars music into the background that runs through the entire clip with a fade in and fade out effect on it. I also added an X-wing sound effect for the fly by and Kylo Rens lightsaber noise.

Testing Renderman

As I had downloaded render-man for a different project I decided to mess around with it a little bit to try and get used to it as the interface is different to the build in renderers within Maya. To do this I created a low poly penguin and placed a Pxr Shader onto it. The reason I chose low poly was because it was easy to create and I also wanted it to have a cartoon feel as render-man is what the Pixar movies use.

These are the different renders of the model using different lights. The first render was done using a light that illuminates the whole section so that the model is lighted equally.

The second render I used a single point light so it looked pretty dark but the model still looks detailed.

For the third render I used 3 point lighting. This gave the model a more defined edge.

Considering my penguin is pretty low detail as it is low poly Render-man has given it a pretty cool look.

This is what the character looked like using the default Maya renderer.