3rd Year 3D Animation Projects

Some 3rd Year 3D Animation Work

Below are some excerpts of my third year work from university. 

Maya: Animation Layers

As I still attend university for animation, one assignment we were prompted to do was make use of animation layers. For this project, I wanted a loop that I could add some layers to to practise using them. My initial idea was to have a character skateboarding, and then ride up a ramp to jump off the skateboard and hit a large creature in the face. 

I created this quick sketch with Adobe Photoshop.

Once I had come up with this idea, I found rigs I wanted to use. I settled with the Mikey rig from the Agora Community website, made by Artem Dubina. For the creature, I decided to use the Monster Creature rig by manoanim on Gumroad. I then set up the rest of my scene with basic geometry. 

For my first pass, I focused mostly on the section I wanted to use layers on: the character pushing the skateboard. I used parts of this video for reference. I also parented a camera to a skateboard model I obtained from TurboSquid by danielcapalongo. 

I submitted this playblast and received the feedback that he is not rotating and translating enough with his core, which I updated in the next playblast. I also created the camera that was parented to the skateboard, as well as creating a rough previs for what I wanted the rest of the scene to look like, which is the second video below. At this point, I just wanted feedback on my ideas and blocking, so I didn't try to polish it too much. 

I had planned an FK/IK switch for the leg pushing the skateboard, so I could get a nice arc with FK as he's pushing and later plant the foot on the board with IK. I planned to parent a locator to the FK foot, bake out the locator, then make the floor IK for the whole animation and parent it to the locator. After having trouble baking it, I decided this would be a final final step when everything else was nice and cool. 

The next round of feedback I implemented for the skateboarding loop was that the leg wasn't extending out far enough for the power he would need to go up the ramp and launch the board. I submitted the base animation loop separate from the rest of the scene so I could continue working solely on that layer. However, I did submit a second playblast where I implemented my layer. I received some feedback based on my camera, specifically how much negative space I was leaving at the end. It was too much, so I had to rotate the camera back so the shot had more space being used for actual information. 

At this point, I was trying to add the whole rig to an override animation layer. However, every time I did, it caused the rig to freak out. I ended up trying to use additive layers for the animation; however, this proved to not be the right choice, as it made the character look like he was punching a physical object. A screenshot of what would happen when I tried to add the character to an override layer is below the videos. 

The feedback I implemented to the main loop here was to add more offsets to the movements of Mikey. At this point, I was feeling like my loop was coming close to being cool. I was also more successful in creating an override layer for Mikey, as I realised he had a divide zero error coming from his tongue when I tried to add it to an override layer. I simply excluded the tongue from being in the layer to prevent the above from happening. This let me fix the look of the arms punching walls. I implemented feedback for the rest of my scene, which was mainly adding more objects to the background to give the foreground subject a better sense of speed for the audience. 

Next, I received feedback on adding more of a horizon line so that the scene had a bit more depth. I also added some slight camera shake to the camera parented to the skateboard to make it a bit more interesting visually. I achieved this by using the animBot noise feature. I made the creature look away from Mikey for longer, so that the skateboard seems like it's actually surprising him because he couldn't actually see it. I also made his reacting slightly slower. 

I still had heaps of negative space sitting next to the creature as the camera pans to it. This was because I didn't  want to actually animate a backflip. However, since this was stopping me from having an actually nice camera layout, I had to animate a backflip. I used this video as a reference. I didn't mean for the timing of the jump and lading to feel so cartoony, but I decided to lean into it with adding a bit of stretch on the legs as Mikey leaps off the board. 

I also received and implemented the feedback that Mikey should do something like lean back on his skateboard to actually get the front wheels over the planks of wood that make the ramp. I thought this was a very nice detail to add, as it gave a bit more character to the animation. 

I implemented feedback on trying to make the pose look more interesting for the audience by facing Mikey towards the camera more. I also added some silly flips as the skateboard ricocheted off of the monster. The skateboard then landed on its wheels as it rolled away. My mentor said this would add a bit of funny cartoonishness to my already pretty cartoony and slightly outlandish scene, and I agree.  

This next pass is the last pass with feedback, as the due date for this assignment has passed. I animated the face slightly, but couldn't change the mouth pose as much as I would have liked. At some point, Mikey lost the geometry for his top teeth, and by the time I noticed it was too late. In the future, to avoid this, I will start referencing rigs instead of importing them so that anything that breaks can hopefully be fixed by re-referencing the rig. 

I received feedback to polish the monster at the end. So, I decided to change the way he looked at Mikey. Apparently, the rotations seemed unnatural, so I made the monster translate his whole body, as well as rotate it. I think this is more engaging visually and looks slightly less awkward. The results have been playblasted below. 

Maya: Quadruped Cycles

Another set of tasks assigned by an instructor in my university course. This one focused on quadruped cycles, focusing on things like weight shifts and offsets. 

Please add some sort of autosave or quicksave feature when editing a Rookies draft entry. Thank you. 

Above is a compilation of my university work. The first week involved analysing a quadruped gait video. I used mrViewer to annotate the video and go through the video frame by frame. In the second week, we animate basic geometry to try and understand how quadrupeds walk through simple shapes. Next, I began doing a basic block out for a walk cycle with the rig I wanted to use, the Jacko rig. I then started adding some offsets and cleaning up the feet so that it felt less like it was sliding. 

Next, I started to block out the poses for the next gait I wanted to animate, which was a dog's trot. Again, I began adding offsets and adding more keyframes to controls like the feet, the hips, and the chest. In week 6, our task was to add an extra bit of animation to break the cycle. I decided to use animation layers to add a yawn. I made a second version, as seen below, where I lowered the chest more as he yawned and fixed small issues like the toes clipping. 

Overall, I enjoyed animating these assignments. I enjoyed getting to look at animals for my references, and I thoroughly enjoy animating cycles. The Jacko rig was pleasant to work with; it is very cute. 

Maya: Mixamo and MoCap

This semester, we also developed our skills in cleaning and combining motion capture data from Mixamo. 

First, I grabbed a Mixamo animation I wanted to use. I decided on the Breakdance 1990 animation and imported the animation into Maya as an FBX. Initially, when choosing a rig to use, I learned that a game-ready rig would be easier to apply the animations to. With this in mind, I decided to use the Spiderman rig by Agora Community. Initially, I wasn't sure if this rig would work, as it uses an add-on called mGear. However, I decided to try and use the Spiderman rig, as it was game-ready and had reasonable proportions. First, we set both the animation FBX and the rig into a T-pose at -10 frames to align them, then assigned the bones and controllers before applying the animation. After that, we baked the animations out onto the controllers on the rig before exporting that data into Studio Library. A screenshot of the T-poses can be seen below. In the screenshit ti the right, the Mixamo skeleton has been selected. The extra arms coming out of Miles are just his ghost arms. He also has ghost legs, which are aligned exactly with his actual leg joints, which got kind of confusing when I was assigning the bones. 

In the first playblast, as seen in the compilation at the bottom, the fingers were so ugly. I'm not sure why they went ugly, but I'm assuming it's because of how the rotations were calculated on the rig. I should have looked at changing the rotation and translation space of several parts of the rig before baking it out, especially the hands. The hands were set to follow the core control, which means the hands followed the translations of the body instead of the global control. Luckily, this was not too detrimental as the motion capture data was pretty good, but next time I will have to be extra careful so that I don't get too far into the work with the wrong spaces assigned to the controls. 

Anyway, I ended up having to hand-key the fingers on both the MoCap I chose. Some of the data was fine, especially on the hand with the green controls, but the blue hand especially was super messed up. I did try re-assigning all the joints and controls in a new file before applying the animation and muting the rest of the rig, but that didn't help. 

The second motion capture animation I used was the Breakdance Uprock animation. I thought they already started and ended in pretty similar poses, so that would save me some time. However, the Breakdance Uprock animation forces itself to loop, meaning there is some foot sliding. I had to fix that when importing the animation, as it becomes especially noticeable when the rest of the animation has solid foot planting. After cleaning this up and baking it out, I uploaded this animation to Studio Library, and imported both files into one scene. 

After this, I began spending some time cleaning up contacts so they felt more solid. I used a lot of locators and some cubes to achieve this, as seen below. Those yellow things came with Spiderman. 

I also began adding animation layers to change the silhouette of the character. At some points, I found it easier to edit the base animation, so I wasn't fighting with it. I saved many versions of my file to try and make the destruction less destructive. A playblast with the different versions is below. 

Overall, I really enjoyed this task. I enjoyed just being able to clean up another animation and make it look nice. For some reason, I also enjoyed tracking the hands and feet to make sure they contacted the floor correctly. I think this was especially easy on this rig, as the texture had little web patterns that I could track. 

Conclusion

This is some of my work from my third year at university. I wish I could have uploaded more videos from every week of work, but I got banned from uploading videos to YouTube for 24 hours and Vimeo only lets me upload 3 videos without having to pay for more. 

When I started my university course, I had no idea what I wanted to do, only that I wanted to do something creative. In the beginning weeks, we tried a bit of everything, including 3D animation basics like the bouncing ball. I'm very glad I decided to get into 3D animation, as the process of creating these animations can be intriguing, and the outcome can be satisfying. I look forward to developing my skills further in the future. 

Thank you.