Category: George Week 11-20

Summary for previous :

Pre-production of animation is a crucial stage to ensure the smooth progression of the entire project. Firstly, ensure you have a clear and captivating story, which serves as the soul of the animation. The script should feature compelling characters, intriguing plotlines, and an engaging conclusion. In character design, each character should be crafted with a unique appearance and personality traits. Elaborately construct their identities, ensuring their looks and traits align with their backgrounds and personalities. Also, devise a comprehensive storyline that encompasses events before and after the animation’s occurrence.

Storyboarding serves as the blueprint for animation production, delineating the layout, shots, and actions of each scene. Crafting storyboards enables better control over the animation’s pacing and plot development. Design the animation’s scenes, including backgrounds and props, ensuring coherence with the story and character styles to enhance audience immersion.

It’s essential to establish reasonable budgets and timelines to ensure timely project completion.

Summary for body mechanics :

Creating compelling body mechanics animation requires a thorough understanding of anatomy and a keen eye for observation. Animators must study the intricacies of human or creature movements, observing real-life actions in various scenarios to inform their work. Reference footage serves as a valuable tool for dissecting specific movements and understanding the mechanics behind them. By carefully planning animations with key poses and breakdowns, animators establish the rhythm and timing necessary to bring their characters to life.

In executing body mechanics animation, attention to weight, balance, and exaggeration is crucial. Animators must ensure that their characters move with a sense of physicality, considering how gravity affects their motions and when to exaggerate movements for emphasis. Incorporating overlap and follow-through adds realism to animations, as secondary actions naturally flow from primary movements. Additionally, maintaining a clear silhouette and a strong line of action enhances the readability and impact of the animation, ensuring that viewers can easily interpret the character’s movements.

In the refinement process, meticulous attention to detail is essential, particularly in refining the curves of various body parts to ensure smooth and natural movements. Synchronizing hip movements with the overall body animation maintains coherence and fluidity, contributing to a more lifelike portrayal. Easing in and out of movements is crucial for realistic transitions, preventing abruptness and enhancing the animation’s fluidity.

Mastering timing throughout the animation is key to maintaining a cohesive and engaging flow, ensuring that movements occur at the right pace and rhythm. Additionally, observing curves for secondary objects like hands is vital, as they contribute significantly to overall animation quality, especially when visible to the camera.

Accurately conveying weight through body movements is a priority, which may involve adjusting or replacing certain leg parts for better effects. Transitioning from blocking to spline animation poses challenges, particularly in understanding center of gravity and spine movements, which require careful consideration and adjustment.

While attention to detail using tools like motion trails and the graph editor is important, it’s crucial to maintain a balanced focus on the overall animation without becoming overly fixated on specific elements. This ensures that the animation remains cohesive and visually appealing as a whole.

Summary for acting:

Body：

To enhance realism in animations, reduce exaggerated movements and incorporate drag during turning motions. Focus on aligning facial expressions and eye direction with the gaze, introduce breakdowns for smoother transitions, and shift from blocking to spline animation.

Face：

To create smoother and more realistic animations, focus on aligning facial expressions and eye direction with the gaze, introduce breakdowns between actions for seamless transitions, and shift from blocking to spline animation. Additionally, refine mouth shapes by ensuring the upper teeth remain stable and allowing the mouth corners to open wider for specific sounds.

For the mouth animation, beginning by locking the camera selection for control and importing audio to identify key words. Focus on the jaw after blocking out the main sounds. Pay attention to the detailed movements of the mouth and teeth before pronouncing sounds, like ensuring the teeth touch before saying “Talking.” Adjust the mouth corners and jaw together to reflect the character’s tone and emotion, and keyframe essential positions starting with the mouth corners. Ensure smooth timing for phrases like “Stop” and “Talking,” and carefully observe the mouth and teeth positions during speech. Specific mouth shapes are crucial: for example, the mouth forms a small “O” for “p,” teeth close quickly for “S,” and the lip bounces for “T.”

Adjust the perspective to see side views of the lips for detailed refinements, ensuring the lip movements remain natural, especially at the ends of words like “ing.” Properly adjust the teeth position towards the end and apply overlap animation to mouth movements. Fewer keyframes are needed for the nose, but it should stretch in sync with the mouth. Enhance the cheeks for expressions like “Please” or “Stop,” ensuring smooth transitions. Avoid showing the back teeth by adjusting the jaw position, as this is a common issue in animation. Following these steps helps create a natural and emotionally accurate lip sync animation.

Due to this week’s limited class time, the feedback focused solely on mouth shapes. The main issue highlighted was that the upper teeth cannot move independently as they are connected to the entire head skeleton. Additionally, for certain sounds like “s” or “eii,” the corners of the mouth can open slightly wider.

When pronouncing the “r” sound, it’s important to ensure that the tongue is visible. This means that the tongue should exhibit some movement rather than being completely hidden inside the mouth.

For the “BMP” syllable, it’s important to have two frames of complete closure of the mouth during pronunciation. This means that during the pronunciation of the “B” sound, the lips will completely close, and then there should also be a frame of complete closure between the “M” and “P” sounds. This ensures clarity and continuity in pronunciation.

this is the rendering for submission

This week’s feedback can be summarized as follows: in certain expressions where the eyes are not looking directly forward, the facial lines form an angle, opening in the direction of the gaze. Some actions and transitions lack breakdowns, transitioning to spline. Regarding mouth shapes, they are typically defined as trapezoids, with one side of the lips being flatter and the other having a greater curve.

When it comes to body postures, it’s important to reduce excessive movements. Drag is essential during turning movements to ensure a natural transition.

This week’s feedback led me to reduce the number of actions, keeping only the two main ones, so I re-recorded the reference.

For the eyebrows, I divided them into three parts, with the greatest displacement in the first part and the least in the last part.

Regarding the eyes, I adjusted the upper eyelids to not cover too much of the pupils, as it can make the character look intoxicated.

Additionally, I made modifications to the mouth shapes I created in the studio library.

“I’m sorry that people are so jealous of me, but I can’t help it that I’m popular.” After discussion we picked this dialogue. And for the next step is to record the own reference.

I’ve sketched out some ideas, and this week’s task is to begin our blocking.

Today we finished the last polishing feedback, I need to track the arc not only the box but also inculding the hands. And there’s many part I can do slow in and out to show the weight and speed.

For Acting part, we need to choose three five-second audio clips without video, imagine the setting in which the character takes place, the story before and after the sentence, and then find the right rig

This week’s feedback focused on refining the curves of various body parts and ensuring that the hips follow smoothly. Easing in and out remains a critical aspect to pay close attention to, especially in mastering the rhythm (timing).

It’s worth noting that, concerning the curves, I only observed the curves of the box but overlooked those of the hands, which are also crucial as they are prominently visible to the camera.

This is the final playblast

Switching from blocking to spline is quite an annoying task.

I don’t have a clear understanding of various aspects like the center of gravity and spine movement. After turning off the motion trail for the arms to adjust the root, the arms and the box started intersecting, and this issue persists even after adjusting the curves.

Paying attention to the motion trail and graph editor is also crucial, but I sometimes get overly focused on these details and neglect the overall picture.

When the body sways left and right, the box needs to follow, which requires keyframing. It’s a meticulous process of setting small keyframes and considering follow-through and anticipation, among other things.

This week’s feedback suggests that I still need to make some adjustments to the body movements to better convey the weight of the box. In certain parts, the legs need complete left-right replacements to achieve a better result. Some movements require stronger easing in and out, and the body also needs to follow certain arcs.

George chose the first idea and added some animations involving doors, which made the entire animation funnier and more lively. However, the total duration has more than doubled.

My shift weight still has significant issues. There are some minor timing adjustments needed, and in certain areas, the body needs to perform C-shaped stretches to convey power and speed.