3D Character Animation Start

Well, back after a good week break (that, I have to admit, I desperately needed) and I've got my new brief.

It's the best brief in the world.

AD108 covers 3D character animation, which has long been a subject of interest for me.  A while back I began to learn basic modelling, rigging and animating in Blender.  Since I started college I haven't had much time for it, but I've been trying to brush back up on that as well as practice in Cinema 4D.  It's crazy how different the two programmes are, considering they both do pretty much the same thing.  Though admittedly I haven't read about any Blender equivalent to Cinema 4D's NURBS (and also, what does that even mean?  A nurb? )

But I'm feeling motivated and quite excited to get back into the meat of it, though I might tweak my character design a bit (I never actually liked it... but it ticked the boxes for the module).

Another good thing is that I passed my two previous modules!  Actually came as a BIG surprise because I was almost entirely certain I'd failed, and miserably at that.  But hey, I must have done something right!
What's even more surprising is not only did I pass, I passed better than any pass I've achieved previously.  So what I thought were my two weakest modules actually turned out to be my two strongest... it's a strange world.

Oh, speaking of which, I think I might have come up with a much easier and more time efficient method of combining the two halves of my ident.  Before the problem was that I was animating in Adobe Photoshop on a decent sized canvas.  (Bare in mind I'm not the best when it comes to animating in Photoshop).  I'd have this big canvas, then, and one run of the Granny's arm animation is almost 60 frames/layers.  The cat, if I remember right, was between 40 and 50 frames/layers.  As you can see on my last post, the Granny does her motion about 6 times.  So 6x60 is 360.  360 frames for the Granny plus the approximate of 40 for the cat's single run, 400 layers.  Then consider whatever final touches, like extra E4s or leaves falling (these could be keyframed for position change but rotation would have to be done manually, so let's say an extra 30 layers for all of them)... we're looking at 430 layers on a whatsit-by-3000 pixel canvas.

Wouldn't be a problem if I was using something like Final Cut (if I were any good at using Final Cut...) but in Adobe Photoshop it just becomes much more difficult.  Now, two options.

1) Continue in Adobe Photoshop, weathering the struggles of my poor tiny computer, and chip away at it
2) Struggle with Final Cut Pro (Hey, it can be tricky you know!) which would get the job done but I'm not awfully experienced with...

But first, I'm actually going to try something that, if it works, will let me combine the two halves with minimum effort and super quick.  Basically I've been trying to learn how to use Adobe Premiere and its chroma key effect.  I'm going to remove the background from the Granny and the Cat, replace it with a strong green or so, render, record at max quality with Fraps, go into Adobe Premiere and chroma key them back onto the original background and together.

It might not work.  It might be a trainwreck.  But if it does work it'll save a lot of time and effort and lag. I'll just have to give it a go and see what I can come up with.  And also, I can't forget to put the sound in.

Either way, I'll probably repost the final once I've puzzled out the best way to go about doing it.

Related AGAIN is that I got to see everyone elses' idents too, and my, they're fantastic.  You guys better upload them soon so I can oogle at their animated brilliance again, okay?

What else... oh yes, we watched a lovely little film called 'Cat Shit One', where two rabbit soldiers take on a base filled with enemy camels to rescue hostages.  It was actually really, really good, if bizarre, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.  War films usually aren't for me, but thanks to quirky writing and cute character design I got really invested in the two protagonists really quickly, and the animation was brilliant.
          Oddly, though, I could tell by looking at it that it was Japanese in origin.  I think there's a particular style in Japanese animations that involves character expressions, lip movements (like the shapes that the mouth makes, even if the English speech is synched well) and the camera angles.  I felt like I was having flashbacks to the idealized style of Final Fantasy Advent Children all the way through.
Japanese animations seem to keep mouth movement to a minimum; characters often seem as though they should be opening their mouths wider and making more distorted expressions but don't.  The same is true for the facial expressions in general; any distortion is very minimal.  A lot of the expressions of the characters seem to be created using the movements of the eyes instead.

Unfortunately, Youtube doesn't seem to have an good quality clip from Final Fantasy Advent Children, but here's a decent example of what I mean.  In the first 20 seconds of this clip, watch Cloud, the blonde man with spiky hair who's being addressed.  Watch his eyes.  Though his face hardly ever changes, his eyes are used to express his emotions instead.  He goes from quiet anger to uncertainty to fear to annoyance in 20 seconds.  And most of his face barely moves.



This was the sort of thing that happened in Cat Shit One.  The faces of the characters were quite still, but the eyes told you what they were feeling.

Camera angles is a bit harder to go into, and in Cat Shit One the oddly recognizably Japanese use of camera angles was mixed together with more standardized war camera angles (yep, over the shoulder shots and the like frequent war films), but they were there.  I think the general difference is American or English films tend to make dialogue between two characters easy to keep track of, often simply having the camera flick back and forth between the characters (and the characters do not invade and move around each others' shots) while Japanese animations are a little more dynamic with how the characters actually speak to each other and don't follow the speaking character quite as obviously.  Like I said though, it's hard to explain, and there's no set-in-stone formula or overriding rule of 'American cameras are like this, Japanese cameras are like that'... it just felt Japanese.

Overall, though, it really worked for me.  The lip synching left a bit to be desired but it wasn't hugely distracting, and the story was told well with good pacing.  Thumbs up!  If you get the chance to watch it, I'd recommend giving it a look in.

Well, I think that's all the blabbering I have to do today.