April 2022 – Esme’s Blog

Week 12: Asset and Environment Modelling

Character Model Issues

When cleaning up and structuring my character model I found several issues that could occur when I begin the rigging process. Firstly, the rotation of the feet and the toes were distorting when grouped together, Which I realised may have been due to mesh-related history issues. After separating the group and deleting the history on each join, and regrouping them again afterwards, i was able to resolve this issue rather quickly and efficiently.

Scaling

An essential consideration going forward into the environmental modelling stage of the production will the the scaling in relation to that character and that of its placement. While i wish for the stage to appear ‘grandiose’ I also do not want the character to feel swallowed up in an environment that is more detailed and large that draws viewer attention away from the performance. Due to this, I have decided to strip back my former ideas of French inspired luxury stage theatrics and decided to create a very minimal stage that will match and accentuate the visual choices of my skeleton model.

Stage and Environment Modelling

Looking at how theatre curtains hang will help me understand how I can apply and model these in 3D space, I tried to model my stage and curtains with a similar drapery. Initially I modelled the curtains without utilising N cloth to keep the scene file from crashing and to get a general idea of the mesh and where it will be placed environmentally. From there this allowed me to go forward doing N cloth passive animation tests to ensure a more realistic result.

Initial Scene Test

Here is my Initial scene mockup, It makes clear to me where my next steps are in terms of modelling, lighting and general rendering improvements. Due to the stark contrast, I wish to create with spotlights to accentuate audience focus, I think it will be important to understand how the Arnold lighting setups work as they do not seem to render the traditional Maya spotlight in the same way as Hardware 2.0 does. Below I have attached a link which should help me improve and expand on how these lighting setups will work alongside some youtube tutorials.

Modelling intentions and improvements for next week

Clean up and improve detail quality of curtains and ropes
Finish wood panelling detail
Add theatre seats (less urgent)
Consider and explore texturing aspects

Post Editing Test

Exploring different noise and lighting effects in Photoshop, I wanted to see if I could create a mock-up version of what the final output could potentially look like regarding aesthetics. Since I was trying to achieve an ‘old film’ look, I intentionally pushed the level of noise, however, I feel this may not be the most effective method as it appears more like an ineffective render. I think in pursuing this further, the moving noise could make it more apparent it is aiming to be a replicator of the old film rather than portraying inexperience through computer-generated rendering.

Friday Workshop Week 2: Skin Weights

In this week’s workshop, we started expanding on the rigging from last week and began to skin weight joints to the mesh.

The first step was to block the skin weighting to key sections of the mesh and use a flooding technique to feather out the weight at the edges in a way that is controlled, particularly by the vertices you select.

The fingers were the most tricky area to flood, because of the sheer amount of vertices and the distance between each other. The important aspect of this selecting the influence of the correct joint and then using this flooding technique (ensuring that the influence is low) to create a somewhat seamless crease between the different parts of the finger.

One of the issues I encountered with this process early on was during the skin bind, I selected the hierarchy of the mesh in the incorrect order, which led to the following issues. In order to fix this, I deleted the skin binding history and started again selecting everything correctly.

Issues with Hierarchy selected in Skin Bind

Starting again, I decided to tackle the skin weighting within the fingers, as this proved to be the most ‘fiddly’ and vertex dense area to consider. The main thing that helped during this process was flooding the weighting 100% to their respective joint, and then selecting the vertices in the mesh that were added with the design of deformation. This is highlighted in our own hands in the areas where lines appear between the skeletal joints of our hands and fingers. By adding a slight percentage of flooding, the two areas blend into one another, creating less mesh collision. However it its a careful process as too little weight consideration can lead to volume inconsistencies upon rotation.

One of the trickier areas of skin weighting was the centre of the body, as the if the skin weigh is not somewhat evenly distributed between the different spinal joints, the deformation would appear blocky and entirely inaccurate to human anatomy.

As seen below, I was initially having a few issues getting the chest/ armpit and stomach areas to rotate side to side without mesh collisions, and using the same technique as the fingers I was eventually able to create an even spread between the different joints, getting a more accurate skin weight than by painting it unevenly myself.

Week 2: Methodology Structure and Research Considerations

Broadening my research into methodology techniques and concepts, I aim and intend to use a mix of both qualitative and quantitative methods to engage with both conceptual and historical ideas surrounding animated documentary creation, performance and engagement as well as current and direct audience responses from animated works I Intend to create myself.

Issue problem and Investigation

The key findings of this paper are to look into how viewers engage with animated documentaries in re-enacted states and how these findings can benefit or deny the essential argument of animated documentaries’ overall genre validity.

Key authors, Books and Writings and Structure of Arguments

Initial my key and most essential authors going forward will be Annabelle Honess Roe, Cristina Formenti, Bill Nichols, Brian Winston and Paul Ward. Historically and contextually looking at background information on the works of Grierson will be vital as his writings play a pivotal point in the formation of the documentary as we know it today. These particularly highlight books such as “Animated Documentary” by Anabelle Honess Roe, and “the Classical Animated Documentary” by Cristina Formenti as they expand upon both contemporary and historical documentary issues and information when regarding the animated documentary. Looking at the different documentary modes will be reliant on research from Bill Nichols’s “Blurred Boundaries” and Paul Wells’s “The Beautiful Village and the True Village: A consideration of Documentary Aesthetics” which cover and explain the theory behind documentary modes between live-action and animated documentary.

Survey Creation and Structure

My survey aims to look at the viewer engagement with several different styles of animated documentary and compare several factors such as overall engagement and understanding of the piece, Stylistic preference, lip sync and facial expression engagement, movement engagement and its overall ability to convince and express factual accounts. This will include live-action and animation comparative elements that will consider different accounts of factual retelling. I think a key part of the survey considerations will be the quality of animation as well as aspects such as lighting and rendering. So when choosing footage I will be intentional to compare specific videos against each other. For example: using two non-rendered pieces of animation together to even out the generalized audiences engagement.

Data Analysis Process

Regarding the Gender, Age, Preferences, Engagement and overall impact the different elements had on different survey takers will be taken into consideration and applied to a graph which will summarize the other all objective and subjective elements of the animation enjoyment. Looking at this and contextually applying the different areas of this thesis research such as aesthetic design, animation methods, empathetic engagement and relationship to interview.

Resources, Materials and Tools

My survey itself will involve using the most random mix of people that are of different, ages, backgrounds, Identities and nationalities as I can involve. I feel in order to get a sense of documentary engagement however, it will be important to involve both academic and non-academic people who appreciate and understand animation in a different way to the general public. This also considers the idea of younger audiences versus older audiences.

Week 2: Animation Workshop

Rigging Corrections

Following on from last week’s rigging session, in the lesson, Toby went over some rigs and gave constructive feedback which proved very useful in understanding the full implications of how the advanced skeleton plugin works. Some issues that arose when completing the rigging assignment were rotation axis issues in the fingers, so understanding that the rotation axis can be visualised to help directional alignment helped massively when achieving a more realistically moving advanced skeleton.

Animation Assignment: Pose to Pose Blocking

Starting this week’s assignment of creating a pose to pose block out between two key poses, I began to use plug-ins I was not previously hugely familiar with such as the tween machine. The Tween machine takes the key poses and creates an in-between that can be central or more influenced by either the latter or the former pose depending on the level selected.

Using Tween Machine to Pose the Character

A key element of the workshop that toby focused on was creating strong silhouettes in which the pose is clear with a good amount and well-controlled negative space. Taking this into consideration I wanted to ensure my beginning and end pose had clear and strong silhouettes in which the gun props were clearly outlined. This process helped me determine the strength of my poses going throughout the shot.

Another key element Toby mentioned was using editable motion trails to clearly track how clean and smooth your motion arcs are. Using these trails helped me understand and process how smooth my overall splined animation may appear. These motion trails can be reminiscent of the golden ratio in art theory that highlights a smooth perfect ‘shell’ shape that draws the viewer’s attention to a certain point. In some aspects, I attempted to recreate this ideal with the left hand and the gun to draw the viewer’s attention to it and the punisher rigs face towards the end of the shot.

See the source image — Golden Ratio Example

Finished Blocking

The overall blocking I feel has some good examples of arcs in the arms and upper body, however, may not have the same effect in the lower body. I also feel it could be retimed as it feels a bit slow and the weight distribution seems a bit off in certain areas. Receiving feedback for next Thursday’s session will help me understand exactly which improvements I could make and expand the shot in quality and overall movement.

Research: Classical Animated Documentary and its Contemporary Evolution Talk and Discussion

After attending a discussion on Monday that discussed the new writings of animation academic Cristina Formenti, I discovered several pieces of information that may prove very vital in my own thesis research. One of the key elements of this speech was the categorisation of the animated documentaries genre fitting into a third and more loosely formed category of ‘docudrama’ which allows space for more re-enacted and fictional standpoints within this field.

A key point Formenti brings to attention is the lack of scholarly writings about the historical roots of the animated documentary, as there seems to be arising conceptions that it is purely a contemporary form of factional representation. She went on to discuss how her book help categorises the different ’ages’ in which a variety of animated documentaries can be placed, and expands on a more International view of animated documentaries that branches outside of purely just The United States and Great Britain in which a lot of focus has been placed within the animation field. Another more ethically driven point she argues within her work is the lack of focus on the female leads within the animated documentary field that are potentially overshadowed by features such as “Waltz with Bashir” (2008, Folman) and also expresses that too much literature is conceived on the basis of that particular film creating a wall between newer and older works that are deserving of attention.

The talk overall has left me with various thoughts and considerations to expand on my own thesis writings, and that is largely the inclusion and consideration of different categoric elements and international standpoints when writing about viewer engagement with animated documentaries.

References

Formenti, Cristina. The Classical Animated Documentary and Its Contemporary Evolution, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=6904339.

Friday Workshop Week 1: Manual Rigging Task

Taking on applications involved in manual rigging, the importance of locators to allow for joint placement accuracy and rotation orientation is stressed. During the Process, locators are placed at key and central points of the rig so that when the joint placement takes place, the rotation is easier to aline in a cleaner and more efficient manner.

When placing all of the locators in areas such as the hand, it is important that the rotation is accurate throughout all the hands and individual fingers so that it is clear which locator group is which and how the joint will align with the locator later on.

Once creating the joints it is important to line the joints up and rotate from the highest point in the joint hierarchy so that there is not any messy translation and rotation information that can cause containing and skin weighting issues later on in the rigging process.

After carefully placing each of the joints at the different locators on one half of the leg and upper body, it was important that the bend of the leg and the spine were considered, easily for IK placement in the leg later on so that it has a clear directional pivot.

Rotating and placing each of the skeletal joins into place in the fingers proved to be the trickiest part of this process as the hierarchal rotational alignment caused a lot of adjustment to get everything in order on each finger.

After completing the arm and the hand, I duplicated this on the YZ axis so that it would copy exactly to the left side of the body. While utilising the mirror joint options, I also changed the name of the copied joints to have L_ at the beginning of each join to distinguish the separate copy and keep the outliner clean and concise.

Initially, during duplication, I had an issue that would not allow me to safely mirror the copy over due to “too many arguments”, which after some research on the Autodesk website, clarified to me that there are too many selected joints to perform the mirror joint action. This meant that I had to select the beginning of the joint hierarchy, the clavicle, rather than each individual joint in the arm.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/maya-animation-and-rigging/mirror-joint-options-too-many-arguments-error/td-p/9623864

After completing that issue I had a character with a fully formed skeleton ready to be rigged for next weeks skin binding class.

Week 1: Premise Project Idea and Execution

Generating Ideas for my Final major project I have decided to commit and develop an interview-style documentary which I will use in support of my thesis to track viewer engagement with re-enacted personal experience. For this premise project, I would like to develop my facial/ body performance and lip-sync animation to a higher level and truly begin to understand the building blocks of creating an effective animation. For this week I have taken interviews from a variety of my friends with different lifestyles and asked how they spent their time in lockdown and how this had affected their overall life experiences.

In order to aid my thesis survey, I have taken these interviews with varying qualities of camera equipment. Different lighting and times of the day to see which a viewer would engage with more, and compare this to a developed performance I will adapt in differing styles of animation. For the next 10 weeks, I intend to adapt 2-3 different audios of these interviews to explore different stylistic approaches to how I will create my final major project next term.

Tasks for Next week

Expanding on these interviews, I will start to consider how I will adapt these into animation aesthetically and theoretically.

Research into documentary forms
Research into aesthetic Styles
Concept works

Thesis Proposal Task 1

Consider the following questions and try to provide brief answers on your blog for next week.

On graduation which area or environment of production do you wish to focus upon and why?

Upon graduating with this master’s degree I wish to go into character animation or previsualization however I have a deep interest in independently created films that expand and differentiate themselves from mainstream productions.

What skills will you need to attain the standards required for vocational practice?

My primary focus intends to be on studying character animation, by also the stylisation and adaptability of character animation aesthetics are used in various contexts.

How will you showcase your FMP practice for the final shows?

I intend to explore various different visual styles and types of animated methods and compare these to the final completed work in a showreel to show progression within this body of this work and the thought processes in order to reach it.

Is it important to directly connect the thesis research to your practical work?

I think, with my intended goal, it will be important to utilise my thesis research to understand which areas and styles of animated work engage a viewer the most. This should aid and help my overall product’s consumer validity while simultaneously (and hopefully) pushing boundaries on visual mainstream acceptance.

Do you have an area of research you wish to conduct that is unrelated to the practical elements?

I am very interested in narrative and story developments, and also how these can ve applied in various contexts. For example when re-creating a factual depiction with narrative elements in a documentary setting, it explores a line between fact and fiction that creates emotional stimulus.

Rigging Workshop 1: Character Rigging

Advanced Skeleton

Following this week’s workshop in rigging, we talked through how to set up and use the advanced skeleton plug-in for Maya. The initial step is joint placement, which requires time to properly align each joint within the mesh as accurately as possible.

Assignment

Our assignment following this class was to apply the information learned in the advanced rigging workshop and applying it to a different rig. Taking the punisher rig, I followed the step process within the advanced skeleton plug-in and cleaned up the mesh in order to make it as even as possible, as that are the conditions that the skeleton functions best under.

Week 1: Proposal Introduction

Thesis Working Title: Exploring the animated documentaries performative, subjective nature, and how this can impact viewer engagement.

This thesis will look into areas such as:
.Concepts of the performative nature in documentary through enactment and re-enactment.
.Interview through animation and aesthetic considerations that exemplify storytelling.
.Understanding of empathetic engagement with animated agents and facial expression.

For the initial thoughts and considerations for my thesis proposal, I want to navigate the forced performative and subjective nature of animated documentaries, and how this affects viewer engagement. This thesis aims to bring to attention arising issues surrounding the contemporary animated documentary, without the primary focus being its genre validity but rather bringing to attention how effectively the subjective, personal experience can be enhanced through this documentary method for audiences. Considering this against its live action counterpart,this could potentially go on to argue its genre validity or deny its place in the field. The exploration of this topic should support my overall final major animated project as I wish to create a re-enacted animated performance of filmed interview footage and will help gain an understanding of what viewers inventive engagement with more to enhance personal factual storytelling in animated form.

Following on from my previous research into trauma representation in animated documentary form, I feel this will be a great way to expand on personal recollection and expression portrayal through animation in non-fictional contexts as well as confessional and aesthetic elements to the interview itself.

Lastly I think these views and Ideas can be accentuated and proven more matter of factually by scientific investigation with audience empathetic engagement and see how this inevitably bridge the link between artistic expression and effective audience communication.

As mentioned in Richard M. Balsam’s book Non-Fiction Film a Critical History, he expands on Dai Vaughan’s point about how in the first ever moving image displayed in Paris 1895, the crowd seemed not so much fearful of the moving imagery itself, but more the ‘spontaneity’ it could demonstrate that the theater could not (1992, p.5) .

“The Cinema Is the illusion of the Real . But more it is a spectacle of movement. And as such at times it seems to exceed reality itself” (Steven Neale in Barsam, 1992. p.5)

In the above quote provided by Neale I think it brings to attention the idea that in drawing attention to the idea of movement, rather than direct, real life movement itself, points out how its effectiveness with viewers and audience surrounding this idea of ‘spectacle’ over reality that creates a form of ‘hyper realism’.

References

Barsman, R M. 1992. Non-Fiction Film A Critical History Revised and Expanded. Indiana University Press: Bloomington.