This week’s workshop detailed looking at and trying to remake ideas and techniques from the work of Lucca Zanotto, who creates simplistic looping animations that are effective in conveyance.
https://www.visualatelier8.com/art/2020/5/lucas-zanotto-yatatoy-kinetic-characters
I started this idea by creating a mash node to create cylinders that were of equal distance to each other.
Meeting and Notes:
Interactivity such as teleportation and grabbing were completed. The rig has also been predominately fixed, and animation has begun in full swing. Music for minigames is complete and scripts on the VR side are going well.
Personal Goals:
.Create Shot List
. Animate Interaction 2
Considering the animation required for this project and also considering time efficiency, we collectively agreed that the best method of animation would be minimal, which gives the overall emotional impression without extensive detail. Despite my best efforts to adjust and fix the rig, time constraints no longer allow us time to keep adjusting the rig, so facial animation will also be kept to a minimum. This, however, appears to suit the process, as conversion from MB into FBX proves to compress and readjust the model until it displays in lower poly/ rather different to Maya in the aspects of mesh presentation.
Animation Development
Developing from last week’s ideas, we began to structure the animation files and rigs into different layers to help us animate in a more organised and structured manner. This will also assist us if we need to make any changes fast without directly affecting the rest of the animation. Reflecting further on best industry practices in this respect, the use of layers is a fantastic way to explore alternate versions of your animation without heavy commitment. Roy expands on how the “weight ” of an animation layer can be adjusted in a similar way to opacity and layer groups found in Adobe Photoshop (2014, P.284)
Shot Lists and Planning
I thought an imperative first step to the animation process was creating a shot list in order to evenly distribute the work into clear, distinguishable sequences based on dialogue. This in itself proved a challenge due to my prior experiences with scenes and shots =, it was difficult to pin down how to separate the different aspects of animation due to its non-linear narrative and structural form. In this sense, I broke it down into the key different environments and key interactions between characters in the order that they were storyboarded. Following on from this I assigned the shots between myself and Marianna, prioritising those on the beach scene due to that being our main goal for the project.
I felt it important to also add the idle animations such as walking and ‘breathing’ due to the constant nature of real-time rendering, and these animations will be used in cycles to help the flow of gameplay.
Animation
Thinking about the stylistic interpretation of the speech bubbles, the integration of how they move in relation to the bird models and also considering player POV when adjusting motion will be something that will have to be relatively controlled within unity’s camera. Due to this, the way in which the interactions will potentially be structured in unity is by ‘ teleporting’ to different squares in which visibility is relatively controlled to a confined space within the games. Beginning the animation process for this VR experience, I had to adapt a different mindset to the one I had harboured for past projects as the animation itself depends on player interactivity, as different sequences are ‘triggered’ by gameplay elements. Animation is also created with the intention of being viewed from multiple angles with lesser regard to cinematography than an animated film.
Baring in mind player interactivity, in theory, the interaction should ‘Cycle’ until the player has clicked or progressed through the narrative in order to trigger the next. But in the event of that not happening the seagulls need to participate in continuous movement to allow for a level of realism and believability of the character. If the character remained static after every interaction it would ruin world-building believability and bring to attention flaws in our immersive experience.
Reflecting on my finished shot, I feel I was able to produce a character-driven performance that is suitable for the lower poly models imported within unity, however, there are several aspects I would improve on for future considerations if given the opportunity to fine-tune our project at a later date. The first would be the lack of ‘finger’ and wing movement detail, as it adds a flatness to the characters that makes them appear more like inanimate figurines than anthropomorphized seagulls. I also feel more follow-through, offset and secondary action could have been included during this animated interaction, especially in Seagull B as he sways to the music, where weight could be distributed in the offset of his head to his body. This would also add to the accentuation of ‘birdlike’ flexibility between the head and neck, as the bird contains more vertebrae which allow for sudden neck and head movements.
The facial expressions are also lacking in blinks and well-developed eye darts, however, the limitations of the detail within these expressions are predominately due to rigging issues experienced with the eyelids, which continue to be offset from the rig despite revisions to the mesh hierarchies. With these limitations and lack of contingency time to fix it, I think the monotonous, lack of expression in its own way suits the characters in their blunt emotional depth and only adds exemplification to Seagull B’s ‘Stupidity’. In association with facial animation studies, the lack of upper facial animation (brows, eyes, eyelids) can create an uncanny effect that strips the naturalistic element of movement and creates viewer discomfort (Tinwell, 2015). However, due to the simplistic design of the seagulls, which do not strive to achieve photorealism, a lack of expression is passable in expression portrayal, as less animation is required to sell the character’s performance inherently and avoids falling into the realms of the Uncanny Valley on aesthetic design.
Animation Exported into Unity
With the previous issues of last week’s animation import issues resolved, the sections myself and Marianna animated over the past week seem to function well in unity. The major issue at hand that still needs to be tackled is the mesh exporting issues. While there are ways to improve the polygonal interception, the overall smoothing seems to be lost, specifically on seagull A, and the wings of seagull B. In spite of this, I feel the ruggedness of the birds adds a rough element that is replicant of childlike drawings that suggest a more ‘undeveloped conscious’ contrasting visually with the conversations at hand. In spite of this, I intend to look more into solutions surrounding unity’s polygonal processing in the following week.
Potential Video Guidance for Next Week
(51) How to Actually optimize your game in Unity – Complete Game Optimization Guide – YouTube
(51) Unity Probuilder : Smoothing Tool – YouTube
Animation Interaction (with vice over audio included)
References
.Roy, K., 2014. How to cheat in Maya 2014. Abingdon: Focal Press.
.Tinwell, A. 2015. The Uncanny Valley In Games and Animation. Florida: CRC Press.
.B. Tyr Fothergill and C Flick. 2016. The Ethics of Human-Chicken Relationships in Video Games: The Origins of the Digital Chicken. SIGCAS Comput. Soc. 45, 3 (September 2015), 100-108. DOI: hht://doi.org./10.1145/2874239.2874254
Due to the heavy inspiration my project takes from early 1920s animated features such as the ‘Silly Symphonies’ there is already a direct reference to be made with instrumentals generally used in the classical music genre. As stated by Goldmark, many people in America “attribute their first conscious memory of the classical repertoire to cartoons” (2005, pp. 107). This in itself could benefit my animated project overall aesthetic simply by contextual association and theme. An interesting point that Goldmark mentions is the intergration of popular concert music and opera often featured in the pieces from the 20s cartoons, and commercialise them which subvertly created a timeless piece that integrates several eras and sustained through popular animation (2005,pp. 108).
Musical References
Starting to develop a musical motif I made note of the traditional instruments heard in the ‘Skeleton’ dance as well as making using a similar key to replicate the tonality. The Key instruments I wanted to explore were the Basson, one and Flute, as they add a realistic and non digitally enhanced clarity that is often heard in the early Disney Silly Symphonies.
Due to time limitations and a general lack of musical knowledge, I have taken these segments of experimentation and contacted a friend who has more experience in musical composition.
All the above practised and considered, Goldmark makes a compelling point that the historical ties Disney linked with Disney’s overuse of the same classical cannons do not expand or test the limits of the relationship between moving image and score (2005). It may also be relevant to consider historically MGM’s use of classical instruments to convey sounds and motions of violence and chases, and how this can later be applied to my own work.
References-
. Goldmark, Daniel. 2005. Tunes for ‘Toons. University of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles, California.
Meeting and Notes:
We discussed major setbacks and progress each of us had made. one of the scenes in Unity was entirely created and ready to be played and interacted with in VR space. I and Marianna still encountered issues with our rig and import/ Export issues in unity that we wish to develop for next week.
Goals:
.Finalise the rig
.Resolve any further issues that prevent animation
Speech Bubble Explortation
Exploring the ways in which the comic bubbles could be interpreted and translated into 3D space, I wanted to think about player interactivity as well as aesthetic considerations that empathises gameplay. Looking at design elements in balance with gameplay elements, the VR team intend to create interactable speech bubbles, that a player can grab and use as potential weaponry against the seagulls. Thinking about this as a graphic element, my initial ideas were to create one singular mesh that contains both 3D text and a larger almost spherical bubble that the player can grab. Looking at the original false knees comic as a reference, the bubbles are very basic in design and did not inspire much creativity from me inherently apart from the differing line size that added a hand-drawn aesthetic, that I wanted to replicate in 3D.
Below is the initial test I produced to explore speech bubbles’ aesthetics and movement. The test proved mildly unsuccessful despite the 3d environment as I felt the bubbles’ appearance was still flat, going forward from this I looked at references of different artistic impressions of speech bubbles in old animated films and games to see different design aspects I could interpret into 3D space.
One particular design that stood out to me is the credit sequence of One Hundred and One Dalmations (Geronimi, C, Luske, H and W Reitherman, 1961) as I found the abstract outlines and shapes were an interesting format that replicated the spots on the dogs. Taking this animalistic concept into account, I thought that this may be an interesting concept to explore with the seagulls. The key element I took from this however was the thick abstract lines and shapes with more human-made, rough edges that do not appear as perfect as my initial bubble.
Developing from this I created a speech bubble that has several different layers that can be interacted with the intention of creating a more 2D effect in 3D space, I added a heavy line replicating that of traditional comic book line art. With the use of the pencil curve tool, I was able to create a ‘drawn’ and more imperfect aspect to the line control which seemed, in my opinion, to fit with the comedic and comic derived goal of the production.
Below I recorded and shared this process with my team members so that the style and process of the speech bubble developed were easily accessible and could be recreated in the same style to keep consistency with our animations. This process also allowed me to explore different methods of NURBS to polygonal conversion within Maya.
Critically thinking about the process of integrating these bubbles into an interactive and three-dimensional space, there may be some impracticalities in the design aspect as the layered spaced elements of the design could not work well in a 360-degree environment in which all angles of our objects can be explored by players, so this in itself presents challenges on camera and object tracking within the virtual camera. Taking accessibility into account also, we wanted to pick a font that would be easily readable for viewers that may not be able to hear or easily understand the audio and voice acting of the birds, so we explored a style that was simple to read and well-spaced out, but also fitted the ‘hand drawn’ visual to match that of the created 3D lines.
Video References
(49) How to convert/change curve into a polygon in Maya 2020 for beginner – YouTube
Mesh Collision Issues
Expanding on last week’s issues involving missing mesh faces upon unity imports, in an attempt to explore the issues surrounding the deleted faces, I looked at the original Maya file model in an unsmoothed mode to replicate that of its appearance in Unity. I found that the vertex seemed to unnaturally collide with one another and adjusted them so that they were more in line with one another, in the hopes that upon import they would not collide.
The method eventually proved effective however caused a few issues in which the wing looked abnormally big and messed up the overall volume and scale of the model proportionally. This, naturally, takes away from any sense of ‘realism’ we may have wanted to achieve within character believability, however, temporarily seems to fix any issues regarding mesh collision elements.
Scene File setups and professionalism
Now that the rigs are in a functioning state and are ready to be animated I thought it imperative for production to set up a scene in both me and Mariana can use as a base for our animations so they are scaled exactly the same and are both in the exact same spacial position. This will improve the production pipeline as when coding the different interactions into the Unity project folder, the character will not drastically jump apart from one another which will prevent any jarring cuts between character and gameplay interactability.
Following on from the useless box tutorial, this week we created a composite of the render and found sounds via free sound.org to create a comedically charged piece of work complete with sound. The main thing learned from this workshop was the ability to control and manipulate audio in post-production settings. For example, In the video below the introductory mechanic sound, is reversed towards the end to get an opening and closing ideal across audibly. I particularly wanted to cut off and create harsher sound effects, to convey a sense of violence within the character’s intentions.
I believe it is essential, even if not explored personally, to consider the rubber hose animation movement that was prevalent in the 1920s- 1930s animated culture. An essential part of the rubber-hose style is that animators were using “curving forms” that sacrificed ” any sense of a body’s structure for the sake of smooth, flowing movement” (Barrier, 2003 pp.74). An interesting thing discussed by Barrier is how The Skeleton Dance was animated “very rapidly in essentially mechanical patterns ” and how the skeletons “take part in simple repetitive dances” (2003, pp.61). He expands how ” their bony limbs are surprisingly rubbery” (Barrier, 2003, pp.61) and gives implications that the robber hose style is complimented by its strong use of sound. Due to the rubber-hose style’s inherent ability to create smooth cycles, its timing with music potentially looks less forced and mechanical, ironically adding a level of realism to ‘dance’ motions. This arises many considerations when designing my own skeletons and their movements in relation to sound.
Examples of Rubber-Hose Animation
3D Translation
An interesting example I found was a YouTube video which accentuates features of the ‘rubber-hose’ style of animation recreated in blender. This, however considers more visually stylistic approaches only in its inherent character design. The movement also do not truly resemble any likeness of the rubber-hose’s squash stretch and cycle adaptability.
Considering this, I have researched into potential ways to create a rubber-hose rig within 3D space a researched several rigging tutorials withing Maya. The video below highlights quite efficiently how this effect can be achieved by using leg and arm IKs. This will very useful for future endeavours into nostalgic recreation within 3D space.
References
Barrier, M. (2003) Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. Oxford University Press.
Meeting and Notes:
Everyone discussed their progress. The sound students already had sound files that we can begin experimenting with movement regarding music with. I and Marianna exemplified the setbacks we were experiencing with the rig, and showed the IK developments we were able to make.
Personal Goals:
.Complete and fix issues with the Rigs on both birds
. Explore import/ export relationship with Maya and Unity
Rigging
During the process of the Maya to unity workflow and animation exporting we came across several issues in which I had to research even further and expand my understanding of rigging aspects. Initially, looking at the rigging files that were shared between Marianna and myself, the hierarchy of the controls, geometry and joints was messy, and seemly caused issues during unity exports. Looking into methods of exporting and importing animation from Maya, the below video made some points that indicated to me structure was not cohesive and clear and was attached to several elements of the geometry.
Animation Import/Export in Maya – YouTube
Revising the rigs from the previous week, there seemed to be underlying issues in the way that the Ik in the wings was attached to the rest of the rig, which caused some exporting issues that did not move inside unity’s game engine even when the animation was baked into the FBX file.
Import Tests in Unity
Trying to engage effectively understand Maya and unity’s relationship to one another, I wanted to produce several tests in order to see which issues we will encounter, and be time-efficient before we began properly producing character animation to get an effective Maya to Unity workflow.
Due to previous model import tests being static in motion, in order to test a working import I took the Mr Boney rig and animated all the different IK controllers in unison, baked the keyframes to the rig, and exported them as an FBX file for unity in order to get it to function. As seen in the test below, this test was successful and lead me to consider two different aspects: The hierarchy of Mr Bony’s mesh and joint structure and the export preset options in Maya.
After studying the structure of the Mr Bony Rig, I noticed that they were primarily sectioned into different groups, that all fed into each other. Containing all the controllers, mesh and skeleton rig into different groups so there is clean access to all of them. Taking this into account, I replicated a similar file structure with a similar joint order and after clearing the history, rebinding the skin and exporting, I was able to create a working FBX file of Seagull A.
On earlier exports from Maya and Imports into unity, we experienced issues with the wings not moving, and earlier on there were skin binding issues due to the separation of the wings to the main body mesh. As stated by Watkins, by reducing the objects attached individually to the mesh, the number of “draw calls” required is reduced, which overall reduced joint deformations, therefore reducing the number of “cost processor cycles” (2012,p.280). This, in essence, will optimize the playback speed, which is imperative for the functions of games due to their ‘real-time rendering’.
Below is the video evidencing the FBX export of the animation test from Maya functions in Unity with wings and IK legs which helped me reassess the pipeline me and my team would implement when producing animations. Going forward with our import and exporting issues, we will use the following method below-
Ensure you are animating with a Clean the Hierarchy/ Rig> Animate on layers> Bake> Export
I found that implementing the additional step of animation layers would create a smoother and more efficient pipeline to use later on in the animation process. As stated by Roy, animation layers “increase the ease of creative tasks like trying different approaches and variations” and also simplify the use of graph editor curves by compartmentalising them ( 2014, P.273). This is something we intend to use going forward for the project also as it allows animation baking to be easily reverted in old files if we need to extract or add elements such as facial expressions separate from the body movements.
Video References
Maya to Unity Workflow – Campaign Update – YouTube
Mesh Issues in Unity
An issue we encountered during this process was a loss of polygons in the mesh when exporting animated rig FX files. Researching into this we found a few solutions that can assist us going into the next week, one being the smooth option which will essentially bake the polygons into a higher count so that once it is converting into an FBX, the polygon information should not be ‘corrupted’ when imported into unity.
Another alternative I looked into with a member of the VR project was polygonal smoothing within unity itself to see if it can be rectified directly within the software.
Due to the multiple tests, we conducted using both animated and static models of the character, it appears that only the animated models cause the mesh issues, even using the above technique. When using the smoothing techniques within unity’s outlier, it had little to no effect, only making the rougher edges and mesh displacements slightly less drastic in appearance. Going forward with our research in fixing this particular issue into the next week it may be important to consider if the mesh in Maya may be directly affecting this perhaps due to polygon collision which can cause their appearance to be ‘defaced’ in unity’s software.
`Video References
ProBuilder Unity | Smooth Object Tool – YouTube
Animation and Music Relationship Test
Working with the music students, I wanted to use their audio and create an animation that interacts with the soundscape of the game, potentially creating an additional character and comedic effect. The animation was created with the idea that it could act as an ‘idle’ animation for seagull B to help accentuate his ‘simplicity’ and general happiness or naivete. This will also help improve player immersion as the characters are interacting more with their environment.
Importing the animation into unity, while simultaneously reflecting on the progression of the technical aspects involving unity and Maya’s relationship, highlights great progression as it also indicates several factors that are not working. The main indication of an underlying mesh/ rigging issue still needing resolution is the ‘floating’ eyelids which seem to offset themselves from their frozen transformation when any body movement is made. The other obvious issue at hand is the mesh deformity in the right-wing, which I will have to further look into to understand why exactly the polygons delete themselves in appearance once imported into unity.
Eye Lid Rigging Issues
Going into Maya once more to inspect the eyelid rigging issues it seems that there is once again a hierarchal issue within the mesh structure, in which the eyelids are separate to the main mesh and seem to pivot around the ‘blink’ controllers rather than the mesh itself.
In order to resolve this issue, I followed the same method that I applied previously in order to attach the wings to the mesh for skin binding purposes and grouped the eyelids in a way that enabled them to follow the eye mesh without causing an offset. Due to the rebinding required during this process, I also will have to re-rig the set driven keys to creating an effective blink method in the following week ahead. reflecting on this, in future I will ensure that the mesh is neat and comprehendible for additional software exports.
Organisation and File structure
In order to effectively manage and structure our files as a team, I thought it would be more effective to create an organised file structure to allow accessibility for all team members and reduce the number of unnecessary ‘we transfer’ files over email; especially since these were causing Maya file corruptions. This will be particularly useful when sharing the scene set-up files and finalised rigs so that both myself and Marianna animating will be using the same versions of everything to prevent inconsistencies.
References
Roy, K., 2014. How to cheat in Maya 2014. Abingdon: Focal Press.
Watkins, A (2012) Creating Games with Unity and Maya : How to Develop Fun and Marketable 3D Games. Burlington, MA: Routledge. Available at: https://search-ebscohost-com.arts.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=376905&site=ehost-live&scope=site (Accessed: 27 Februrary 2022).
Following this week’s seminar, we participated in a group discussion with other team members and created a mind map discussing ideas of how to progress and develop our project with differing teams.
In these teams, we had to discuss a question that would make us critically reflect on our project and the way we approach it. Our team’s question was: If you were to remove one element from each of your projects completely, how would this affect the work?
For our project, we took several approaches to this question, thinking about software changes, narrative changes and character changes. FOr narrative, we discuss how without the use of comic bubbles, the project loses its comic adaptation in style and seems to take away from the intended experience. This was contradicted in our class, however, as someone suggested that perhaps adapting the games aesthetically to a cell-shaded style could retain the comic book feel without inherently needing the speech bubbles to adapt to this.
We also discussed how for software use, if we switched from using unity to an engine such as Unreal Engine, the processes and overall rendering would look very different and perhaps create an ease of relationship between Maya and unity due to its easier import and export options. We also discussed that perhaps one of the most significant changes would be changing the characters from anthropomorphic seagulls to humans, as it would take away the entire comedic value of our project and begs the question of writing the concept entirely due to how flat and mundane it would feel in a ‘human’ experience.
One of the major pieces of feedback we received from a classmate was perhaps thinking about how the entire experience, if not in VR, could be adapted in a way that still feels immersive. In this respect, they suggested perhaps making it a 360 experience using real screens and 360 sound space using speakers to immerse viewers in the world without the need for a headset, integrating the real and virtual realms in a more literal sense.
Group Meeting and Notes:
During this meeting, we met the sound design students who would be helping develop the soundscape and effects for the game.
Personal Goals:
. Set up the scenes for the interactions
.Animate cycles
Scene References and Organisation
While beginning the scene set-up process in order to effectively organise our scenes, I encountered several issues which created some major setbacks in our progression of animation. When moving the global control of the seagull, the main body mesh separated itself and offset from the main rig controllers and the eyes. This issue seemed to occur in both rigs, so looking into solutions for both rigs I found that the root issue was in the rig’s entire hierarchal structure, which needed to be edited to make more coherent sense.
With a lack of understanding of the rigging process, when opening the referenced file to investigate the issue at hand, I tried to delete the history which deleted several elements that destroyed aspects of the rig such as the Wing Iks. As stated by Watkins in his book Creating Games with Unity and Maya: How to Develop Fun and Marketable 3D Games (2012), He expands on the importance of deleting its mesh history before beginning the rigging process to minimise the file size and prevent and excess of nodes, so critically reflecting on this in future, our process of rigging will have to be much cleaner. In this light, I unbound the rig from the skin in order to reset the mesh and deleted its history as I found several issues to tackle.
Rigging Issues and Solutions
One of the key elements we had to consider when improving the rig was the addition of IK controllers. When going to create a test walk cycle with our characters to provide to the VR students, I noticed that with a lack of IK controls in the legs, full-body animation would prove excessively difficult for us in the long run. Taking this into consideration, I research and followed some YouTube tutorials in order to gain an understanding of how leg hierarchies work in an IK Format.
Following this, I created a test that displayed how this worked in order for my fellow teammates to see and understand how I intended to adjust the lower half of both the rigs to improve the mobility and fluidity of the animation.
Seagull A
Applying this to the first rig, Seagull A, in which the legs are longer and more replicant of real human legs, the implementation was fairly smooth and easy to calculate. The real difficulty in terms of achieving ‘realism’ or anthropomorphised Seagull behaviour will be in the skin weighting and directional knee bends.
Lining up the ‘knee’ controllers and placing the skeleton IK into the seagull in order to correctly place the joints and attach the new IK legs to the rest of the rig. Understanding joint connection hierarchies and IK applications, a key element I learned that can affect joint rotation is the ‘Rotate-Plane Solver’ which changes the way that the joint can follow a pole-vector control.
While it is not vital to gaining directional control, it is possible to set the IK directions early in the rigging process but bending the ‘knee’ joint towards the direction of intended influence, which helped my understanding of knee and pole vector rigging practised to make them smoother in the future.
Once the rig was successfully connected in a sensical hierarchal order, the next key step was to create a pole vector constrain and control that could control the knee pivot. This is a key element to rigging with IK controllers, that in retrospect could have been used to create directional control for the wings, and is something I will heavily consider in future rig creations, especially in more animalistic bipedal rigs.
A learning step for me was understanding how to use and implement set driven keys. Going back to the reference of the seagull movements, their feet roll in a similar fashion to humans; typically in CG rigs, extra features are created in the attribute editor for the ease and access of animations to create the most realistic animation possible without breaking elements of the rig itself. So In creating different controllers for the foot, ball, and individual toe joints, I was able to add set driven keys to that group to create foot and toe rolls that can be manipulated in the attribute editor. Following the tutorial from earlier, the process of creating toe and foot rolls was an extremely useful tool that would help myself and Marianna key aspects of the rig in a more clear and less ‘messy’ way without direct animation onto the joints of the character, which cannot be frozen in transformation.
Expanding onto clean rigging pipelines, I thought it may be worthwhile to limit the translation and rotation information in order to effectively restrict the motions available to the character so they make logical sense to the world. For example, in limiting the X-axis information in alls the rig to stop and be more proportional without excessively stretching and contorting the joints and therefore breaking the mesh of the skin. This will help to build a level of consistency during the animation process between me and Marianna as the ‘volume’ and shape of the character will appear the same, and also add to its character believability.
In addition to the IK leg control, I also found issues with the way the eye controls were functioning on the seagull character, as they were directly parented to the eyes rather than aim constrained, which is a much neater method of rigging eyes as it does not directly affect the translation of the sphere, but instead only its rotation.
Below showcases all the rigging adjustments I was able to make on the Seagull A rig, including IK controls and eye rigging controls.
Eye Rigging References
Rigging for Beginners: Eyes and More in Maya – YouTube
Skin Weight Paint Influence Issues
One of the initial problems I went in to fix was the skin weight issues on seagull A, as both feet had influence over one another, so they could not be lifting without dragging the polygons of the other along with it. Experimenting with different aspects of this, my first attempt was to add a negative paint influence to the faces affected on the opposite foot, however, despite my best efforts in this, the influence seemed to not remove itself. After attempting to find several solutions to this, I discovered that the method that proved most effective in this case was flooding the affected vertexes with either 100% Positive or 0% negative influence in order to get them to act more realistic in motion. While this worked and I was able to more efficiently paint the weight into even and realistic weight distribution, this seemed to point out several issues in the mesh hierarchy, as in flooding these vertexes the wings were also entirely affected and followed the feet rather than the main body mesh. This caused further setbacks in the rigging process but offered suit for some critical reflection on rigging pipelines for myself. In reference to Watkins, he states how Maya in the process of skin binding will attach its vertices to the nearest joints on the initial bind without the contextual physical and biological context we have, and since the wings were not attached to the mesh via ‘combine mesh’ attributes, the vertices must have attached themselves to the feet without spacial context ( 2012, p. 303).
Seagull B Rigging Issues and Corrections
Taking the same developments from my rigging progression of Seagull A, I applied these to the seagull Brig. Since learning the process with seagull A, I was able to apply these changes faster with more accuracy, which led to a cleaner overall rig.
As seen in the video above, the older rigged version of the eyes was not very effective for the animation process, so adjusting and changing them to aim constraints gave us much better control over eye rotation and look much more realistic. In order to maintain and preserve the style and character of the rig, instead of creating an aim constraint that moved both eyes at the same time, I added controls that matched the distance offset between the eyes so they are controlled separately, to upkeep the confused and ‘stupid’ look of the bird.
References
Adam Watkins (2012) Creating Games with Unity and Maya : How to Develop Fun and Marketable 3D Games. Burlington, MA: Routledge. Available at: https://search-ebscohost-com.arts.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=376905&site=ehost-live&scope=site (Accessed: 5 April 2022).
In this week’s workshop, we explored how camera angles can convey a story but show the same thing from multiple perspectives. For example, In the two videos shown below, the same action is occurring, however, their point of view indicate different stories.
The first shows a man desperately running away from a pursuer, and in his panic falls and trips, perhaps inciting a feeling of tension similar to that of horror movies.
This second camera angle is a POV over-the-shoulder shot of a police officer who is seemingly chasing a criminal, and when they fall to the ground it has a more comedic effect overall, indicating the ‘criminal’ is clumsy and not widely threatening. With the application of further may tools such as the camera sequencer which we have looked at previous, a sequence could be compiled together to create a two-dimensional dynamic narrative between the two characters that contrasts and conflicts perspectives.
I think considering camera angles will be vital to any future piece of work I will consider, just as cinematography is important for film conveyance of mood, setting and overall narrative enhancement. Below I have listed some readings that I could consider to hone in on my understanding of this aspect and apply it to my own pieces of work.
Reading List
. Keating, P. (ed) (2014) Cinematography. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
.Brown, B. (2011). Cinematography: Theory and Practise: Imagemaking for Cinematographers and Directors. Oxford: Focal Press.
.Mascelli, J. (1998). The Five C’s of Cinematography: Motion Picture Filming Techniques. Los Angeles, California: Silman-James Press.
