I really enjoyed the animation assignments this semester. Even though I learnt most of the equivalent material while studying for a year on 2D Animation on my BA, I skipped over a lot of them when learning 3D animation because, at the time, I didn’t think I would need to relearn the fundamentals. Yet now I can look back at my animation work before coming to UAL and see where not having relearnt them held me back a lot. At the time, I might have had the knowledge from my time on 2D, but I wasn’t always applying it to my 3D work.
The feedback sessions were super helpful, both for getting feedback on my own work and seeing the work of my classmates.
I would like to do more of these exercises (such as the previously mentioned ball bounces with different weights), so I plan to do this in my own time as personal work.
Learning to use UE5 this semester with no prior experience was a huge challenge, but I have very much enjoyed the process once I was able to get over the hurdle of not knowing where to start. I’m excited by the possibilities of this software in my future practice, especially because I have previously struggled with other programs because of the lack of live visual feedback. I feel like using UE5 will allow me to focus more on animation, which is what I want to focus on most, as previously most of my project times were taken up with parts of the pipeline I found a lot easier and faster to do in UE5.
As shown in my Formative Presentation, the production process for me was as follows:
Visual research
Storyboarding
Animatic
Environment layout
Shot set up
3D Animating (Maya)
Texturing/creating materials
Lighting
Making custom LUTs
Rendering
Editing
I briefly mentioned it in my Formative Presentation, but if I had more time to work on this unit I would prioritise animation clean-up, adding more characters to the environment, and material creation. I did enjoy making materials in UE5 a lot, but I didn’t feel like my project idea gave me the time to fully delve into the process and possibilities. Early on in production, I really wanted to explore 2D line art materials, but I unfortunately wasn’t able to fit it into my schedule. As previously mentioned however, UE5 allows for easier editing of the different parts of the project in the future, so I will definitely be returning to this project as personal work to improve on existing parts and to add new assets.
The main bulk of my work during my extension for animation was applying the feedback I received from George to the individual assignments he gave us. I also splined and cleaned-up the animation on my body mechanics shot.
For submission, I added some materials to the assets and tweaked the settings of the viewfinder in Maya so I could still playblast the animations but have them look nicer for the submission showreel.
If I had more time, I would have liked to do additional animations for some of the assignments. For example, I initially wanted to animate different ball bounces, giving each ball different weights. I do still plan to do this in my own time, but it would have been nice to have these for George to review and potentially give feedback for.
I really liked the week by week assignment set up of George’s classes, as it was helpful for me to stay on top of the work when I was essentially being held accountable each week to have work ready for review. I can see why this might not work for other projects, but for animation it was great to both get feedback on my own work each week, and to also see other people’s work and learn from their process and feedback.
I first did blocking animation for all active shots with animated characters, and imported those to UE5.Then I went back, and did splining and clean-up on those shots. If I had more time, I would have liked to do more clean-up work. But I’m okay with how the animation looks, and due to how dynamic UE5 is I can, in the future, do the clean-up work I want to do and reimport to UE5 for rendering. I do like that I won’t need to worry about going through an entire pipeline just to re-render improved animation, which UE5 makes much more simple. It is one of the reasons I’m very glad I learnt UE5 from Serra this semester, as I could potentially use it for future projects both at UAL and personal works to save time on parts of the pipeline I’m not as interested in perusing and learning. For example, I don’t like compositing in Nuke personally, but I found the live view ability of UE5 made making those counterpart adjustments and applications easier and faster.
Materials:
As mentioned previously, I remade and applied the materials for all of the rigs I used. While this was a little annoying and time consuming to do, once done for each rig I didn’t have to worry about it again until it came to the final render, where I made some tweaks to some of the materials.
I also changed and made my own materials for the subway train asset to make it look like the London Central line, as I wanted the film to feel more like my own experience with public anxiety so the film looking more like it takes place in London made most sense to me. For the seats, I roughly imitated the pattern used on most London underground seats in Photoshop, which I then applied to the Albedo texture for the seat assets. I also replaced most of the metal and wood materials, as I feel these aren’t nearly as common on the London underground, where everything is mostly a white matt material with black frames. To finish, I made some Decals using my own graffiti tag designs.
For the secondary characters, after the mood/lighting change I wanted them to be as void of personality as possible. I wanted the visuals to be representative of my experiences of working on my own social anxiety about people staring at me in public. I’ve found it helpful to question why people would be staring at me when I’m not doing anything outwardly worthy of watching, or thinking of times I’ve seen someone doing something weird and I maybe only glanced over momentarily before continuing to be more preoccupied with myself and my own thoughts and actions. All of those actions entail me thinking about the other person’s/people’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences as opposed to seeing them as void of those aspects and only focused on me. So if I wanted to add a twist to such a narrative, it makes sense to me that the people staring at the main character should be void of depth. Going back to my visual research, James Fenner’s works depict people as mostly silhouettes which I felt would work well for my idea. I made a flat, black material in UE5 and applied it to the skin, hair, eyes, and facial hair of the secondary characters in the ‘red lighting’ level to be representative of the above themes.
I also added 2D eyes to overlay the secondary characters. I found these shots to be a little boring and too static, so I added a jitter to the 2D eyes to give these shots some life. I realised later this worked well because the jittery eyes reflect the panic and instability of the feeling of these people staring at the main character.
Lighting:
I mostly went in and changed the colours of the lighting on the subway train asset, more so for the red lighting after the mood change mid way through the film. I did find it a bit difficult to not have the lighting too red, and essentially feel flat, so I would like to go back into UE5 after the submission and experiment more with the lighting.
I also added one point light each in front of the two characters in shot 0200, as they were too shadowed and the black silhouetted skin wasn’t as clear when not contrasted with their lit clothes. I also added both these lights to the sequencer so that I could key their visibility in the scene, otherwise they were too bright in other shots and looked odd.
Rendering
Even though I initially set the UE5 levels up in a way that I could have the lighting change during shot 0100 in engine, I kept having issues executing this. Eventually, I decided instead to render both the red lighting and the normal lighting separately, and edit them together later. Once I had set up a duplicate sequencer for the red lighting level, this was pretty straight forward.
For the sequencers, I made sure that the visibility of shot specific lights, alembic caches, and the 2D eyes were keyed so that they would only be visible during their set shots.
Editing
I edited my film in DaVinci Resolve. Most of the work was creating a satisfying transition from the normal lighting to the red lighting. I experimented with different methods (fading in, a glitch effect transition, suddenly changing the moment the main character opens his eyes again), and settled on the red lighting flicking quickly every so often up to the moment where the main character first glances over to the secondary character in shot 0140.
I also added in the sound. Early on in the project development, I found the track ‘Slow Trap’ by Anton Vlasov which I still wanted to use. I did have to cut and edit the track to fit with the film, but I’m pretty happy with the end result.
This week we’ll be splining and cleaning up our Body Mechanics shot.
Body Mechanics Blocking feedback:
Feedback from George:
Arch back more in first few frames
Frame 14: Add in some asymmetry, make sure the silhouette is more readable. Give arms nicer arc
Frame 23: Hip placement feels weird, doesn’t really lift between here and the next frame, it just moves forward. Might be best to delete this pose entirely, or keep it until splined only to tighten graph curves before deleting keys on some of the controls later
Frame 29: Push the asymmetry, and make the silhouette readable
Frame 54: Add more scrunch to the pose, add anticipation before the pull up
Frame 63: More scrunch and curve to the back. Need to feel the effort of pulling himself up
Frame 70-76: Move elbow controllers. On 70, both should be pointing behind. On 76, screen left can be pointing more outwards. On 76 the screen left arm feels too straight and unreadable
Frame 84: The silhouette being unclear is a big thing here. Some unclarity is okay (eg it might be unavoidable to have screen right leg overlapping the screen right arm) but the rest should be as clear as possible
Frame 91: Try lifting the screen left arm. Not a necessity but it might help clear up the silhouette a bit
Frame 91-102: Have screen left arm more lifted in general, and more outwards/behind on frame 102
Next blog posts:
As mentioned in my previous Immersion blog post, I have an extension on the Animation Fundamentals unit and will be doing another blog post before the final submission post summing up what work I did between this week and submission.
As I mentioned in my last Immersion blog post, I decided to buy the M-rig pack from Ramon Arango, and to use a few in this project. They were quite expensive, but I really liked his Artemis and Apollo rigs so I found the price worth what I would be getting in return. I did unfortunately find a few issues with them (mostly issues with the clothes and how they look with various rig poses), but I have already seen Ramon mention on his Discord server that he will be working on any bugs and issues, and releasing updates in the future with fixes. The issues aren’t so big that I can’t use the rigs, so I’m happy with them for now.
Using one of the rigs, Minerva, I started blocking animation for shot 0080 and 0090. I also did the same changes to the base rig file as I did with the Apollo rig to prepare it for UE5 import (removing N-gons, renaming materials, hiding faces, applying materials to the faces and not just the object). I still need to remake the materials in UE5 for the alembic cache import to link to.
Because I have an extension on this brief, I asked Serra what to do about blog posts updates, and she (and Friendred separately) advised that I make one last blog post before the submission post summing up everything I did between this week and submission.
This week we’ll be blocking our body mechanics shot using our reference and planning from last week.
Body Mechanics Planning Feedback:
Reference collection:
Extra reference (from similar jump but new camera angle)
Pose sketches:
Animatic using poses (overlayed on Maya background set up):
Sphere animation (roughly matched to the head, hips, hands, and feet of the reference footage):
Feedback from George:
Some of the arcs feel slow, make them more punchy
Don’t forget to switch hands and feet between IK and FK depending on if they have made contact with the wall or not
Towards the end of the reference shot when the guy stands up and his hands lift off the wall, the screen right hand peels off nicely because of the angle. Make sure to include and push this in anim
This week I blocked animation for shot 0190. I also imported the alembic cache for shot 0180 (0170 and 0180 combined) and shot 0190 to UE5 and set them up in the sequencer.
Shot 0190 Blocking:
I also saw that the creator of the Artemis & Apollo rigs, Ramon Arango, is going to be releasing a new rig pack this week of 6 human character rigs. I want to buy them anyway for my personal use, but I realised I could use some of the rigs as the secondary characters for this project. I do wish I had them sooner as I would have liked to maybe use one of them as the main character also, purely for style matching sake as the new rigs look a little different to the Apollo rig. However I think since the Apollo rig is the only main character, I’m happy with the rig for him looking different.
This week we looked at planning and video references for animations.
For filming your own video references, getting as much footage of the same movement as ideal, as you can then pick the one that looks best. This could mean it fits better into the shot/scene idea, it’s the most visually satisfying, it conveys the desired information and mood, etc. You can also edit and cut together video footage, such as taking part of the movement and slowing it down to create more dynamic movements.
It’s also best to get multiple angles, and to always try and film from multiple angles simultaneously so the movement matches up. This is so you can see the different parts of the body clearly moving, as from just one angle some movements may not be as clear or visible to the camera. I’ve shot references in the past with multiple angles by borrowing a friend’s phone and using that and my own to get a front and side angle. I just had to match up both in video editing software.
We can also use preexisting video reference, since some movements we might not be able to do (such as professional athlete movements for example). We just need to keep in mind how easy or difficult the reference might be to use when looking for some. I found a parkour video on youtube where they often capture movements from multiple angles, so I think I would like to find a quick jump from one of these videos to use as my reference.
Walk Cycle Spline Feedback 2:
Feedback from George:
Have the feet planting done in 3 frames. Frame 1, heel of foot touch down. Frame 2, foot touches down but toes still lifted. Frame 3, toes touch down and foot fully planted.
On frame 15-16, the back knee gets stuck. Move the foot control a tad so the knee moves between those frames
Around frame 33 the ball movement feels shaky for some reason, double check the animation editor arcs are smooth
This week I’ve been focusing on animation. I’ve been finding it difficult to get myself working lately, so I wanted to start with a shorter shot first before jumping into anything too big. I picked shots 0170 and 0180 (I decided to merge those two shots together as the cameras were too similar for a shot change to not feel weird).
I also decided to block all active shots for now so I can import them to UE5 and render the full film with blocked anim to test how it all looks, before going back and splining/cleaning up animation later. This way even if everything goes wrong after blocking and for some reason I can’t do more animation work, I at least still have a full film with blocked animation for submission.
