3D Character Animation

This is the final rendered animation with audio.

Evaluation and Reflection

Over the course of this semester I created my character and animation. The idea was to create a character to portray emotion whether in body language, facial expressions or both. Furthermore the character had to develop a personality that suited his visual presence. To create realistic emotive expressions and body language, research had to be conducted into how real people move and emote.

Generally the modeling stage went without much trouble. It was time consuming and took a while to become adjusted to modeling an organic character with clothes. The model of the head was recycled from an earlier project which helped significantly.

The most trouble during the project I found was during the bone structure and bi-ped stages. I used bones within the hands of the character but came into a lot of trouble with getting the points to respond properly, however these problems were fixed and the characters hands worked very well.

The rest of the body was a bi-ped system which saved time and enabled me to think about how to animate the character.

Once the modeling stage was finished I created storyboard images of what I wanted the character to do in the animation and noted what type of environment I wanted and the sound effects I’d need to create the full effect.

When creating the environment the use of lights within the environment was something I was happy with. The omni lights used created a gritty atmosphere and enhanced the aesthetic of the textures. Using omni lights was important in making a more realistic glow for the characters light sabers as well. The glow of the lights moving with the light saber and casting the character in its coloured glow was something I was pleased with.

I was happy with the characters movements during the animation. The cut throat expression and the light saber throw movements I was particularly pleased with as I thought initially it would be hard to pull of realistically.

Also the characters facial expressions I was quite happy with, although I would of liked to create some more diverse facial expressions.

The part of the animation that I am least happy with was in the way the character walks with the bi-ped system. While there are a lot of different parameters the user can change to adjust and tailor the characters walk to a more desired result. However after a lot of experiments the result was the best I could come up with. As the character walking is only used to introduce the character to the scene and at the end of the animation I thought it was not a top priority to have the character walking totally perfect.

Further improvements that I would implement would be to improve the environment and more diverse facial expressions.

Overall the project was very beneficial to me and was something I found interesting. Reflecting back on previous projects I believe that I have improved my work and have developed techniques that will have a positive effect on my 3D work.

The time spent trying to get the right facial expression and body movement was worth the effort when the final result was just how I wanted it to be and although there were aspects of the animation and modeling that were difficult it is very satisfying to have the whole animation come together as planned. I hope to be able to work on another project similar in the near future to further improve my character modeling and animation skills.

Animation

My character has been given his personality and has been fitted with the ‘Bi-Ped’ system and so he is now ready for animating.

The animation is based upon my earlier storyboard sketches. The character will appear from a doorway with the lights behind him casting him in shadow for a dramatic entrance. Mickey will retrieve a lightsaber from his pocket but will struggle in actually turning it on and so will become angry and impatient. Once he has managed to switch it on, after fiddling with it, the lightsaber illuminates Mickey’s face in a red glow as he bears a manic grin of happiness.

Mickey then encounters a foe that he is none too pleased to see. He glares furiously at his opponent and they both draw their light saber’s ready for battle. Mickey points at the nameless adversary and insults him by depicting a cutting throat motion.

Mickey is revealed to be a bit of a misfit in his biography, although he looks like a dangerous maniac that you wouldn’t like to meet in a dark alley, he would much rather be writing hit songs for his debut album. His physical ability has been described as a “crushing disappointment”, and so now preparing to engage in a fight with a person who is undoubtedly going to win, Mickey decides to launch his lightsaber through the air and kill his enemy in a desperate and unfair victory.

Mickey is now free to continue his journey. He leaves his thrown lightsaber on the floor as he walks away swearing an oath never to use force again.

The animations took some time to finish so they were at a standard I was happy with. Rather than concentrating purely on facial expression or just on the body movements to express his emotions I felt it would be better to try both. Using the head model I made from my previous semester I changed the face map and went back to making the model pull horrible faces. I came up with a fierce glare and an evil grin for my character. The body movements took more time because there was more to think about with how bodies move when they perform different poses. Working with the animation and key frames became quite tedious but in the end I managed to create the poses I needed.

I used the recent Tim Burton film ‘Sweeny Todd – The Demon Barber of Fleet Street’ as my main inspiration for my character within the animation. The general style and feel of the film is macabre and grim. I found the characters facial expressions and body movements to be similar in how I wanted to portray my character. The lead character Sweeny Todd himself is shown almost permanently with a scowl and never really looks happy. It was difficult trying to replicate the same appearance for my character. However I successfully managed to create a rather nasty stare and grin.

I wanted to create a dark gritty environment where my character exists. I used some metallic panel textures for the floor and walls which I thought would suit the ‘space station’ aesthetic of the animation. The props and the environment were fairly unimportant during this process as they were only needed to support the character. With more time I would create a more believable environment with perhaps some windows which look out into space showing planets and light beaming through from the sun. I used some key placed Omni lights to create an atmosphere for my scenes, which I thought worked very well on the high specular metallic surfaces.

The main prop for the story is the characters Lightsaber weapon. This item was created simply, using a cylinder with enough height, length and width segments so I could manipulate the vertices’ into a handle shape then applying some bevelling at either end. A turbo smooth modifier is added for the smooth finish. The blade part itself is just another cylinder with a lens, glow effect added. To finish the handle I added a ‘Raytrace’ map on the reflection map to create a realistic metallic finish.

I also added an Omni light to the lightsaber so that it gives off a red glow wherever it is moved to which works very well in the animation. I had to change the near and far attenuation so the light didn’t travel far and only effected what was close.

For rendering the scenes I decided to use the ‘Quicktime’ MOV format because I have always had good results than compared to the AVI format. I used a resolution of 1200x800 for a good quality wide screen render at 25 frames a second.

Using ‘Adobe Premier Pro' I edited my animation and added some suitable sound effects before rendering out the final animation. Premier Pro scaled down my animation to a lower resolution.

Bipeds

In some of the scenes for my animation I want my character to walk. The best and most effective way to achieve this was to use the Biped technique.
Under systems I selected Biped and created the skeleton Biped system. I selected the motion tab and with Figure mode turned on I could scale and fit the skeleton into the characters body. I then switched Figure mode off to finalise the skeleton .

The biped is now in place and the next stage is to attach the mesh to the skeleton. I started off by selecting each body part in turn and applying the Physique modifier, then within the modifier I clicked the small figure which allows me to 'pick' which part of the biped to the selected body part. For each body part you apply the Physique modifier to, you always attach it to the BiP01 which is the parent of all the biped bones. this selection always attaches the right bone to the right body part.

Once all the bipeds have been initialized with the body parts the limbs will now move more or less like a real body limb should move. However in some cases when parts of the body move, some stray vertices will be left behind, this is because the physique modifier's envelopes haven't completely covered all the vertices and is fixed by selecting envelopes under the physique modifier's stack and using the scale tool to make the envelopes bigger to cover all the vertices.

Now with the biped system finished I can make the character walk. Under the Biped parameter within the motion tab I clicked on the footsteps mode. Inside the Footstep creation panel I selected Create multiple footsteps and 'walk'. This box allowed me to select everything from how many footsteps to the length of stride and pace of the characters walk.

After several different attempts I was settled on the render below. The character has a slight limp which I think suits his eccentric personality. I also quite liked the effect of the characters robe shifting along the shoulders.

Storyboards

Whilst creating my character I was also thinking about what sort of scene the character would be used in. I drew out some storyboards of the camera shots and basic movements I wanted within the scene. Furthermore there will be close up shots of the characters face which will portray the expressions.

Along with the storyboard images I have also included some 3DS MAX rendered images of the environment used within the storyboards.

Character enters.

Character cannot get his light saber to work, so becomes angry. Eventually it works and he is happy.

Character continues to walk on.

Character bumps into another man and becomes angry and points at other man.

Character throws his light saber at the other man. The man screams and will have a close up shot of terror.

Character walks off out of room leaving the man behind.

Below are rendered images of the environment and light saber which will be used.

Character Update & Profile

With the additions and updated details of the character I thought it would be an ideal time to provide a work in progress. The next stages of the character will be to fill the rest of the body with bones so his arms can move and also to get the character walking using the biped technique.

In the image below, the characters sleeve has been updated and also the characters fingers are fully functioning with bones.

This image shows the characters new eyes, they do look slightly larger than they should, however I think it will be ideal to have them this size as the characters expressions will be slightly more dramatic and easier to see.

The image below shows the whole character thus far.

Along with the model, the character should also be given a name and a personality to make the character appear more realistic and have a background.


Name: Mickey ‘El Loco Candyhips’ Funshine.
Age: 38.
Height: 6'4.
Parents/Lineage: Jeevan and Francois Funshine.
Occupation: Space Cowboy / Connect 4 Extraordinaire.
Interests/Hobbies: Lewd Behaviour, Thrash Punk, 5-a-side Football and Alcoholism.
Dislikes: Tuna and games of ‘Twister’.
Favourite Food: ‘Italian B.M.T’ Thursday’s ‘Sub-of-the-day’.
Favourite Drink: ‘The Cheeky Vimto’ Which is thought to be a cocktail of harmful and illegal liquid substances.
Place Of Birth: Mickey is thought to of materialised in a wheelie bin outside Francois’s nans house.
Fun Fact: Is believed to have created the popular 80’s ‘Nu-Wave’ movement after a hosting a disco in his parents house. 

Short Bio:
Plays ‘Midfield General’ in his 5-a-side football team ‘The Dreaded Rear Admiral FC’. His football skills are thought to be the origin for the term “Crushing Disappointment”.
Became incredibly angry after losing the rights to his hit number 1 singles  “Tonight, Im Gonna Rock You Tonight” and “Gimmie Some Money” in a game of ‘Pop-up Pirate’.
Mickey now spends his time searching the universe in his 2 door 'Star Destroyer' saloon finding the inspiration and funding to write his debut Irish folk album. Will stop at nothing to reach this goal.

The Eyes

Making the eyes is quite a simple and straightforward task and can add a lot of depth and personality to the character.

I start off by creating a sphere, naming it ‘Iris’ and changing the colour to white. By cloning this sphere and decreasing the Hemisphere we can create a lens shaped object. I changed the colour to black and named it ‘Pupil’. I then reduced the radius to form a good sized pupil.

The next step is to create the skin which will form the eyelids. Again we start by cloning the first sphere and reducing the hemisphere to create a sphere cut in half. I increased the radius slightly and rotated it into place to form an eyelid. Also I changed the objects colour to skin coloured. I then cloned the first eyelid and placed it on the opposite side under the eye.

The model of the eye is now finished but the next step will allow us to manipulate the vertices of the eye to form expressions. Under the ‘Space Warps’ panel I selected ‘Geometric/Deformable’ objects from the drop down menu. Within this menu I can select ‘FFD(Box)’. I dragged this box out to cover the eye with the number of points set to 2x2x2.

With all the eye objects selected I use the bind to space warp selection to connect the eye to the FFD(Box).

Now under the FFD(Box) modifier list I can select ‘Control Points’ to pick points of the box to move which will move the vertices of the eye object.

Below is a short video example of the FFD(Box) controlling a pair of eyes.

Another important way to control the eyes is to use helper points. Using helper points we can set up the pupils to follow the points which can be useful when you’d like your characters eyes to follow something.

Under the Create panel I selected the helper objects and chose Point. I placed the point helper on the stage in front of the eye, this will be the object that the pupil will follow.

With a pupil selected I went to the motion control and within the assign controller parameter I clicked the Rotation: Euler and then clicked the small ‘?’ box to bring up a list of controllers. I picked the ‘LookAt Constraint’.

Further down the assign controller parameters the ‘LookAt Constraint’ becomes available and will now allow us to select LookAt Target to pick the helper object. The pupil will now follow the helper object when it moves. However be sure that the Select LookAt Axis is set to the right axis, in this case it’s the Z axis.

Below is a short video of a pair of eyes moving with the help of two separate helper objects.

Research On Emotion

The main purpose of the character is to portray some kind of emotion either in body, facial expression or both. Before I can start to animate my character I need to gather some basis of research that I can examine and model my character on. I will be trying to animate my character to perform angry and malicious expressions so I searched for videos that could help with those emotions.

I chose this video because there is a good collection of general negative expressions, lots of frowning and stern faces. Furthermore the main character is a tortured soul who seems permanently furious and although when he seems happy it still looks like a manic grin rather than actual happiness. The full length film it self provides a huge amount of emotional responses, much more so than any other film due to it being a musical and therefore the actors need to portray a much more dramatic persona


I chose these videos because the main character in the film is a deeply insane and an evil maniac that provides really eccentric and powerfully emotional persona.





Below is a couple still images which I thought relevant to the emotional expression research.

Skinning & Boning The Hand

This week was dedicated to creating bones to put inside the hand which will allow for realistic hand/finger movement when animating the character.

The first step is to create ‘helper’ objects which the bones will be ‘linked’ to so that when a helper object is rotated the bones rotate with it. Under the create > helper menu the correct tool to use is ‘Point’. I placed a separate helper point in front of each finger and he thumb.

The next stage was to create the bones. Under the create > systems menu I chose the ‘bones’ tool and drew out five bones, one acting as the bone inside the palm and the rest for the finger itself. It may be necessary to resize/scale some of the bones to get the right shape inside the hand.

When the bones are ready in the correct places inside the hand I now had to link each bone to the correct helper object. For example each bone along the forefinger will be linked to the helper object positioned at the tip of the forefinger.

I select a each bone in turn and right click and choose ‘wire parameters’ then from the drop down menu I select ‘transform’ then ‘rotation’ then ‘Y rotation’ because I want the fingers to move up and down like they should.

I then click the helper object to begin the link, going through a similar drop down menu box, choosing the same Y rotation selection.

A box appears where I click the middle button and then down to ‘connect’ this completes the link between the two.

Once each bone has gone through this method the helper objects can then be used to rotate the fingers. Furthermore the thumb was also added to the Z axis to allow it to move on its two axis.

The next stage is to link all the bones in the hand to the hand itself so I can move my hand object with the bones.

With the hand object selected I applied the ‘Skin’ modifier and added all the bones in the hand to the modifier. Now that everything is connected the helper objects will now be able to move each of the fingers, however in most cases the skin modifier applies a much too strong pull on all the vertices all around which leads to a messy looking hand object. To fix this I went inside the skin parameters to edit envelopes.

Also within the weight properties there is an ‘Abs. Effect’ which ranges from 0 to 1 and dictates the strength of the vertex select. So by turning down vertices that should be moving to 0 it is easy to clean up the envelopes to animate a realistic looking hand.

I reapplied the ‘Turbosmooth’ modifier to the hand object to give it the realistic appearance and then tested some simple hand movements on the animation timeline to get used to how it worked.

Below is a video of the characters hand.

Arms & Hands

Following on from the legs and chest areas of the body, I will next be making the arms and hands.

For the arm I created a cylinder which I would use as a guide to get the right length. I created another cylinder and decreased the sides down to 8, with ‘smooth’ unchecked. It is a good idea to decreasing the height and width segments to help keep the polygon count low. The object is then converted to an editable polygon.

The cylinder is kept thin so we can extrude the object. Extruding three times to allow room for the shoulder, then extruding one long segment to create the bicep area, extruding a further three times to create the elbow socket then one final extrusion to create the lower arm.

To create a realistic looking bicep and forearm we select the polygons between the shoulder and elbow and delete them entirely. With the border selection turned on I can select the borders (the inner rings on both sides of the deleted object) and select ‘Bridge’ which joins the upper arm back together but this time with a information box that allows the user to input segments, taper and bios the polygons to create a much more realistic looking bicep.

The exact same method is used to create a more muscular looking forearm. Below is the arm with a ‘Turbosmooth’ modifier applied. The next step is to create the hand and join the two together.

The hand is a relatively shape to model realistically, but like most other complicated shapes, they start with a simple box object.

Staring with a box that will act as the palm and back of the hand I applied four length and three width segments which will allow me to create the fingers and the thumb out of the basic box.

After converting the box to an editable polygon, I used the polygon selection tool to highlight where I wanted the four fingers to extrude from. Using the bevel tool I made a slight inset into the hand object, this makes it easier to extrude the fingers individually.

Extruding the fingers is the simplest aspect of creating the hand. Before extruding the polygons it is best to rotate each polygon slightly, this will give the fingers a more realistic appearance, compared to having four fingers pointing straight forward. Using the bevel tool to extrude and change the height to create the knuckle and extrude out the finger.

The thumb works with same technique, however is more complicated due to where it is on the hand and the general shape.

I Selected a polygon on the side of the hand and rotated it slightly so I can extrude the thumb towards the fingers rather than sideward’s.

The thumb was a problem area for my hand model, at first it wasn’t long enough and so in trying to get a good, realistic shape I created a few too many extruded polygons when it could have been kept much simpler.

I also had to rotate and move vertices when creating the thumb to make sure it went in the right direction and was to scale with the rest of the hand.

In the image below shows the thumb and also where I have selected the vertices on the side of the hand and pulled them down to create a rounded hand shape.

With the shape of the hand finished I spent a lot of time working with individual vertices and polygons to create a better and more organic shaped hand. Finally a ‘TurboSmooth’ modifier with ‘literations’ set to 2, gives the hand a much smoother and realistic surface.

The image above shows the design of the hand so far. The thumb still looks slightly odd and a bit thin but overall I am very happy with the model. I deliberately tried to make the fingers thin and spider like as I thought it will suit my character when brought together. Furthermore my character will be wearing gloves rather than bare hands so extra detail such as finger nails, is unnecessary. However detail in the textures will make the gloves obvious. 

Character Update

Whilst creating my basic character form I came to the idea of giving my character the form of a Star Wars inspired ‘Jedi’ character. The following images I gathered as part of general character research so I have a clear idea of what I am trying to achieve while creating him.

Below is the updated character of mine with redesigned legs and feet and a more realistic looking cloth robe and vest.

Redesigning the legs was done by using the bevel tool and applying a turbo smooth modifier to create the smooth appearance.

The boots were done in the same manner. I wanted the boots to have a better look than before, so using the bevel tool I created a proper high top boot object.

Overall I am very happy with how the character is progressing

Basic Character Form 1

The heel of the foot is the starting point for creating the foot/shoe. By creating a small, thin box and turning it into an editable poly we can select the top polygon and extrude twice. This leaves a middle polygon than can be extruded twice and then bevelled at the end to create a point.

The leg starts with a small, thin cylinder at the top of the foot and has to be converted to an editable poly. We extrude the top polygon to the knee point and extrude a further three times to create the knee joint. From there the bevel tool is used to extrude and change the width of the leg joint, making the thigh and groin as we get higher.

For a more realistic look it is best to pull out some of the polygons on the side which represent the hip area. Rotating the leg inwards slightly improves the stance of the character as real legs don’t just go straight upwards.

With the leg and foot finished it is just a case of mirroring the objects to create the opposite parts.

The next stage is to create the body. Using a plane with no height or width segments and making it an editable poly is the starting point. From here we select the top edge and using shift click to create five more polygons, then using the method to create the top and back polygons, whilst taking care to try and make the polygons parallel.

Using the vertex selection tool it is easy to change the shape to a more realistic chest and body shape.

Clicking a side edge then using the loop tool to select all attached edges allows us to select all the edges on one side.

We then shift click and drag like before to make the chest and body wider. The extrude tool is helpful to create a layered shape.

As the object has gaps all down the side, we need to create polygons to fill in the gaps but leaving a couple of gaps near the top for the arms. Using the bridge tool and the edge selection we can pick what polygons to be filled in.

With the general shape now complete I spent some time moving polygons and vertices to create a shape I was much happier with. By this point I was trying to create a cloak/robe effect that the character will be wearing. This is the body with the ‘Turbosmooth’ modifier applied

To create a better and more realistic looking robe I thought it would be better to add some details to make it more obvious. Adding a collar and a gap down the front for example proved to make a much better looking model.

These were created by using selecting edges and using the shift, click and drag method used previously. Then I used the vertex selection to move points into different positions. Below is the model with the ‘Turbosmooth’ modifier applied.