Lighting and Rendering Tests

As I know next to nothing about lighting, and slightly further from nothing about rendering, I can only determine what will work best for my animation by simple trial and error. For starts, I've set up a weak ambient light complimented by a stronger spot light to create a few shadows around William and I'm deciding which software I will choose to render with.

Maya Hardware

Maya Software

Maya Vector

Mental Ray

Personally I am very tempted to make the whole thing in Maya Vector, what a brilliant little setting :D

It's between Mental Ray and Maya Software, then. A test of render timing for each will make the decision for me.

Picturez

A couple of images created with the intentions of using as a business card design but decided that it would stand purely as an interesting blog post :P

Excited Puppy animation

Slightly too fast.

Excited Puppy

Nico, a rig downloaded from creativecrash.com, is a model far more closely resembling a dragonic creature than a dog. Using a little imagination i have used this rig to practise animation for Jake the puppy. Below is a simple animation of him getting excited, as puppies often do, before realising that it's not so exciting after all. I plan to do more test animations with Nico, it is a brilliant rig and a lot of fun to experiment with.

Puppy videos

Power Centres 2

Media Tests.
Looking at Power centres and trying to re create scenes from my animation using downloaded rigs, to try and show the power centres and emotions of the characters at the time.

William, shocked to find a dog in his house.

Playful puppy.

Agitated, checking his watch. It's too late to still be awake.

Curiously checking the hallway, no one is at the door.

Coming home from work, tired.

Power Centres

Investigation into the display and meaning of power centres within characters.

Ed Hooks 'Acting for Animators'
Everybody, including you and me, has a distinct power center. Usually it is a couple of inches below the navel, in the area that the japanese call the hara. When you walk across the room, that point sort of leads the way. But haven't you seen people whose power centre seems to be someplace else?
It helps an aniamtor to be conceptual about power centres because every character has one. When you give a character a noticeable power center, it suggests more characterization.
The higher the power center, the quicker the rhythm of the character. Anxiety is a high and heady power center. Confidence, on the other hand, manifests itself in a feeling of weight, a lower power center.

Various poses, mainly concentrating on the hips and shoulders, depicting different personalities with a common visual appearance. Using the Andy Rig.

From left to right:

An anxious person, searching for something.

A shy person, hiding from someone desireable. (Spine should be bent.)

A coy person, pretending to be shy to seduce someone.

A confident person, trying to pick a fight.

A person who thinks they're amazing, trying to show off.

Meline Study

Inspired by the short film 'Meet Meline' by Virginie Goyons and Sebastien Laban I have created a short piece of practice-based research as part of my media tests. This time, I chose to look at facial animation. To capture the childish nature of Meline I decided to try and recreate the scene at 4 mins 50 seconds, as she frantically tries to get her torch to relight, there is a brief moment of shock followed by rationality and childish curiosity. This was one of the moments that stood out to me even from the first viewing and I was excited to try and recreate the essence of the character using the Andy Rig.
Again, this proved a difficult excercise. Fortunatley for me the rig that i have downloaded is equipped with a very useful facial rig, with clear control shapes and flawless parameters. As well as enjoying this, i also got to experiment a lot about subtleties and exaggeration in facial animation.

One thing i have just realised is the lack of retina animation - after the initial shock her eyes would be expected to dart around as she further inspects that which has shocked her.

Gentlemen Test

Based on my analysis of the characters in Blur Studio's 'A Gentlemen's Duel', i created a very short animated sequence in Maya with a the Andy rig that i downloaded from creativecrash.com. Using the same rig customisation, and textures, i created two instances of the same character. Through animation I believe i have differentiated between the two characters. The small scene i devised was inside a hospital waiting room, where the two gentlemen are waiting to be seen to after being beaten up during their duel. Without clearly stating, I wonder if i have managed to communicate personality through animation by showing how each character would act in this situation.

Practise-based research, i predict, will be a crucial part of my research. Even from this simple, short excercise i have learned a lot about how personality is communicated through performance in animation. For one, it was a quite difficult process, thinking about what makes each character tick, and imagining how they would act based on how they move in the original short film.






The character on the left is the French Marquee and the character on the right is the English Sir :)
Did you get it right?

Did I get it right?!
This is what I hope to build upon and develop my skills in.