Character Animation Projects

I chose to create an animation performance that had multiple contrasting factors, the main factor would be the characters and their personalities. I chose Spider Gwen (Alex Salmar, 2024), and used the NC11 rig for the other character, which I will refer to as Nico (Arthurnal, 2024). Accompanying the contrast they still had to have commonalities otherwise they wouldn’t necessarily get along or be good friends as they need to be able to relate to each other.

 

Shared traits:

-       Competitive

-       Strategic

-       Out of the box thinkers

 

Differences:

 

Þ    Gwen:

o   Playful

o   Graceful

o   Quick

o   Quiet

o   Takes rules lightly/ doesn’t know them.

 

Þ    Nico:

o   Trained in Army

o   Strict rule follower

o   Serious

o   Stiff/ Rigid

o   Has a soft spot for Gwen?

 

The concept I had for this performance piece was to have both playing a game of laser tag, where Nico was accustomed to however this was new for Gwen. I didn’t want to outrightly reveal its laser tag, for a better cinematic reveal, it was done towards the end. I wanted the beginning to be more intense and then have the story shift to a playful, funny tone.

 

A supporting contrast is that, although they both have the desire and objective to win the game, Gwen was new to laser tag and did not fully know the rules, while Nico stuck by them without a doubt.

 

Planning out my initial story started with researching poses that were both dynamic and typical for each character.

 

(Character poses and Colour Theory Reference file I made)

 

I then used these to be the foundation of my storyboard and to aid story progression. I initially thought about having dialogue, I decided I could rather visually depict the storyline, that meant I needed to have a stronger visual narrative. After a few re-writes of the ending, the original ending seemed to be the strongest visually, but needed to be aided by other visual cues. That is where the ‘no physical contact’ sign and the personalised sign ‘for Gwen’ came into the storyline.

(My storyboard in video form)

Later I also added a sign saying, “laser tag room 4” and another more viable sign saying, “zone 4”. These would help reinforce the theme of laser tag without having to focus on them too much.

(Sign images I made for this project)

 

As part of designing my storyboard, I first came up with my scene setting. This was influenced by ideas and techniques I learnt from the ‘Layout and Composition for Animation’ book by Ed Ghertner (Layout and Composition for Animation by Ed Ghertner, 2010).

 

Techniques that influence my project:

-       Placement of doorways and room settings with vanishing points. (Horizons and Vanishing points

-       Tricks tip on representing changing perspective with using an overlay to bridge the two perspectives.

-       Compositing advice on “leaving air” around the character for them to move and act in the frame.

-       Path of action tips on ‘don’t fence me in’ and ‘out of the box’ for camera framing and movements.

 

(My drawn layout planning of the setting I created in maya)

 

Although I had studied vanishing points before, this changed the way I thought about designing a setting and influenced the way I went about drawing the layout design to create the depth needed for the characters to act in. The overlay tip gave me a camera angle idea to show Gwen at the top of the pillar instead of only having camera angles near the bottom of the setting looking up and around. Additionally, the compositional techniques also helped me create better framing and allowing the characters to have enough “air” around them. (Ed Ghertner, 2010).

(Layout and Composition for Animation by Ed Ghertner, pgs. 88 & 103)

 

The main influencer on how I placed the pillars was the tips on ‘path of action’ and the ‘out of the box’. I made sure there was a designated path for Nico to walk forward into that would not obstruct the camera view of him but also look natural. However, when trying to include the framing of the camera to have some pillars cut into the frame on the edges it began to feel too cramped as it is only a single room.

 

During the semester I participated in figure drawing classes. This helped me to loosen my drawing style and be freer and more relaxed with not having perfect drawing and to focus on the story planning rather than the detailed drawings. The classes also helped with shifting my mindset and trying to incorporate movement into my drawings.

(Figure drawings plus movement drawings)

 

I also did some animation tests with a mini jump and blocking out an animation sequence.

(Jump playblast and blockout sequence – both Works in progress)

 

Moving into maya I created the main room with a balcony as I designed and started adding rough pillar shapes based on my plan. I found that a few of the pillars needed to have more distinct height differences and widths. The pillar I planned to be quite thin with a bridge design for someone could climb on it, ended up being a lot wider and shorter, to give variation to the room. Later I also changed the shapes of a few other pillars to make more areas one could hide and shoot from, enhancing the laser tag game theme.

 

During our lecture on strong poses, I learnt how important dynamic poses are for an animation. This is what led me to finding and pushing poses to be more extreme and dynamic.

 

(My strong posing tests from the lecture)

 

When it comes to the principle of pose-to-pose and straight ahead (Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, 1981) I interchanged between the two throughout this project. The storyboarding was more influenced by the straight-ahead method as I had more storyline than poses in mind and rather wanted to loosely develop the story and see how it would develop. The pose-to-pose method more influenced the blockout as I mainly focused on creating the key, dynamic, poses to form the basis of the story. I then interchanged between the two when making breakdowns and in-betweens as I wanted the story to flow naturally so used straight ahead method. This is how I came up with the idea to have Gwen do a swan dive off the pillar to have a cartoony feel as that action, was not safe or realistic.

 

I created a rough plan of my camera movements so that I could see how well the sequence would read and emphasise the storyline. I based these on the different camera angles and shots with their meanings that we were taught in our Previs and Storyboarding lecture.  

 

Such as:

-       Medium shots: just below waist and above head, focuses on subject’s eyes without losing environment.

-       Medium close-up: reduces distraction, prioritises story and character details.

-       Close-ups: highlight change of emotion, time of anxiety or decision.

-       Extreme close-up: isolates specific area, focusing on eyes, highlighting internal process/ thoughts.  

-       Static shot: camera locked on tripod – good for dialogue.

-       Pan: rotates horizontally, good for revealing info or following characters.

-       Tilt: goes upwards or downwards.

-       Pull out: unveil characters, context, setting in a scene.

 

I used the panning, tilting and tracking techniques to help reveal Gwen when she was entering the scene for the first time and to reveal the gun when she needed to tag Nico.

 

I chose to animate Nico’s walk based on the ‘SWAT’ walk reference video by Kevin Parry (Kevin Parry, 2018). This fitted Nico’s personality and training background, especially since he would be using a lot of his training in this game. The NC11 rig has armour as part of his outfit and fits the look of a soldier, this was the main reason I chose the rig.

 

To add some contrast into Nico’s movement I decided to incorporate a drop to knee spin when he hears a noise. This was to emphasise his training as he was very exposed in the open and dropping to a knee would give him cover. He would also be harder to spot low down and had additional cover as he knelt in front of a barrier and less chance of being targeted from that angle.

 

To help is character come to life I animated his eyes to be constantly searching the room. Ed Hooks (Acting for Animators, 2017) has nine principles to follow when animating characters, his first one is “thinking tends to lead to conclusions, and emotions tend to lead to action,” this is where I used that principle as most people show thinking when they move their eyes. For example, when a person answers a question, they may move their eyes to look to the top right or top left depending on which hemisphere they are using (Howard Ehrlichman and Dragana Micic et al, 2012). In this case, however, I use the eye movements to show what he is thinking in terms of where to look/go to next. When he hears a noise, Nico’s reaction is facial expression as if to say, “what was that?”, then his eyes move first, leading the action to him doing a knee drop as if his thought process went “it must be Gwen, I need to protect myself and see if I can tag her first”.

 

(My Block-out playblast)

 

When I was working on the timing I asked for feedback from fellow pears. Feedback from Luke was that the timing of Gwen’s big movements needed to be faster. In response to this I changed the timing and spacing of her actions to be faster, this also resulted in me removing some poses and I used stretch to make the movements faster. I had to change Gwen’s arms to IK to stretch them, which did create some issues when switching between FK to IK during animations, as it created popping when it switched too fast or there was a big difference between the arm positions.

 

Other feedback from Lucia, was regarding to Nico’s animation after Gwen landed on him. I had not yet added much animation to him at this part besides the pointing to the wall. She suggested I create a movement that shows Nico fighting against Gwen when she is sitting on him, then show him giving in and pointing to the sign saying she must tag him to win. When incorporating this feedback, I chose to instead have Nico get mad and slap a fist into the ground in frustration. This would work better with his personality as he is strong enough to shake her off him, however, he would not risk hurting her. That is why he frustratedly points to the wall at the ‘no contact sign’ as he is mad that she broke the rules.

 

While animating I used a variety of tools on the Animbot suite. I mainly used the Tween Machine tool to help create the in-betweens. I used the ‘Euler Filter’ tool when I was creating the animations, some of the values on the rotations would go from around 180 or below on one keyframe then to around 360 or above on the next keyframe. The Euler Filter helped correct that. Along with the using the ‘best guess tangent’ tool to smooth out the graphs.

 

The tool that helped me the most with my animation was the X-Form tool in combination with the temporary controller tool, these saved so much time when animating Nico’s hands on the gun and Gwen using the gun. I created a temporary controller for the gun geometry so that I would be able to position it easily in relation to Nico’s hands and use it for the X-Form relationship. I selected the gun controller and shift selected Nico’s right wrist controller. I copied the X-Form relationship, and making sure my timeline was set to the frames I wanted it to be pasted on, baked the relationship onto those frames. This process allowed me to still be able to go back and edit the animation as it was not a permanent constraint, which allowed for more freedom. I did the same process but selecting Nico’s left wrist controller first, which was in IK, then selecting the gun as the hand needed to be influenced by the gun so it would follow the gun. I used the same process with Gwen’s web shooter and when she holds the gun.  

 

A slight issue I had with the NC11 rig (Arthurnal, 2024) was that at some point the rig’s shoulder controls did a rotation and there was no sign of the change in the graphs. When I tried to zero out the controllers, they went to zero, but the mesh was deformed and over twisted by the shoulder. I did not figure out what caused this, and I think an Issue I had was not setting the snapshot pose in the beginning of the project. The mesh was deformed by the wrist and the shoulders, that is why a piece of his shirt shows through the jacket when he is down on his knee.

 

Focusing on the finer details for the polishing phase I animated Nico’s jacket, hair and eyes.

I wanted to build in the principle of follow through and overlapping action. The jacket’s main animation was the drag when Gwen collides with him, however, I also animated the drag and overlap when he turns to look at different places in the room and his second largest movement of spinning and dropping to a knee.

 

For the final stage of the project, I began texturing and adding lighting. The final look I envisioned was inspired by a laser tag scene someone created (Ziiella, 2017). I loved the high contrast lighting and the neon texturing. This is why I assigned a variety of neon colours to the pillars. As the focus was not on texturing, I chose to simply assign Ai Standard Surface materials to the various faces I had created by using the multi-cut tool to create the patterns. This became slightly complex as I needed to fix and redo a few of the pillar’s geometry to allow for them to be smoothed and hold the pattern. I also used the emission for the neon colours to use them as a light source. I added a Skydome light to use at a very low intensity to help lift the overall lighting in the scene so that you would be able to see the characters clearly even in the dark lighting. This, however, was not enough, so I added an ambient light with a warm tint to lighten the scene but enhance the colours.

(laser tag scene inspiration by Ziiella)

 

For lighting I had the idea to have swirling lights that swept over the room slowly. I chose this technique with the lighting as I wanted to incorporate the colour theory to highlight different sub-contexts. In the beginning I had the red light sweep over Nico to emphasise the idea of danger. The yellow light that sweeps over Gwen when she falls is to emphasise playfulness. Blue was to emphasise the friendship between Gwen and Nico and finally the green at the end shows Gwen winning plus her playful side (Filmd, 2022).

 

Lastly, I chose to go with a laser tag themed audio as the main background noise as well as a beep sound effect for the gun. However, as I ran out of time, I was not able to add sound effects for Gwen’s web shoot plus sounds for her fast movements or Nico’s footsteps. They were both in stealth mode and would make as little noise as possible however, I believe the added sound effects of footsteps and the web shooting would help ground the video a bit more.

 

For my walk cycle I used a reference video by Kevin Parry (Kevin Parry, 2018) on dramatic walk cycle. I think this came out nicely with the arcs of his arms and the animation is smooth and conveys weight. There is room for improvement with more time to make more natural. However, I think the cheeky, dramatic personality comes through well. I chose to use the spot rig as this personality of the walk cycle feels right and could fit his personality as he wants to be seen and noticed. I chose to animate the ‘spot vortex’ to appear as he hits the ground, to emphasise spots need to be noticed and recognised for his power. I chose to copy the animation so that the walk cycle was continuous rather than letting it loop. An element I’d change is his arms as I feel they stay too long in the air with too little movement, I would make the arm raise slower, so it feels more purposeful.

 

Self-Critiques:

 

Now having gone through the multi-pass process I can see where I need to spend more time and where to spend less. I would need more time for the polishing phase, animating the finer details to a higher quality.

 

I struggled to stay in each phase and found myself playing the animation on splined during blocking phase as well as using the stepped preview. I will be more careful to avoid doing this in the future and focus more on the timing rather than the in-betweens at this stage.

 

I will also be stricter about continuing to blockout plus stage as I feel I may have moved on too quickly from this phase onto splined rather than fixing the timing issues I had. I would concentrate on the animations and extras like smears to keep the snappy and contrasted animation in this phase as well.  

 

Another aspect I would include more is incorporating more of the 12 principles of animation. I tried to include as many as possible but looking at the result I can see more places where I could include/emphasise the principles. Such as emphasising easing in and out of actions and the timing in the animations, for example when Nico leans around the pillar I would have that be much slower and have him ease more into that action. I would also incorporate a secondary action at that stage so Nico would be completely still, slow that action down and have him do a secondary action of raising the gun or looking around. I would also be more explorative with contrasts in the animation and pushing into the exaggeration including squash and stretch rather than stay with realism. I could’ve done this by squashing Nico as Gwen’s force lands on him from above then have it carry them both down.  

 

If I had more time I would add in more subtleties in the performance piece. I would look for a rig that allowed me to animate Gwen’s eyes and when she is thinking animate her finger tapping on her chin.

 

Further Explorations:

 

In future projects and practice I want to explore more with animating on twos and ones

As well as animating for various speeds such as slow-motion animation and more cartoony speed animations.

I would explore creating settings with more interesting framing and adding different shapes to cut into the frame to make it feel like a larger setting and more natural.

 

As well as developing my camera shots and angles techniques to create more dynamic and appealing storytelling, I would like to further develop my cinematography skills for future projects. For example, I could have used more extreme close ups to reveal Nico’s facial expression and emphasise Gwen’s decision-making moments.

 

 

Bibliography:

 

Alex Salmar (2024) Spider Gwen Rig. Available at: https://alexsalmar.gumroad.com/l/spidergwen (Accessed: 14/01/2024)

 

Arthurnal (2024) NC11 Rigs. Available at: https://arthurnal.gumroad.com/l/nc11 (Accessed: 14/01/2024)

 

Dimitrios Savva and Jarod Guest (2024) Lonely Road Afternoon (pure Sky). Available at: https://polyhaven.com/a/lonely_road_afternoon_puresky (Accessed: 24/04/2024)

 

Ed Ghertner (2010) Layout and Composition for Animation. Focal Press, Burlington, USA.

 

Ed Hooks (2017) Acting for Animators. 4th Edition. Routledge, New York.

 

Eric Goldberg (2008) Character Animation Crash Course. Silman-James Press, Los Angeles.

 

Filmd (2022) What Is Colour Theory In Film, How It Can Transform Your Storytelling. Available at: https://www.filmd.co.uk/articles/what-is-colour-theory-in-film-how-it-can-transform-your-storytelling/#:~:text=In%20film%2C%20colour%20theory%20states,helping%20to%20tell%20your%20story. (Accessed: 24/02/2024)

 

Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston (1981) The Illusion of Life Disney Animation. Disney Editions, Italy.

 

Howard Ehrlichman and Dragana Micic etc al. (2012) Why Do People Move Their Eyes When They Think? Volume 21, Issue 2. Available at: https://doi-org.ezproxy.kingston.ac.uk/10.1177/0963721412436810 (Accessed: 08/05/2024)

 

Jofae (2016) Beep Sound Effect. Available at: https://freesound.org/people/Jofae/sounds/365105/ (Accessed: 03/05/2024)

 

Josh Janousky (2024) JoshCam - Free Realistic Camera Rig for Maya. Available at: https://justjoshinmagic.gumroad.com/l/JoshCam (Accessed: 24/04/2024)

 

Kevin Parry (2018) 100 ways to walk. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEoUhlesN9E (Accessed: 14/01/2024)

 

Kiel Figgins (2018) Amazing Spiderman and Web Rig. Available at: https://3dfiggins.com/Store/ (Accessed: 24/04/2024)

 

Mbuso3d (2024) Sci-fi Energy Gun. Available at: https://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/military/gun/sci-fi-energy-gun-3c9fd36a-ca48-4ed0-9c5f-79b5a6e987ba (Accessed: 20/04/2024)

 

PolishCZE (2017) LaserMaxx: Soundtrack (luk27 edit). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apNcN4Set8M  (Accessed: 01/05/2024)

 

Richard Williams (2009) The Animators Survival Kit. Expanded Edition. Faber & Faber, London.

 

Sahil Banik (2024) The Spot (ATSV). Available at: https://app.gumroad.com/d/5ea2d7771fd1e8a6ebf5bab80d5c8f79 (Accessed: 14/02/2023)

 

Seth Makes Sounds (2023) Upbeat Background Music. Available at: https://freesound.org/people/Seth_Makes_Sounds/sounds/696111/ (Accessed: 03/05/2024)

 

Ziiella (2017) Laser Tag. Available at: https://rec-room.fandom.com/wiki/Laser_Tag?file=Laser_Tag_-_Key_Art.png (Accessed: 20/03/2024)