Just Keep Writing~

Artistic

When in doubt... write. I come to this conclusion recently. Most of the times i face both technical and artistic difficulties, and a lot of times i doubt myself and worried too much. I feel insecure and worry if my pals will like my work or not. Every person has their own way to explore their ideas and mine is through writing. I start to realize that this is becoming my problem solving method.

I was very lost when I worked on my shots three months ago. My mind was clouded by all the pressure and guilt from receiving a mixture of critiques and comments of the first video we did. I tell people that I am very open to any kind of critiques. This is the truth, however, i have to admit that i am not immune to the very harsh ones. Now that the result is shown to public and not graded by a teacher, this fact adds a ton of pressure. It brought me down for sure.

One of a very spot on feedback that i received, pointed out that our work needs a better direction and story board. That was an 'Aha' moment for me! So, instead of succumbing to desperation, I decided to try to give the scene a better direction. One thing that I realize is, even though we have a story board, I am still not sure what are those guys doing in that scene. So, it looks like we really need to prepare a better story board. D: !

Unlike planning a shot for an animation, I was not very worried about timing and the animation principles at first. I did not go very deep into each characters as well.. or perhaps I should? I'm not sure.. (Please feel free to let me know if you have any suggestions! I'd really appreciate it!). My approach was that I imagine what are these folks doing in each shots and then I wrote what I see inside my head, every small details, like an eye blink, etc without worrying about the timing. I know that this does not sound very 'WoW' haha, but I told myself, 'Just Keep Writing'. The hardest part during this stage was I did not have the final audio file containing the dialogue for the scene yet. So I had to really depended on the story board and my imagination.

One of my favorite part during this stage was when I just let the imagination flew. This was when it really helped me to determine when one certain thing will happen. I read the planning for a couple times and keep layering in the information that i would like to have in the scene. The next stage was bringing this planning to the computer. This is when things got interesting!

Technical

The last time I animated in AE, to be honest..  i freaked out, haha! This time around, our illustrator/storyboard artist and I have worked on a better way to animate the character. He prepared the 'model' so that it could be easily set up in AE, and I am very thankful for this! I have to credit him for all his works, so thank you Kefas! (Guys, check out his gallery! He recently participated in a fan art contest for Diablo 3 and it looks..Awesome!!)

This time, I chose not to worry about what software, what tools I should use.. I chose to focus myself on the workflow. There are many workflows out there and I chose to stick to the one I have learnt, which was transferring Key Poses to the screen. Prior to this, I of course had to set up the characters first. We have each limbs of the main characters separated so I had to work on the hierarchy of the limbs; parented them to the center of the movement. I was also very happy because this set up was certainly allowing me to pose the character better. I had more freedom! :D

After I had all of the key poses in the shot (I forgot to mention that I worked on one shot at the time). I start to worked on the breakdown and the overlap. At this stage, I used Layering approach. I felt that working at one limb at the time was more efficient in this case. Finally, I used the Puppet tool to refine and polish the movement that the limbs could not do or push the actions; for examples, the overlap, chest movements, etc.

Another thing that saved me was the planning that I wrote. To have everything described on that paper was very precious. A note to myself, never ever abandon a planning and make time to plan everything that you do. Although the result was not as good as I wanted it to be.. I'm glad that we found a way to improve the work! My friends and I are definitely learning something new from this project and we'll continue to keep leaning :) Thank you everyone for reading my post!

Have a Wonderful Day and Keep Animating!

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March

It's March already? How did that happen? Ha.. Anyway.. Hope everyone is doing great?

I have been working on some projects since new year.. i feel very productive hehee! Now that all of the projects are kind of finished.. I really need to do something that will keep me busy and aliveee! .. So, let's start with writing this blog entry :D .

My friends and I finished the second part of our tiny project, Momo's Adventure, or Petualangan Momo as we call it in our mother tongue :) . We got a lot of feedback for the first part and certainly worked harder for this one. I sure hope that everyone will enjoy this one.. So, here is the video.. it is in Indonesian by the way.. we have not provided any subtitle.. sorry~ , but i hope you will enjoy it :

If you guys have any comments or critiques, please let me know! I would love to hear them and I would really appreciate it! :)

I guess this will be all for now.. and Thank you everyone for reading and watching! :)

Happy Animating and Have a Wonderful Day!

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Week 1 of this Month

So today, we are at the end of the first week in 2014. I have an odd and funny feeling when I think about it.
Anyway, I am feeling quite rusty right after I submitted my work. I was not very happy and I had a lot of creative energy built up. It has been awhile since I animate in Maya, so I thought... Let's start from the beginning!

I found a great list of practice from this website: animatorisland.com , feel free to check it out when you have a time! :D Lately, I have been feeling that my main problem are Weight and Spacing and I feel that I have to do more practices to get a good sense of weight. So I decided to do a few of simple test shot of bouncing balls and a brick fall. Here are the tests shot :

The first one : the aim is to quickly get into the weight and the software..

The second one : Next attempt to futher understanding of weight and spacing..

And the Revision...

The third one : Bricks fall test..

The brick test was very interesting. I definitely recommend to try to find a video reference for it on YouTube prior making a test shot. There are a lot of variations on how it lands on the ground, therefore understanding the 'mechanics' of this brick is very important. If you have a feedback for them, please let me know! I'd really appreciate the critiques.. :) Sorry about the low quality o the video too! They're just a quick playblasts ;)

Thank you very much for your time to read my post!

Have a Great Day and Happy Animating!

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PS: Does anybody know we we could not upload a video to Blogger? or is it just me? D:

Happy New Year 2014!

Happy New Year 2014

Hi everyone!
Happy New Year 2014! Hope this year will be a year that is full with blessing and success. God Bless us all!

Take care everyone and Have a lovely New Year!

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Walking With The Puppet Tool

This month was quite interesting. I struggle a lot with Puppet Tool in After Effect. There is no doubt that the tool is very powerful, the problem is that I have lack of knowledge on how to use it. It is my fault that I did not learn the tool beforehand.

I also found out that the graph editor in the software is very different than the one in Maya and I found out that the graph calculates the value of an object travelling from one point to the next, but please correct me if I am wrong. The first time I used the graph editor was very confusing. I am very glad that there are a lot of tutorials about the animating in AE that has really helped me out. So, I thought it'd be a great idea to share it with you guys here, so here are the links:

• More on Keyframes and the Graph Editor
• After Effects: Easing and the Graph Editor
• Understanding the After Effects Graph Editor for Adjusting Animation

The other problem that I had was spacing. Thankfully, the graph editor fixes this problem. Another solution that I did was, I animated the object every 2f or 4f.. for some reasons, I kind of  feel better if I did it this way.. it probably because this method gives me more control over the animation.. but, I am still trying to find a better way on how to adjust the spacing properly..

The next thing that I would like to talk about is The Puppet Tool. I was very stressed out because I did not have a good control over the limbs of the characters that I animated.. and guess what..?! There Is a Rigging method for AE animation! (O_O;!) I was quite surprised when I found the tutorial.. It was a very nice and clear one, and you could watch it on the link below :
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqWc7ywdUV1qs6mAcLq_ODPtRVCcAB2Yt

I have not got a chance to try it out because i had already started animating by the time I found the tutorial, but it was very helpful!
There had been a lot of trial and error during the animation process and I am not very happy with the result that I have right now.. If you have a time, feel free to check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_54_3v0cp4 .. and let me know what you guys think about it.. I'd really appreciate your feedback for the scene..

Thank you guys for reading my post.. this will conclude my gloominess for today and I will start fresh tomorrow! Ooh and.. tomorrow is a New Year!! Wooott!!

Happy New Year 2014 Everyone!! All the Best for Next Year!! :D

Take care and Stay Healthy
God Bless You All

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Say Hi to Momo's Adventure! (Petualangan Momo)

I am very lucky that I could be a part of our small but lovely team called, Blackappleroom :)

My friends and I are developing an educational children series, titled 'Petualangan Momo' (Momo's Adventure). The show will be broadcasted on YouTube and right now, we have a teaser trailer for the show :D If you have a spare time, please check out the video below and you could also leave some comments or feedback for the teaser our YouTube page... We would greatly appreciate it :

So far, the process has been very interesting! I have to learn how to animate in 2D medium and I don't have any experience to animate in 2D medium! I'm going to share how I tackle this challenge later on.. This is completely new to me and I am very excited about it! :)
Thank you everyone for reading my post!

Have a great day and Happy Animating!

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Overview - Long Time No See!

Hello everyone.. :) Hope everybody is doing well.. :))
So.. It has been a really long time since my last post and it has been a really interesting year for me..
The great stuff that I discovered during class 6.. well, thank goodness they are still in my brain (yayy!) . I unfortunately could not upload the playblasts from my last shot because I am in my hometown now and left them in my PC in my second home.

However, you can check out the shot on my reel here. It is the first one on the reel.
There are couple things that I did differently in this shot. I still feel that the facial animation is still very weak, but here are some of the approach that I did and some discoveries that I found :

1. During my planning stage, I tried to find a way on how to make this little girl more appealing. I could not remember where I got this from initially.. maybe from alumni tutor q&a, the lectures, I couldn't remember.. but it was about Clint Eastwood and his remarkable facial expression when he talked. I thought.. I should try that out! So I decided to make her mouth shapes move sideways, to the screen right, when she talked or smiled.. the idea came from my own habit hehe.. My mouth tends to go sideways when I talk :p
   I guess this would be a great idea to add to our shot, I kind of feel this could add more personality to our character.. :)
    
2. At some random moment when I was animating the shot, I think I was animating a blink and having a hard time with it.. The thought appeared out of the blue, 'I think I am going to try to use an X-Sheet next time..' .. I should have realized that we could use it to add details too.. :/ So, a note to myself: use an X-Sheet when you plan your next shot.
   
3. This time around, I added the facial animation at the very beginning of the blocking stage. As always, I made 2 different groups of controllers; All Body Controllers and All Facial Controllers. The aim is to avoid confusion in the timeline. I blocked the body first and then the face came along..
   
4. On my class 5 shot, I was thinking about how the character talked and behave.. This time around, I tried out the method that was taught on the lecture.. I used my dad as a reference :D I was thinking what my dad would do if I talked to him about becoming a fireman.. My mentor gave a very nice suggestion too! He suggested that when he tries out to find out a nice acting flow, try to listen to the dialogue.. and then, listen how the tone of the voice flow, and then go with the flow of the voice of the actor.. It is kind of hard to explain it.. but, I hope you guys get it.. Please let me know if this part is not clear! :O
   
5. I think I have better understanding of video reference now.. My mentor taught us to quickly take a new reference if we got stuck with our shot.. and it was really helpful! I think I get more patient when I plan my shot as well.. Studying the body mechanics before we bring the poses to Maya is very, very helpful..

Those are some of the stuff that I learned from my Fireman shot, that I could remember :)

However, The Ultimate Thing that I learned from my last class is ... 'To look back on the process and be Grateful' .. a quote from my mentor that I will remember forever :) Shout out to my awesome class 6 mentor Mark Oftedal! :D I couldn't even describe how grateful I am to be able to become a part of AM and finish the course.. so, Thank You very much everyone, the support has been incredibly amazing... this thing called Animation is my light at the end of tunnel.. :)

Have a great day everyone and Keep Animating!

Don't forget to enjoy the sun and fresh air out there! Holiday Season is coming! :D

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Animation Layer Quick Tutorial

Hi everyone!
There is one tool that i use quite a lot when i polish my shot, it is animation layer! Honestly, I have no in depth knowledge about it, but i thought i'd like to do a quick how-to tutorial about the tool. So here is the video:

I find this tool is very helpful and it kind of feels more organized. In my humble opinion, i think it could save us from destroying the previous animation that we've already had before we polish our shot. I mainly use it for adding small details such as breathing, head or hand shakes, staggers, and squash & stretch. I'm sure that it can be used to layer in a lot of other cool stuff as well! I hope the video is clear and i hope it helps. Please let me know if you had any trouble with the tool or if you had any questions about it, i will try my best to get back to you asap.

Thank you all for watching and Happy Animating!

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Overview - Animating a Contact

Animating a Contact is one of the hardest thing that I have ever encountered so far. In my 2 people dialogue shot, i had a lady stroked a girl's hair and then caress her cheek. I remember that every week, i always asked and told my mentor that i had a problem with this. My mentor explained that a contact is indeed one of the trickiest and hardest to animate. The reason for this is because sometimes, the object is probably not even touching the other one and this may be caused by the camera angle or maybe we want to have a clear silhouette for the pose and we have to find a way to make it as if the objects are touching. I like to think this of this like an illusion... it's not there but it Is there... I hope this make sense..

The other thing that i learn from this shot is that we need to be always aware with the relationship between our characters. I came up with few 'reminder' questions for myself, such as Are they siblings? Are they related? How close is their relationship? Ultimately is What will your character do? Not us, but what will she/he do? I found out that it is very easy to make their movement not exactly right even though it seems like it is the right and proper one for me. At this point, i do believe that peer feedback and taking countless video references are some of the ways that will help us to find the solution.

Couple things that i noticed when i took video references for this shot is that it was important to take a close look on what is going to happen on the surface that i touch and how the object reacts to the touch. In my case, i unfortunately did not have a person that i could rely on becoming my test subject and i am to shy to act it out to other people.. so, i act it out on my own cheek, my giant Winnie the Pooh doll and my dog ('_';). I probably did not get an optimal result from this because those objects are not human and they obviously will not react like one. However, it was really cool to notice some micro eye movements when the hand is approaching to the face and see a bit of head movement, the subtle change on the cheek as the finger touches it and how the fingers move as they touch the cheek. These are some of tiny details that i usually missed to notice because they are so subtle. The other tool that i used a lot was a mirror and i found that just by doing the hand movement every now and then was very helpful as well. In the end, i sort of combine all results that i got from all of these references and gave my best to translate the research to the animation.

At the end of class 5, my mentor told me that the lady's last touch was almost there. It really took me a long time to polish the movement and i was also scared that i might be noodling on it way too much. As the term proceed and almost at the end of class 6, it really just came to me that in order to polish this hand movement... there is no other way but to get into each of the hand and finger controllers.. It is inevitable ... :D

 Below are some playblasts for shot 2 progression :

 

Week 6 : I think i was still refining the lady's body movement on shot 2

 

Week 7 : The hand contact was still very rough

 

Week 8 : I had a problem with the timing of the lady's hand movement when she raises her hand to touch the girl's cheek

 

Week 9 : Still refined the lady's hand movement, it still felt too fast and not gentle enough

 

Week 10 : Still refined the hand movement, my mentor suggested to add something on it so that it will show there is a Real contact and not simply just moving her hand from the girl's forehead to her cheek..

 

Week 11 : Still refined the hand movement. That week, my mentor suggested to add something more special for the hand movement, something like another hand strokes on the cheek..

 

Tweaked the movement and added another hand stroke..

  

Changed the angle of the hand like it was mentioned on the critique...

This is the last version from week 12. At this point, I did not manage to thoroughly refine the lip sync on shot 2.. 

I did further polishing for this shot in Class 6, but I'm going to wrap this post now and i will continue to write about polishing this shot on my next post :) Thank you everyone for your time to read my post..

Have a great week and Happy Animating!

  

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Overview - That 'Aha' Moment ... Part. 2

The Third 'Aha'

Eye Shapes.
I was always not sure with eye shapes. I have heard some advices that we should not overdone the eye shapes. Bishop has quite a lot of attributes on his eyes controllers that i was not sure what i should do with them. My mentors (i had a sub mentor last term! :D) explained this matter really well to me on their critiques about how to make the eyes look more appealing. I thought i want to share the information with you all. So.. here we go! :)

We all know that our eye ball shape is not perfectly rounded. It kind of has a tiny bump in front of the iris area :

This bump will gently 'push' the eye lids, therefore this will affect the eye shape.
We can start reshaping the eye shapes by drawing a vertical line in the middle of the iris. You can see it on the picture below:

The idea is to determine where the bump is pushing the eye lids.

Now that we have these lines as a 'bump indicator' (yeah .. i just totally made up the term hehe :p), we can start drawing new eye shapes:

Eye Line and Eye Direction.

I always thought that we should never ever move the left and right eye controllers on Bishop to avoid a risk of getting the wild eye look. I did not adjust the left and right eye position at all when i did my first one person dialogue shot and as the result, i got a crossed eye direction; one was facing to the right and the other one was facing the opposite direction. This was also one of the main feedback that my mentor told me.

A tips that i got from my mentor is try to treat the eyes graphically:

I struggled a lot with adjusting an eye line as well. I think it becomes hard for us to notice this because we have spent a lot of time staring at our shot. As I'm writing this, I think we can use this very same trick to fix this eye line issue:

My mentor told me that I needed to make the lady a bit higher for this shot to fix the eye line mishap.

Eye Darts.

This is the fun part. Eye darts can give a lot for our shot and it is definitely not an easy one as well in my opinion. I remember that my mentor explained this to me on his critiques for a couple times and it was really tricky to achieve the right eye darts movement (Not that i am really good at it now! It's still very tricky!).

I often hear that we should not ease in or out the eye darts because it basically has a staccato movement. I was quite surprised when my mentor explained that we actually can give an 'ease-in' for it. However, it is not really an 'ease-in', it would be best to use a term: Cushion.

The idea is if we have an eye dart that moves from A to B, we can reduce the snappiness by adding 1 more key around 80% of the eye dart:

Once we added A', B 'becomes' the Cushion.

It took me quite awhile to process the concept. I have to say that I had to do a lot of experiment to finally understand it. I also have the eye dart keyed on every frame so that i have a better control of the eye position. One thing that helped me a lot was by framing through the camp fire scene from Tangled. I would suggest to take a look at one of the shot in this scene and check out the eye movement:

Eye Controller Attributes.

There are couple eye attributes -the inner,mid,out controllers- that we can use to tweak Bishop's eye shapes. As i carry on with my shot, i actually don't use a lot of these eye attributes if i didn't need to and i pretty much keep them in stepped or linear mode, depends on the situation. I only use them to shape the eye into the shape that i want and to layer in the tiny movement that the bump of our eyes make during eye darts. I also have them keyed on every frame. I know that it is very tiny and super subtle movement, but i feel that maybe it is a good idea to add it in and even though it can't be seen, hopefully it can be felt by the audiences.

So, i guess that is all for now. I hope this helps and if you guys have tips or ideas about this or anything else, i'd love to hear it as well! :) Huge thanks to my mentors for sharing their knowledge, they're awesome! (seriously :> )

Thank you guys for reading my post! :D

Have a great week and Happy Animating! :)

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Update: There was multiple images uploaded in this post, i didn't know what happened but sorry for the inconvenience!

Overview - That 'Aha' moment ... Part.1

Most of the shots that we have up until now is obviously involved a lot of body mechanics. We push the poses, make our characters jump off a cliff, climbing, swimming, and do all the cool stuff that we probably can't do! This is of course a really cool thing. In class 5, i decided to try out a very subtle acting since i did such a broad shot in class 4. I feel that the shot opened up my eyes, it introduced me to a lot of new and exciting thing, and there were a lot of 'aha' moments!

The First 'Aha'
(Wow, i can't believe i just wrote that as a title haha.. i hope you guys don't mind.. :p)
The first 'aha' moment was when i put a gesture on my character and my mentor told me that it was not necessary. So here is what went through my mind. It was weird to have my character sat on the sofa. It felt like she was just there, staring at me.. *gulp... At that very moment, my mentor also mentioned in his critique that i should try out couple more acting choices. So, I shot a new video reference right away with that advice in my mind.

I'm obviously not a pro in acting out an audio clip, but i kind of figured out where i went wrong. I was thinking a lot if i should put my hand on my forehead or if i should holding a cup while i was acting the audio out, where i should have thought about what will my character do and what is she feeling right now instead. As the result, I had a reference where i rested my cheek on the back of my hand and looked very sad. I would say it was one of a really cliche idea. I brought this gesture to my blocking without thinking anything else. You can check out the playblast below:

My mentor explained to me that it was an ok gesture to add for the shot, but Do I Need It? Another thing that he pointed out was that the gesture felt like it did not show the right body language, that i wanted to show in this shot. This body language is probably more proper if the situation in my shot is more casual. In this case, my character is seeking an approval from her senior, which is why this gesture and body language did not suit for this shot.

The main lesson is always think what our character feels and what our character will do. I have found that by asking this question to myself right before I shot the reference is always very helpful. This really helps me out to put myself in their shoe. I also believe that shooting a reference with props is a really good idea. However, i feel that maybe we should think it twice if we need them or not, especially if we are shooting a subtle shot.

I recently polished this shot and i did an eyebrow pass for the girl. I realised that i really don't need that gesture when i watched the shot again. The reason is simply because the audience will look at her face right away and they probably will not realise the body movement. This is something that my mentor has mentioned too, but for some silly reasons this just really hit me recently. (Not that i did not trust his advice! i think it just takes me some time to really process it :O )

I should say that the temptation to move the body will always be there, but when it strikes you, maybe we can try to ask ourself if we need it or not.

The Second 'Aha'

This goes back to my first one person dialogue shot. I had a very hard time blocking the shot! :D My mentor explained that we should have basic mouth shapes and basic facial expressions when we start blocking a dialogue shot. Long story short, i was unable to understand the concept. It sounds very simple, but I had a hard time to apply it on my blocking. Worry not, i will not discuss about those difficulties again, let's carry on with the now and not the past :O

The assignment which we had to pose our the facial expressions on bishop was the one that taught me what this concept means. I spent more times to listen to my audio file and really tried to find the main beats on the audio. I started from here and once i got them, i marked the words on my note. I went through my video reference and i checked out the facial expressions on the words that i had marked. Instead of posing the expression on bishop directly, I used a mirror. I feel that if you posed the expression that you see on the mirror, somehow you will feel the words too. I think it is very important to capture that feeling, this way we will not just simply pulling the controllers and mimic the facial expressions. 

I figured this out when i re-blocked my shot. Below are the playblasts of shot 1 re-blocking process :

Re-Blocking the facial expressions and mouth shapes. Keyed all the main beats.

Added some breakdowns on the body and gave some breakdowns for the facial animations.

Added more breakdowns and in betweens for the body. At this point, i ignored the facial expression and focused only on the body. I wanted to see if the body movement alone worked well or not.

At this stage, I was unsure with the lip sync. It felt weird to see her mouth shapes did not match with the audio, so i decided to 'pose' the syllables too. I kind of feel that she is a bit chattery here.

This is the second shot. I kind of found out that i actually did not have to 'pose' the syllables. I posed the lady based on the main beats and i continue to work on her body animation.

 

*Tips: Proxy mode can be a good way to refine the body since it does not have facial expression, which means less distractions.

*Hit the spline button... uh oh D:

Shot 1 Refining stage and blocking+ the second shot

I feel that i got more familiar with the process when i started refining the second shot. My workflow for the second shot was:

1. Find the key poses and key expressions.
2. Blocking : Body only.
3. Blocking plus : Body only.
4. Layered in extra facial expressions and mouth shapes.
5. Keep refining the body.
6. Refining the lip sync.

Below are the playblasts up until step no.4 above :

 

Refining the body.

Shot progression up until step no.4.

During these weeks (it was around week 6-ish) i started to feel that everything starts to make a lot sense. It just clicked in a lot of ways, the shot was so difficult but i was overflown by joy at the same time! *tears of joy :')

I'm gonna wrap this post here since it's been a really long one O_O. More about my findings on the next post! Thank you everyone for reading this post, i hope i did not bored you guys! :O

Have a great week and Happy Animating everyone!

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Overview - From Audio to Paper...

I kind of overlooked something on my last shot. It was that very first step that we should all do before we start our shot; getting to know our character. I did not put a lot of details about my character, not until i found the advanced planning packet video training. Long story short, i regret that i did not invest a lot of my time for this at that stage. I made sure that i did not repeat the same mistake this time around. Below is a snapshot of my planning :

My mentor told me that i probably did not have to go this extreme for this dialogue shot, but i'm glad i did it. This really helped me out to understand the characters. I did not do a lot of thumbnailing for this shot. I'm still wondering if this is all right or not. I felt that I should approach the shot in more storyboard or comic panel way. All right, as I type this I realise that I probably played it safe because I avoided my biggest fear, which is Drawing a Face! -A note to myself, try this out next time- Here are my early planning for the layout, they are quite similar :

Layout 1 + Playblast

Layout 2 + Playblast

Another thing that i should look out next time is I should treat layout pass just like first pass blocking. This pass can be said as the step where we set up the shot; the framing, the set, etc. As we can see here, I just put my character in an unknown space, that has window on its wall :| .. I have to admit that I had a quite a hard time on my first pass blocking because i did not plan this very well. I had to change the camera angles for a couple times until finally my mentor agree with it, but it's all good cause I learn something from this. :)

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Overview - About The Audio...

I kept thinking about how to write an entry differently at the beginning of class 5. Well, this kind of caught me off guard cause I ended up did not write anything at all for last term! I had always felt that this shot would be really important for me. We were going to work on this one shot for the whole term and i could feel the pressure since the beginning.

Researching The Audio File

I often hear advices about try to find an audio file that inspires us. I, like most folks in class 5 am obviously still a baby in this field. This is our second dialogue shot and it's going to have two people talking in it. It surely sounds very exciting and as Barney Stinson said, "Challenge accepted!" .. [yes, i'm a fan of HIMYM ;) ].

Back in class 4, i spent my times browsing audio clips on the internet. I focused on other factors such as the timing, contrast, beats, and many other things that we should consider when we're browsing audio clips. One thing that i tried not to do is I avoided to watch the original source of the audio clip. I was scared that this would effect my thoughts and ideas as this would make me keep thinking of the original actors.

A question that came up to my mind was; how am i supposed to get inspired if i don't know the characters who speaks the line? To be honest, it would be quite stressful for me if i had to do the same audio browsing process. So, i decided to do it differently this time. I watched some of my favourite old school movies, couple of new ones and watch a movie that has my favourite actor in it. A simple tips, always have notebook, pencil or your mobile phone nearby to write down some notes, this will come in handy. I find this method is more fun, i really love the rush of taking notes when we hear the good line on the screen. :) However, i did not mean that browsing an audio file on the internet is not effective. I do believe that each of this method has its own pros and cons.

Before I continue, i forgot to introduce my class 5 mentor, his name is Malcon Pierce ! He's really awesome btw! :D 

There is one great advice regarding audio clip that i got from my mentor. I will try my best to paraphrase his advice. We may encounter two types of audio clips during our audio hunting. The first type would be an audio clip that kind of mentions some stuff or reflect some actions, which may driven us to try to match our animation to that one particular action. The second one would be an audio clip that will draw us into the character's psychology and would potentially give us a room to develop our own scenarios for it. This is really an eye opening advice for me! It became much easier for me to choose the audio clips after hearing this advice. I believe that both of this audio types are great, but in my humble opinion, i honestly feel that the second audio type is stronger.

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stay tuned . . . . . . o_o;!

hello everyone! no i am not abandoning my blog .. please stay tuned for class 5 overview post!

o_o major delay is happening..

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Offsetting Audio File in Maya

Hi everyone,

Last term, I had an experience where i had to offset my audio file in Maya (At that time i used Maya 2011). I had some issues such as the offset feature did not work even after i've put some values on the offset option. I thought i'd like to share couple tips about it in this post.

Firstly, we of course have to import our audio file to Maya. 

1. So let's go to File > Import > [your audio file location].
   I believe that the audio format should be either .wav or .aiff. Please feel free to let me know if you know some other format that works in Maya :)
2. Right now, you should see an audio waveform on your Timeline. If you can't see it, try to go to your Timeline, Right Click on it and select Sound. You should find your audio file there. See image below:
   
   
   
   
   
3. Once we have our audio file imported, we can go to step no.2 again, but this time click the Option Box of your audio file. It will bring up an attribute editor of your audio file.
   
   
   
   
   
4. On the attribute editor, Go to Audio Attributes > Offset. The value that you put in here represents the amount of the offseted frames. Enter any value that you want here.
   
   
   
   
   
5. I put 10 on the offset. The audio waveform is now start at f 10.

The problem that may occurs now is the audio still starts at f 1 if you scrub your Timeline. In order to fix this, press Play button on the right of your Timeline. I believe this will re-build the audio cache on your Maya, sort of like refresh the audio file and this should the problem.

If this is not working:

1. Check your audio file format and make sure it has the right format.
2. Remove your audio file. You can do it by typing delete YourAudioName; in MEL Script command line and press Enter on your keyboard. (Source: http://craigbowman.com/maya-tutorials/audio-in-maya-2011).
3. Import back your audio file and repeat the steps.

I hope that this helps and thank you so much for your time to read my post. Feel free to send me a message on AM or leave comments here if you had any questions or need help with anything! :) 

Happy Animating, Have Fun, and Have a great week everyone! :)

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1 Year L'Anniversary ;)

I supposed to post this on the 20th of May (19th on the states) .. well it's better than never! I drew this during my flight back to Sydney :p It's been a year since i received an e-mail from AM, i still remember that i missed the phone call as well (>,<) .. well, happy 1 year anniversary! Have a pie ;)

one of my favourite scenes from Toy Story hehee :

"you saved our lives, and we are eternally grateful" - Aliens, Toy Story

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Chapter 12 - a Cup of Coffee with Sugar

Naw... It's the bitter sweet week :')
I wrapped the week by doing some revisions for both of my shots. I'm glad that i found some flaws on both of my shots as i revisited them. I believe that both shot can still be improved as well. This term, I learnt a brand new workflow. My mentor taught us a traditional animation approach workflow. I feel that this new workflow works very very well for me. I spent a lot of time on blocking stage. I feel that i managed to put all the necessary information during the blocking stage and as the result, the spline stage   went less horrifying than it used to be. I definitely have to watch for spacing, moving holds and where the residual energy would lead the movement, secondary action, and of course the rest of animation principles as i move on. My mentor's final critique mentioned that my shot is still more on the pose to pose-y side and i need to loosen it up a bit more. The facial animation is obviously one thing that i have to improve. I feel that I lost a control over it at the beginning, but i feel that i'm catching up as the week goes by.. It is very tough but i really enjoy the process, and you know.. there is a joy when you finally see Bishop's talking! :) 'he's aliveeeee~~!' :p

I really enjoy class 4. There were only 7 of us in class and we're all got called up to the cam every week. It was very fun and our mentor is really awesome! I'm very grateful to have Dimos as my mentor this term and i appreciate everything he taught us... It was a very amazing class :')
it's sad.. but hey, the good news is i made it to class 5 yiippiiee :D

Last but not least, below are the revisions of my shot and my progress reel :

The eyes on the last pose.. i supposed to make him look psycho.. but it's so hard to achieve that :

Next try .. :( he's still not looking psycho enough .. : 

I decided to go back to the original file ... i don't think he looks psycho at the end but i hope it works :

My Progress Reel :

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Thanks Mom for helping me during the last two weeks of the term. Your support means a lot to me.. *virtual hug :)

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Chapter 11 - Polishing (?)

On week 11, I sort of got an answer for my own question that i had a year ago. I used to think that if we only had half of the body visible on our shot, that means we do not really have to pay attention to the bottom half part simply because we can't see them. Well, the answer for this question is we Do have to pay attention to this unseen bottom half part of the body. The reason is pretty clear; even though we can not see them, we should have them posed correctly. The movement that occurs in any of our body parts will effect the other the body parts, e.g. : we can not shake our head if our neck perfectly stay still and we can not raise our hand if our elbow and shoulder stay still, etc. So, if we have the right amount of information to start with, our animation would turn out better as well. I'd like to think that this is similar to making a planning for our shot. It would be a pain to carry on if the necessary information is not there. In my humble opinion, this would be one among of many other important recipes that will help us to achieve a correct, or i should say, believable body mechanics. We should also remember that we don't have to polish this unseen part to the max because no one will see it. In a nut shell, put all the information you need for this unseen part (the pose, timing, etc) but it'd be less necessary to make it super duper pretty. (i guess it'd wrong if i said unnecessary, words are tricky! hehee :p)

Week 11 was also a polishing week. The lecture showed a brand new view of Polishing! It is indeed not about making the curves look pretty, it is rather to see if the whole piece works well or not. It is a stage where we focus on the small details. I would say that polishing is the new tough stage but i think it's the fun one as well! Blocking is one fun stage and so does planning. Frankly, the whole animation process is fun (>w<). Back to my shot.. I need to get rid of the eye roll that i added on the previous week, i think there was a lot of arc tracking, especially the head arc.. it's quite hard to remember D:! but  hey, here are some of the playblasts :

Tracking the arc of the head using the tiny ball on the nose :

Get rid of the eye roll and fixed the SL hand pose; reposition the thumb :

Get rid of the eyebrow raise at the end :

Fixed SR hand hiccup around f 120 :

The one that was submitted :

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Chapter 10 - Refining

My mentor pointed out that my shot still feels very pose to pose on his critique, he mentioned that there's no life on the moving hold and i need to find a way to break the rigid feels. My friends also told me that the torso area still feels stiff and some poses are twinned. This week i pretty much refined my shot based on the feedback that i received.

To be honest, it was quite a challenge to figure out what i should do around the moving hold area. My friend pointed out about the residual energy and the direction of the body part will go because of it. I spent a lot of time acted out the action in front of the mirror and see how the body moves. I also did this to analyse the facial expression. The tough part is it is very hard to achieve the same result every time i act out the performance.. i guess it'd be a good idea to record it.

At this stage, i feel that i kind of miss one principle which is secondary action, but at the same time you don't one to add something just for the sake adding it.. i guess this will make the performance not believable.. Here are the playblasts from week 10 :

Eyebrows are quite out of control here @_@ :

Added head nods and break the W shape of the arms towards the end of the shot :

This week I had some time to create a simple set up, the props are provided by AM :)

Added eye roll when he moved back.. :

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Chapter 9 - Bounce Back

I mentioned that i missed exploring the facial expression on my previous post. This was definitely my main struggle this week. So this is what happened. Up until this point, i feel that i'm starting to understand the concept of key efficiency ('we want least amount of key for the most amount of information') and we should have control over our keys. This week i felt that i lost control over the keys. Earlier this term, I feel that i have a complete control of Stewie. Obviously because Stewie does not have full facial control. It is of course a whole another different story with Bishop :) I freaked out when i saw the facial controllers hahah! I lost control over the keys :p As I carry on i realised that I am too focused on having 'efficient' keys. Right now, i think it is more important to gain control over them. I would say that it does not matter if we have keys on every frame as long as we know what they are doing. We could always clean them up later on, no? :3

The solution for my issue was by creating character sets. I hardly use this tool because i find it a bit too complicated and somehow i always failed to create a character set. It may sound silly, i have no clue why that happened.. BUT! The most important thing is that i managed to create one, in fact More than one character set Properly heehee.. Thanks to the demo on our lecture :)

I would recommend to try out to make character sets for the jaw-cheek-mouth-nose, eyes and eyebrows. In my opinion character set makes everything look more organised. I feel that I can focus on those particular facial parts because i can only see their keys. The only flaw that i found is if we forgot to turn off the character set once we're done with it. Character set will auto key the controllers that are in the set.. (-o-;) so if we modified the other controller that is not part of the set, eg: if we have facial character set and then we modified the spine, a new key will be set on the facial controls as well. The worst case is if we did copy pairs method and then we still have, for example, eyebrows character set On. We most likely will lose the change that we've done on the eyebrows for the next few frames, because we did not realise that we still have the character set on. This happened to me... :'( i guess we have to be careful and keep reminding our self to turn off the tool before we start tweaking other controllers. I also recommend to make quick selections for the facial controls or use the GUI picker as this will help us to work faster, however, the bottom line is use anything that suits your workflow :)

Back to my shot progression which i would say went very slowly.. here are some of the playblasts, ooh and i splined my shot too *gulp! :

Added some in between keys on the arms to reduce the rigid feels :

Splined! :

I delete the keys on the eyebrows and eyes for some reasons :| i did not remember why i did it ... but i think i imported it back using animtransfer :|

I would say that as the time goes by, i start to feel less frightened by spline mode.. i guess this is a good thing :O

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