Fire/Water/Smoke: ANM302 – Week 9

Well, the midterm project went over quite well and now we're moving on into fire, smoke, and water. As a reprieve, we've had the chance to view the movie “How To Train Your Dragon.” It's a light-hearted and diverting film (although I still don't think that Vikings had Scottish accents) with a great deal over VERY GOOD animation in it. Of course, what really makes this movie are all the effects shots – fire, water, and smoke. Needless to say, with fire-breating dragons as a main part of the cast you're going to need to animate of lot of fire, but it is quite amazing to see all the subtle (and gross) differences in what they have produced – from simple wooden pyres to transparent blue butane-eque jets. It's funny really, the more I learn about a subject (like SFX) the more I look closely at a film, and I find that it doesn't ruin the experience, because I know how the magic is done, but actually enhances it. I really do enjoy special effects.

2D Stop Motion: ANM201 – Week 9

Okay, so now we start a phase of transition. We are moving from traditionally hand-drawn 2D animation into working with Adobe After Effects, and to segue into it we are doing a traditional 2D stop motion piece of animation. Build a puppet, set up a ten second story, shoot it one frame at a time on a camera, then polish it in either Premiere of After Effects. Well, this has been a fun project – though as always I have over engineered the model. My King Ghidorah has WAY too many joints for a simple ten second shot. Oh well. I think I should have shot more cells, but I can package what I have fairly nicely and do some padding with interstitial text. Once I through in some music and sound FX it should play fairly well. We'll see so stay tuned.

Midterm Project: ANM302 – Week 8

Okay, so I have spent two weeks working on my midterm project. I have spend days adjusting and readjusting setting for the smoke plume, scrutinized camera angles, rendered animation frames throughout the over night hours, tweaked and re-tweaked the adjustment settings in After Effects to get the look just right, and finally rushed to complete the project at the last moment. Yet, now when I look at the piece, I feel disappointed. I looks as if I just shot footage of a smokestack with smoke billowing out of it. Which, of course, is what it is supposed to look like. It's not an over the top shot, it's very, very, very, very, very subtle. So subtle that you really can't tell I did anything – which is kind of disappointing. However, if that kind of subtly will get me a job somewhere, I'm willing to live with the disappointment.

Frustration: ANM201 – Week 8

Simply put, I have failed. I hate failing. Due to work, sickness, relationship problems, school, drive times, traffic tickets, and overall stress I have failed. I have failed to get my perspective weight project in on time. In fact, I have barely gotten anything done on it at all beyond the basic keyframes and a tiny bit of animation which has to be thrown away because it leads to a very difficult connecting piece which at my skill level and frustration level is near to impossible. I am tired, worn down, and burned out. At this point I am simply going to shelf this project and come back to it when I can. I will come back to it because I cannot stand to leave things undone. I may not be worth anything at that point in terms of a grade, but I will not leave it behind. I hate this, I really really do hate this.

Smoke: ANM302 – Week 7

Smoke gets in your eyes, right? Well, if it's coming out of a factory chimney nowadays (under current EPA regulations) it shouldn't be smoke, it should be water vapor. Which brings us to the subject of my midterm project: a factory smokestack emitting smoke. To accomplish this, I have been studying smokestacks and how the smoke emitted from them looks – it's quite different than that created in the tutorial I did for a volcano. Much thinner, much more whispy, much puffier – like clouds actually (which are also made of water vapor). I'm starting to set up my scene and experiment with settings to see how easy or hard it will be to get the right look. Of course, I'm going to have to get video of a non-smoking smokestack for the project and who knows how that will affect things once I bring everything into After Effects for compositing. As of right now, I'm shooting for light, white, puffy, and easily diffused. We'll see how it turns out...stay tuned.

Perspective Weight: ANM201 – Week 7

Right, so our next project we have to animate a character either picking up or moving an object, showing through the movements of the character that the object has some serious weight to it, all in 2D, hand drawn animation, set on a perspective grid, using perspective for the object and the character. Easy right? I'm not so certain on this one. We have a short turnaround time – well I do anyway due to my school/work/homework/sleep regiment. I'm planning what I think should be a fairly short animation: some basic anticipatory animation, the actual push against the box itself (the character will barely move it), and the post action (the box will fall back and crush the character). But to be honest, that is a lot of animation for me. In other words it is a lot of frames to be drawn, inked, scanned, adjusted, manipulated, fixed, re-inked, re-scanned, and finally rendered. I'm slow with this process and to simply use the computer is to produce less than desirable results. I don't like just getting by, I feel the need to be better than that, but there are a lot of things biding for my time now, and I'm not certain of this project. Stay tuned.

Destruction: ANM302 – Week 6

One of the best things about special effects is making the impossible possible. Of all those crazy things brought to “life” on the big screen a large subcategory involves destroying things. Anything from the end of the world as seen in 2012 to me simply smashing my name (as seen to the left) are possible in 3D animation programs like Maya. Needless to say, this is what we're working on right now in class. Let me tell you, breaking things is fun – however – just like particles, destroying an object in Maya takes a lot of computational power. Of course, one of the really neat things is that an object will never break the same way twice in Maya. Now this might seem problematic, but a clever feature available nowadays is caching. When you finally find just the right breaking sequence, you simply cache is and it's you're for good. Or at least until you find a better sequence. In any event, it's all terribly fun, and terribly complex. Yes, you guessed it, there are LOTS of settings that allow you to get a near infinitely wide set of destruction. That being said, I'm off to work on another tutorial that will simulate breaking into the crust of the plant. I'll let you know how that turns out, stay tuned...

Weight: ANM201 – Week 6

Wait, weight? It's not what you think it is. Most people think of weight as being how heavy something or someone is – but this confuses the concept of weight and mass, which are two very different things. Weight (W) is determined by multiplying the mass of an object (m) with the local gravitational constant (g), thus W=mg. What does that mean? In short the mass of an object always remains the same, but it's weight can change. Let me explain: a box that weighs one pound on Earth will only weigh 1/8^th of a pound on the Moon because the local gravitational constant is different. Does that make sense? Well, regardless we're now dealing with weight in terms of animation, which is a very tricky thing. Suppose you want to animate a character moving a massive object, how do you represent it? Are they going to float lightly along palming it in one hand, or are they going to struggle and strain? How do you represent that? Is it all done with short, halting steps or arms being stretched to the breaking point, while veins and eyes pop out? Or is it all in the anticipatory and post actions? This is an interesting topic and I'm looking forward to trying my hand at it. With a little more research I hope to be ready for my “speed exercise” on Wednesday and the ensuing project. Wish me luck, I'm sure to need it!

Cloth: ANM302 – Week 5

Cloth! WOW!!! No, wait. Before I go running off let's start with a bit of definition. Cloth - a flexible material consisting of a network of natural or artificial fibers. Simple stuff, right? We wear clothing made of cloth everyday. However, in terms of 3D animation we enter a whole new world of “gosh wow!” The key here is the flexibility. Cloth in Maya can simulate a range anywhere from watery silk, to heavy sheets of near steel in its appearance and interactions with other objects (and everything in between). What's more is that you not only make curtains for the window that you have just modeled, but add some wind and a few pieces of furniture for the curtains to interact with and suddenly the dreary architectural scene has come to live. Moreover, you can make the cloth destructible. In other words, when an object strikes it, the cloth will “break.” This opens up incredible new avenues in animating – and in creating realistic simulations. I've got to showcase may use of cloth in a homework assignment. Not sure if streamers off a oscillating fan will be the best or if I should do some wind blown curtains. Either way, it's going to be exciting!

Perspective: ANM 201 – Week 5

Do you know what a delineator is? He (or she) is a person who renders a realistic drawing of an architectural plan. The most famous and influential in modern times is Hugh Ferriss (ever wonder where Gotham City and Metropolis came from?). Anyway, to do render a drawing like this the delineator needs to use perspective - the appearance of things relative to one another as determined by their distance from the viewer. In other words, things that are closer are bigger and things that are far away are smaller. Simple, right? HA! Apply this powerful and important principle to 2D animation and you suddenly go from the Flintstones running across the TV screen through a near infinitely large house, to some very dramatic – and realistic – movement through 3D space. That in a nutshell is our assignment this week, to develop an short animation of a cube jumping from the distance to the foreground or vise-versa.

Again, it sounds really simple doesn't it?

Well, first you have to figure out the jump (anticipatory action, proper arc, ease-in/ease-out for the effects of gravity, and squash/stretch), then you have to figure out the movement in terms of perspective (small to large or large to small, and the points of the arc which are VERY different from a flat side shot, and the angle of the cube). This will be tricky. I'll let you know how it turns out. Stay tuned...