Telling Tales: Week 7 - Research

I didn't do much character and narrative this week because we went to Manchester Animation Festival, but I read some chapters of this book by Keith Osborn.

The book emphasise a lot in exaggeration, mainly to avoid the character moving too realistically, but at the same time make them entertaining. Other than that, a part that intrigued me the most is polishing the animation because last time I only did the stepped tangent animation for Moom's walk cycle. I learn that I need to devote more time to refine the motion in the animation. Polishing takes the same amount of time as each of the process of planning, pose-test and creating breakdowns in order to achieve the quality of animation in feature films. Hence, it roughly gives me an idea of how much time I should spend on polishing up.

A conventional way of refining movement is to make stepped tangent to curve on the graph editor. Osborn identified a major problem of this method: curve overshoot past the value between the keys being set.

Of course, there are many ways to approach same problem as all that matters is what it looks like on camera view. Personally I prefer another method suggested by Ken Duncan to get the animation right from the start by starting off sculpting each frame in the curves from the core of the character, the hips, and move parented controls accordingly to exaggerate movements. This sounds less mathematical, and more straightforward process which also allows room for creativity and tendency to create happy accidents which makes the animation more natural.

Some useful tips to fix recurring problems:

• To prevent lagging, delete all the keyframe data on a channel if there is no animation on it: Edit > Delete All by Type > Static Channels
• Euler Filter under Animation Graph Editor: fix crazy rotations (gimbal lock problem) between keys if not working do the pose again from start

Other than that, I also did a little research for the research blogpost and to get the paint on glass animation for elemental effects in the animation. I worked out a simple light box set up for the paint on glass animation and wrote down a bit of planning.

I am still unsure whether this method will work or not, but hopefully, editing the animated outcome on Photoshop can help the elemental effect blend in to the 3D mis-en-scene. I talked to Dan about the issue, and we decided to have two point light source on the fireplace, so that there will be glow and shadow of the characters cast on the scene and probably help the painted animation to blend in.