To tick of my final remaining learning outcome I’ve texture a model but go beyond simple diffuse textures, so I decide to add a normal map to the model I made for the games students.
I downloaded Nvidia’s texture tools for Photoshop, and after playing around with the settings I sort of got the hang of it. I felt however that the texture in the wood wasn’t deep enough when compared to the skin texture, so I upped the contrast of that part in the diffuse and applied the filter again and I though that looked better.
Before
After
I like how it turned out with the wood indents, though I don’t like how much it exaggerated the texture on the body, though I suppose that’s kinda unavoidable with a process that’s as automatic as this.
Since I have lost the after effects files we worked on with Brett, I decided to try and composite an animation into a filmed environment. Not having time to make a model, I found a website that hosts rigged Pokemon characters ripped from the 3Ds games, and decided to use Talonflame to make a video in a similar style to the Pokemon GO trailer.
The idea was to have animated him to land on my balcony, so I looked up some animation reference of hawks, the animal Talonflame is based on.
This helped a lot, but I still feel my animation is pretty stiff! I found it really hard to guess how the landing should look and also folding the wings. (which the rigging really wasn’t suited to doing)
I had to learn a lot of things to make the animation look at least somewhat believable in the scene. My footage was really shaky, so I did a little research and learned of the warp stabilizer, which worked really well, but the camera still moved enough that I had to learn how to track movement and apply that to layers as well, which I did by applying the movement tacker to a null object and then parenting that to any layers that needed to follow the movement of the camera.
I made a track matte mask on a shape layer to make sure Talonflame didn’t pass over the top of the railings, but encountered a problem when he landed to them, as his toes needed to be visible. I worked around this by making a small white shape on the luma track matte layer and keyframed it to move down as he lands.
I also applied a grain effect to the talonflame animation to make it fit better with my low quality camera footage. Along with this, I made him lighter when he is furthest away and had it blend to his normal colors, then to darker colors as he flew under the roof. To finish off I added a small shadow where he lands on the railings and added his cry to where he opens his mouth.
I don’t think the finished product is very believable and there is still a lot of mistakes, but I’m still pretty happy with it being my first independent project in after effects.
Our final project for Studio 1 is to animate a character navigating and obstacle course. Along with this, we also had to replicate the movement style of a character, and decide between doing 2D or 3d animation. I decided to do 2D animation and use Goofy as the style to follow.
Research and Planning
Goofy’s movement style is quite well summed up by his name. Acting is very important to his movement, as you will never see him animated in a way that isn’t clumsy or awkward. All of his movements are highly exaggerated and comical, and rely heavily on squash and stretch, heavy anticipation/buildup and slapstick. He takes large, loping strides and swings his body around wildly, and is quite limber. Goofy’s proportions are also quite essential to his movement, especially his large feet and long snout.
Keyframes
This is my first pass. I tried to make the keyframes as goofy-like as possible, despite the drawings lacking his signature visual features, because at this stage I was expecting that I would have to use the Norman rig.
This version has a few changes after I got some feedback from Martin and Chris. They suggested making goofy have a more difficult, clumsy time, especially at the part where he has to jump from pole to pole and at the stairs at the end.
Breakdowns
I added a few extra frames in between the key frames to further help achieve the movements I was after. At this stage I found it easier to show any squash and stretch, arcs, slow in and out, and anticipation.
Here I replaced the rough key frames and breakdowns with some of the the final art I would use. I changed how Goofy broke the flag at the end from a suggestion of Martin’s and exaggerated the scramble up the wall at the poles because of Chris’ feedback.
Inbetweening
I added extra variations of symbols for the hands, face and feet to make it look more natural along with adding the inbetweens. At this stage I felt it was pretty much complete enough to be presented, so I exported it at the required 16:9 aspect ratio at 25 frames per second, though I wish I had more time to add his ears!
CAYEL 