Tag: Animation

Week 4: Rube Goldberg machine camera set and render in Maya

Post author By Nira Gonzalez Sanchez
Post date 4th February 2023
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In this lecture, we focused on finishing our Rube Goldberg machine texturing, camera set up, and rendering the final outcome.

I continued adding the last textures and finishing touches of the design, such as the finish lines numbers, and some more neon lights in the edges of the planks and of other components. I also modelled the light bulbs’ buttons to switch them on and textured them with glow.

Neon glow added to the rotating and fixed planks

Moreover, I decided to animate some arrow lights on the top of the initial ramp to add another point of interest in the animation:

Arrow lights animated on ramp

After I finished with the texturing, I continued to set the camera movement using ‘camera and aim’. This way, I only have to set the ‘translate’ of the camera since the ‘rotation’ is adjusted with the aim. I tried to follow both balls switching priority between one and the other depending on the point of the animation and which one was more important to follow each time. Therefore, I not only framed the scene from the front view but I also made the camera rotate 360 degrees around the machine, showing its back too.

Camera and aim set up with keyframes on ‘translate’

In the last bit of the scene when the second ball has to reach the finish line, I had to reduce the duration of this since it was way too slow. Therefore, I selected all the elements of the scene and in the ‘graph editor’ I scaled down the number of frames required for this last movement. I reduced from 800 to 700 frames. The following video shows a preview of the camera movement I set:

Camera movement preview

When I had my animation fully set, I proceeded to set the render. Thought of adding a chrome textured background with the lighting of the skydome I had previously, however, it turned out to be problematic as there were too many reflections so the render would take too much time to finish. Maya also started to crash every time I tried to preview the render. Therefore, I decided to get rid of this chrome background and leave it with the original workshop background. I just lowered the light a bit so the glows added were more pronounced.

I was playing around with ‘Camera (AA)’, ‘Diffuse’, ‘Specular’, and ‘Transmission’ to get the best result without having to render for too long.

After two days rendering, this is the final result:

Final render

I really enjoyed this project and I feel enthusiastic about 3D modelling and animation. I also feel like I could improve the render, amending some details like adding a dark and reflective background to darken the scene and to make the neon lights more visible. However, due to limited time I was not able to do this (but I definitely will if I find some spare time before the end of term 2).

Tags 3D Modelling, Animation, Maya, Render, Rube Goldberg machine, Texture

Advanced & Experimental Advanced Maya

Week 1: Rube Goldberg Machine Modelling & Animation in Maya

Post author By Nira Gonzalez Sanchez
Post date 13th January 2023
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In the first week of term 2, we had our first contact with animation basics, trying to animate two bouncing balls made of different materials. We also started to design our first project of the term, the Rube Goldberg machine.

Firstly, we started a quick model of a basic staircase as a base of our first animation. Then, we created two spheres to start our bouncing animation. The first ball is suppose to be made of rubber, therefore, the animation needs to show a high bounce on each step of the staircase. The second is made of metal, so it should look heavier and less bouncy. We set the basic key frames for each jump, and then adjusted the animation with the ‘Graph Editor’. With this last tool, we can see the graphic of the animation, therefore, we could tweak each movement to make it look more realistic.

Stairs and balls wireframe view with planar for shadow surface

Rendered animation

After understanding the principles of manual animation, we dived into ‘Bullet Physics’ in Maya. This plug-in is specialised in the interaction between the geometry of a 3D scene. In order to practice with this tool, we were assigned to create a Rube Goldberg Machine, using basic shapes that would interact with each other.

Before using this tool, the programme needs to be set up to be able to see the ‘Bullet’ tab in the programme’s menu. Once everything is set, we can start designing our machine. The first thing that popped in my mind when we were introduced to this project, was an instagramer that I follow on Instagram known as ‘Enbiggen’. He specialises in creating these 3D Rube Goldberg machines to reproduce the music of any known song, movie soundtrack, etc. I have attached two of his creations that inspired me:

https://youtube.com/shorts/KCSvlCAr-CY?feature=share

https://youtube.com/shorts/Wfp3Gfa9MCM?feature=share

As a first idea of my Rube Goldberg’s machine, I came up with the following sketches as possible designs:

Once the machine was planned, I continued to build it up in Maya. After designing and placing the basic geometry in the 3D scene, I set them as ‘Active rigid body’ or ‘Passive rigid body’ depending if I wanted the polygon to act as a dynamic object or as a static object. Once this is set, I needed to rewind the animation until the beginning (so Maya calculates how the objects would interact between each other), and to adjuste them as needed afterwards. This needs to be precise as the programme can be very picky with these calculations and can cause some errors at the time of setting up each object’s bullet action. Also, as I wanted to make objects spin, I added constrains to some of the polygons using a ‘hinge’ option, placed in the middle of the object (‘Rigid Body Constrain’ tool).

First ball pushing domino pieces and second ball boosted with a seesaw like object

I am struggling a bit with the set up of the actions and adjustment of this as whenever I closed the programme and reopened the scene later on, the same actions that I set up previously, were reacting and behaving differently. I flushed the playback cache to see if this helped but it was doing the same. I had the same problems in both the university computer and in my personal computer.

Tags Animation, Bullet Physics, Maya, Modelling, Rube Goldberg machine

Maya VFX Fundamentals

Week 10: Face Animation Render in Maya and compositing in After Effects

Post author By Nira Gonzalez Sanchez
Post date 11th December 2022
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In this class, we set up the lightning and colour corrected our model to get it ready to render and compositing later on After Effects.

To create the illumination of my scene, I wanted to recreate the real lighting of the scene I took as reference. I added 3 spotlights to my scene: one is in front of the model to illuminate the face, and the other two are behind as backlights.

Since the lip sync looked a bit odd without a tongue, I modelled one, added a standard surface material with some shiny highlights (to give a wet look) and animated it in the parts with ‘L’, ‘D’, ‘S’, and ‘T’ sounds.

Using the ‘Hypershade’ editor, I added two colour correct nodes: one linked to the base colour and coat of the skin material, and the second linked to the specular colour of the skin material. I added a soft yellowish base colour to the skin as is shown in the reference clip but then added a blue/purple highlight with the specular colour to make it a bit more interesting. I also added a subsurface scattering to make the skin a bit more translucent, so it looks more realistic.

Colour Correct 1 – linked to base colour and coat colour

After I was happy with my lighting, I set my project render details to half resolution to have a relatively quick render to review the final look. Thankfully, I did not have to change anything as I like how it ended so I set my project at HD 1920×1080 resolution and render the final lip sync animation as an alpha.

Final render

The final render turned out to be good and it is ready for compositing with a background and some nice VFX. So I imported it to After Effects and searched for a proper background for the scene. I found this already blurred background with a futuristic look so I added it to the comp and colour corrected it to make it darker, more saturated and showing more blue hues (I added colour balance and brightness and contrast effects).

Blurred abstract background interior (topntp26, freepik)

Then I also colour corrected the face as it seemed a little flat so using the ‘Levels’ effect increased the contrast and added a bit of more shadows and saturation.

Finally, I also scaled up the face and I scaled down the background towards to end to make the scene more dynamic and simulate the camera movement.

Scale and position of face and background

Final Comp

I think that the final scene turned out good, as I like the contrast between the blue/purple background, and the yellowish skin colour of the face with the subtle blue/purple highlights on the head and forehead. Overall, I think the scene looks realistic and the lip sync and head movements looks pretty natural.

References

topntp26, freepik. Blurred abstract background interior view looking out toward to empty office lobby and entrance doors and glass curtain wall with frame. [Online] Available at: Available at: https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/blurred-abstract-background-interior-view-looking-out-toward-empty-office-lobby-entrance-doors-glass-curtain-wall-with-frame_1254627.htm#query=building%20indoor&position=36&from_view=search&track=sph [Accessed 12 December 2022]

Tags Animation, Lighting, Lip Sync, Maya, Render

Maya VFX Fundamentals

Week 9: Speech Lip Sync in Maya

Post author By Nira Gonzalez Sanchez
Post date 3rd December 2022
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In this class, we learnt to synchronise the mouth and facial expressions of our face model with a short speech that we selected.

First, to capture a video from internet (YouTube) in this case to use it as a reference to build up our speech lip sync, we used ‘OBS Studio’. With this programme we can record the screen and sound of our computer’s desktop and then edit the length and export in the desired format in Adobe After Effects, or Adobe Premiere Pro. The sequence that I chose shows Charles Xavier talking to Magneto in X-Men Apocalypse (Movie Scenes, 2021).

Magneto’s Final Talk With Charles Xavier | X-Men Apocalypse (2016), (Movie Scenes, 2021)

Then, we imported it to Maya as an ‘Image Plane’. It is important to have set the timeline with the same fps (frames per second) to our clip, otherwise, it will not be in sync with the audio. In my case, I exported my clip at 30 fps so set Maya with the same value. To import the audio, we right click in the timeline and import it from there. If we want to preview the clip with the audio to double check that they are in sync, we can use ‘Playblast’ feature which will show a low-resolution preview.

Once we had our reference clip set, we started to animate the mouth creating new targets in the blend shape previously created to fit the mouth shape to each sound of the speech. Then, using keyframing we set the exact movements we wanted and smooth them editing and adjusting the key frames in the ‘Graph Editor’. A useful reference to build the mouth shape depending on the sound of each syllable, I took as a reference an online image from Preston Blair Phoneme Series (Martin, 2018).

*Preston Blair phoneme serie* (Martin, 2018)

I did not create all the phonemes as not all of them were used and I actually blended 2 or 3 phonemes at the same time to create a different phoneme with this. I also animated the tongue, the eye brows, the jaw, the head rotate, and the neck (Addam’s apple). Below there is a sequence of screen captures of all the movements together and the targets that have been used.

I really enjoyed modelling and animating the facial expressions. I definitely need to improve and refine the animation part as some of the phonemes are not as polished as I would have liked but to be my first time animating a face and lip synching a speech I think it looks really good. I feel like this is an area that I would like to explore further.

References

Martin, G. C., 2018. Preston Blair phoneme series. [Online] Available at: http://www.garycmartin.com/mouth_shapes.html [Accessed 12 December 2022].

Movie Scenes, 2021. Magneto’s Final Talk With Charles Xavier | X-Men Apocalypse (2016). [Online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gZqgfiWDh4 [Accessed 28 November 2022].

Tags Animation, Blend Shape, Lip Sync, Maya

Maya VFX Fundamentals

Week 8: Facial Expressions with Blend Shapes in Maya

Post author By Nira Gonzalez Sanchez
Post date 27th November 2022
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In this week’s lecture, we learnt how to edit blend shapes to create facial expressions and how to make those actions interact with each other so we achieve a natural movement when animating.

Creating blend shapes and targets inside these, we can animate our face’s expressions. One by one I created the expressions as full smile, half smile, frown, half frown, blinking eyes, and open mouth. I built up the expressions using the brush and relax tools. I also added a correction in the mouth for when it is opened to relax the sides of it and make it look more realistic. Since this correction is only needed when the mouth opens, I set the mouth correction target as a driven key and the jaw joint as driver and key framed the animation.

Mouth correction for open mouth movement using ‘set driven key’ tool

Mouth opening with final frown animation experimentation

Initially, I struggle a bit creating the facial expressions as sometimes I forgot to switch the ‘Edit’ button of the target I was manipulating at the time and I had some errors when animating that affected previous targets. Also, I seemed to have a duplicated head node in the background and some other duplicated ‘set’ nodes that were giving me an error message all the time. After asking Nick for help, he found this duplicated nodes in the ‘Node Editor’, and after delete them, my face model started to work better. I had to delete all the targets and the blend shape I had and start from scratch. I did this numerous times before finding the real error, and it was really time consuming, but at the end of the day, it was a really good practice and I learnt how to solve the error myself for future projects.

Tags 3D model, Animation, Blend Shape, Facial expressions, Maya

Maya VFX Fundamentals

Week 7: Facial Animation Set Up, Hierarchies and Rigging

Post author By Nira Gonzalez Sanchez
Post date 21st November 2022
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In this session, we reminded how to create blend shapes to animate the facial expressions and how to create a ‘rig’ or ‘skeleton’ to animated the head and the mouth of our model.

Using the ‘Shape Editor’ tool, we can create a blend shape or shape variation in order to set the facial expressions of our model. On each blend shape, we need to add ‘target’ points with which we could create our movements or reshapes, for example the eyes opening and closing, the mouth smile, or the eye brows frown.

In order to animate the head and the mouth opening, we created a ‘rig’ or ‘skeleton’ that will determine the joints of the neck and jaw. After setting the rig, we bound the skin of the model to our rig and painted the skin weights to add the influence parts of our model (the parts the will be more influence by the rig movement).

Lastly, we created the model’s set of teeth and added them to the rig influence.

Mouth opening with adjustment of painted weights

I struggled a bit with the painting of the weights to open the mouth of the model. I had to adjust my mesh with the ‘soft brush’ and ‘relax’ tools so it started to respond appropriately.

Tags Animation, Blend Shape, Maya, Rigging

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