Overall.

The module overall has been a great experience, it has been very frustrating at times however, and I cannot stress enough how the time scale of the module was not long enough to create something to a high enough quality.
I am overall pleased with what I have achieved in the timescale, and I have learnt an awful amount of new techniques during the learning the period, which will be beneficial for the future.

If I was to do the module again I would avoid going for the realistic look animation, as I feel that I lost a lot of time creating my character and adding definition to make them look realistic, some people went for a cartoon type animation and this mean they did not have to worry about the definition and features of their characters because they simply had none, if I had gone with this approach I would've been able to focus more on just animation alone.

If I could do the animation again I would also revisit the facial expressions of my characters, and learn how to animate the face using a bone structure rather than using the morpher tool, as I was unable to animate the face that was attached to the body, I am pleased with the facial expressions I achieved, however I would've been nice to have animated them while on the body. I would also make sure that the audience cannot see through the characters mouth, as I am really disappointed with this, as I feel it lets the animation down, however the positive aspect I can take away is that I know how to correct that issue, but simply flipping the material.


Below are just some of the learning outcomes I have learnt whilst doing this module:

* Modelling a human character, and learning the importance of topology when coming to animating the model.
* Animating using the CAT method, using pre-set rigs and creating my own rigs, I also learnt how to animate the character applying pre-set animated layers, and also absolute layers to create my own animation
* Creating helpers such as sliders which help control specific aspects of the character, such as the movement of the pupils and the blinking of the eye lids.
* Layer management, I learnt for the first time how to add different parts of the scene to different layers so that they're easier to work with, a little bit like Photoshop.

Other things I have learnt:

* I know for future reference that when animating from scratch using the absolute technique that it is crucial that before animating the objects movement should be studied for a while to learn exactly how it moves, or a reference should be used to help animate it more realistically.

Putting together the Video.

Now that I have rendered all my clips I have assembled the video and put the story line together, I am extremely pleased with the outcome and the quality of the videos, there are however a some errors which are noticeable, unfortunately you can see straight through the characters mouth and see the back of the scenery, which I think I know how to resolve as I had the same problems with a building in the scene, it was a case of flipping the material and it solved the issue. Unfortunately I don't feel like I have enough time to go in and correct the mistake and re-render the scene, so its going to have to stay how it is for now, however this was generally the only issue with the final animation.

I added transitions in between different clips to give a smooth transaction between scene changes, and this helps the flow of the animation. I also added the song 'The Hoosiers - Cops and robbers' as this was a very appropriate song choice for the story line of the animation. There is a clip in the animation that goes slow motion and I edited the song, so at that particular clip the song slows down with it and I feel that this fits quite well. To finish the animation I added an Title intro and a ending credit, the intro is a simple 'Cops and robbers' text which starts to vanish as the end of the 'S' on robbers hits the building, the ending just simple displays my SID for marking purposes.

Despite the minor issue I discovered I am very pleased with the animation overall, and very pleased that I have successfully animated a character and even managed to get some facial animation.

Rendering scenes.

Below are just some examples of the rendered scenes I created, I have not included them all because they are simply just slightly different because of camera angles, or because they incorporated the same techniques.

This particular scene is when the burglar walks up to the front of the prison cell and puts his hands onto the bars, this was achieved using the absolute layer in CAT where I animated the movement by key framing, I also animated the head so it looked down wards, and key framed the eyes moving with the head to look down at the ground to give a sad emotion.

This is another shot of the burglar when he walks into the prison, I animated the head so it looks down at the ground, and I used the technique I learned so that the character followed a path which a dummy was path constrained to, I used this technique a lot as I allowed me to create custom paths, I also used the 'Pick-ground' option in the global settings as this made the character walk on the particular surface I selected.

This is another example of where I used the dummy path constraint technique to make the police man follow a path I drew.

This scene shows a close up of the character looking at the wanted poster, I used the key frame technique here to animated the character blinking, using the slider tools I previously set up.

This scene is where the policeman bumps into the robber leaving an incident, I had the robber do a creeping walk, and the policeman was walking, I wanted to change both so that they gradually starting running to create a chase scene, to do this was quite simple, I applied two layers in the CAT motion, one creeping/walking layer and then another running layer, it was just then a case of using the key framing technique to decrease the initial walk and increase the run, this meant that both character went from their initial walk into a run to give the impression that the policeman was trying to catch the robber.

This is another angle of the scene where the policeman is looking at the wanted poster, I created the poster using a rendered image of the robber and just cropped his face and applied it to a distressed paper material I downloaded and added the text, I deliberately added the spelling mistakes to try make it comical and also the use of the old fashion western style wanted poster was deliberate, to give a discrepancy in the style of the animation.

Facial expression animating.

To animate facial expressions in my animation, I decided to use extreme close ups to show the full effect of the face, I also may have over exaggerated the look on the characters at time, but this was done on purpose to maximise to the audience exactly how the particular character felt.

 

This screen shot shows how I animated the characters facial expression, using the morpher technique I key framed in different movements which allowed the face to display different emotions.

 

I also key framed the movement of the eyes with the set-up I created previously to move the pupils, and also key framed the movement of the eye-lids to make the character blink.

When rendered out the movement of the characters face really does give the full effect of how he is meant to be feeling.

Rendering

Today I have been animating all my different scenes, I used the follow settings which I have found to be the best in the past:

HDV
1280 x 720
Targa File output
Mental Ray renderer.

This output provides me with a HD output once I put it into the same settings in premier pro, I have found that these particular settings provide the best and most crisp looking animations compared to .MOV or AVI, it is however quite spacious but does provide a superior picture.

CAT Animating.

Today I have been animating my character using the absolute layer technique, this allowed me to create my own layer and move my character in a custom way using the auto-key technique. This particular way of animating is extremely time consuming however brilliant because it allowed me to create the exact movement I was looking for.
I used this technique on multiple parts of my animation, I used it so that the police man grabbed the robber and also for the robber when he is in prison, I moved his hands and fingers to grip the bars in the prison cell.
I would've liked to have used this technique more, but due to the time scale we have, it just isn't practical to create a finished animation.
Another issue with this piece of animating means that the movement of a character would have to be observed for quite a long period of time to maximise creating realistic movements, for example if a dog was to be animated it would be crucial that the movement of a dog is studied in depth to try and recreate its movement.

 

This particular piece of animation is where I key framed the character to move his arm and hand up to pose with a 'stop' hand signal.

 

This piece of animation is where I animated both the policeman and robber. I got the policeman to step forward and grab hold of the robber, the robber then raises his hands to cover his face. I would've like to have created more of a fumble between the two however it was just too time consuming and I wouldn't of had it finished in time.

Facial expressions.

I have recently devoted a lot of time to trying to animated the facial expressions for my character, as I mentioned in a previous post I suffered a lot of problems trying to successfully animate the facial features. I have been looking at animating the face using the morpher technique, this technique simply transforms one object into another as long as it has the same amount of vertexes. So to do this I simply cloned the head of my character multiple times, changed the facial features and when the morpher was to be applied to the original head, and the modified heads selected as a target this should have allowed me to animate different expressions.
Unfortunately I found that I wasn't able to select a morpher object if it was an editable poly, so this meant I was unable to select just the head by itself. As I feel it is crucial to animate the facial expressions of my characters I decided I would detach the head and when it comes to animating and putting the animation together, I will just show close ups of the face so that the viewer cannot see the body.

So I begun created a series of different facial expressions with the heads I had cloned, I edited them via the editable poly mode and adjusted the vertices to suit the expression, I was only editing one side of the face as I thought it would be quicker to delete half the face and apply the symmetry tool, once I had finished creating all the faces I changed them to an editable mesh so that I could select them using the morpher tool. Unfortunately once it animating so that the face would morph into the selected face, because I had used the symmetry tool it would not work and this was the outcome:

For whatever reason the morpher tool did not like the fact I used the symmetry modifier when editing the heads, and it would not morph, so all the time I spent on creating and adjusting the other heads was wasted.

Fortunately in the end I managed to get the morpher tool to work, however the process took  lot longer because I had to edit the faces without using the symmetry tool.

Here is the final outcome and an example of how the tool works, I am very pleased with the overall outcome as I feel that the animation works nicely, with the use of the morpher tool it means that the facial expressions can be adjusted slightly or a lot, so the tool allows the user to control how much the expression is shown on the characters face, it also means that the movement in the face moves nice a smooth giving a realistic expression.

Scenery.

I have also been looking at creating the scenery for my story line, I used techniques I learnt in previous modules to create background scenery, I created a sphere and cut it into a sky-dome and applied a city texture, so that the surrounding area looks as though it is in a urban environment. I created a couple of cuboid shapes and applied a building material to bulk out the scenery, I also added a road and path which I applied materials to, and used the UVM map tool for all of the scenery to align the materials up correctly.

I also added a couple of default trees and then looked at creating some grass, I found a tutorial which showed how to create realistic looking grass, and this was done by simply creating a plane and applying the hair and fur modifier, I then changed the colours to green to give a grass effect, and the outcome is excellent, unfortunately because of this modifier it takes a very long time to render the scenery, so although it looks great, and I am pleased to learn this new modifier, I may not keep this in the scenery when it comes to rendering the animation as it will cost too much time.

I also added the police car to the road to see how it would look, overall I am very pleased with the outcome of the scenery and am looking forward to bringing the characters in to animate.

Burglar and Facial animating.

I have created a burglar for my story, as I am going to create a 'cops and robbers' themed animation, based on the target audience of children. I researched again using an image search to get a sterotypical idea of what a burglar should look like, and this was the result.

I concluded from the search that my character should have a striped black and white top, with jeans and a mask, I simply created these materials in Photoshop and applied them to a clone of my character. If I get a chance I was thinking of removing the definition from the character and making the burglar fat, however this is the last thing on my list of things to do at the moment.

The next thing I started looking at was animation of facial expressions, I watched a few tutorials on YouTube to get a better understanding of how to animate the face. There were a several tutorials which offered different methods for moving the facial features, however I opted for using the 'Morpher' method, this means cloning the head of the character several times, and moving the features of the face to create different poses, once I had the poses I could then select the original head and apply the morpher modifier, this then allowed me to select an object which I want the initial object to morph into, which in this case is the different heads with the posing facial expressions. Unfortunately I had a lot of issues with this method, when it came to selecting a morpher for some reason it wouldn't allow me to choose the heads I created, I managed to get it working once, but I still cannot put my finger on it, as to why it isn't working. 

I am hoping to get this method to work again when I revisit it, as I spent a lot of time trying to get it to work, and I felt the best option was to leave it and come back as it was beginning to get very frustrating. From what I have seen on existing videos this technique will be very good for facial animation, as I can create a variety of different facial expressions by adjusting the percentage of each morphers applied, and simply key frame them to create the animation.

Stress test.

Today I have been stress testing my character, with the rig inside I added an absolute layer which allowed me to key frame movement to the rig which would animated the character, this therefore allowed me to create a stress test. The purpose of the stress test is to animate all the possible movements in the character and this will indicate how the character will move in the animation, if there are any imperfections then these can be amended by adjusting the envelops which control exactly where the movement should be on the particular part of the body.

When I created a stress test for my character it showed that there were not too many problems with how the character will animate, however there was one problem when the character bends backwards from the spine that his abdominal area stayed in its original position and didn't follow the rig, I corrected this slightly by adjusting the envelops however I wasn't too worried about this because I wasn't planning on creating any movement for my character which meant he would bend backwards.


This is the envelops which were used to improve how the character moved with the rig, this could be changed on virtually every part of the rig, and fortunately for me I did not have to change many, because my character took well to the rig I built.

This shows the stress test of the character, moving limbs dramatically to see whether it moved naturally and had any imperfections.

I am glad I did the stress test before animating my character as this meant when it came to animating the character I had no problems, some people did not stress test their character and discovered a lot of issues when it came to animating, costing them time.

Character Path constraint.

After being shown how to make a character follow a path in previous weeks at university, I decided I would attempt to create what I was taught, with my own character.
 The first thing I did was create a floor which the character would follow, I gave this floor features such as dips and hills as I wanted to get the character to walk according to the shape of the floor.

 The next step was to create a line that the character would follow, I simply created a line and manipulated the shape, I then added a dummy and applied a path constraint so the dummy followed the line.

After creating the dummy I needed to assign my character to follow the path, to do this I selected the rig and option up the CAT motion editor, and under global I was able to assign my character a path node, this then allowed me to select the dummy I created for the path, I needed to rotate the dummy so the character would be facing the correct way, and this was easily done with the rotate tool.

This was great and character followed the line, however it did not walk down the steps nor did its footsteps change according to the ground, so I needed to assign the floor to the foot prints, to do this I opened the CAT motion editor again and selected the LimbPhases option, in here it enabled me to pick a floor so that the footsteps followed the shape, and I simply clicked on the plane floor that I created, this then made all the footprints follow the shape and my character would now walk down the stairs and adjust his walk/run according to the floor.

Some tweaking was necessary for the path, as some of the footprints meant the characters shoe submerged into the stairs, this was easily corrected by moving individual footsteps using the move tool so that the feet would clear the steps.

Test Animation:

Overall I am extremely pleased with the outcome, although the walk itself needs some tweaking I am happy with the outcome as I now know how to achieve walking especially on uneven surfaces. I will be looking at envelops to try and correct some of the movement in the walk/run. I now also know that if I key-frame the weight of the run/walk I can speed up the characters movement and also make him speed up from a walk into a run, and this will deem useful to give a natural look to the animation.

CAT Animating.

After experimenting slightly with the basic animation, I begun to look more into the movement of my character and I wanted to make him walk realistically, I attempted many times trying to apply a CatRig however I kept finding that it wouldn't work and I ended up getting very frustrated, I then took a break and started fresh, I tried two different techniques for building the rig, firstly I tried applying a Base Human pre-set cat rig which I found a lot of problems with, and secondly I used a technique taught in the lectures where I could build my own cat rig. I also managed to fix one of the problems I was having with animating the boots with the model, I decided that the easiest way to do this was to just target weld the boots to the characters leg, this would then be part of the whole model.

Creating a CAT rig from scratch

To do this I opened up the helpers tab and created a CAT object parent, from here this then allowed me to create a starting point which would be the pelvis of the character, then from there I could create other parts of the body such as legs, arms, spine etc until I had fully built my rig.

It was important that the majority of the bone was covered by the model itself, it was also vital that I aligned up the joints in the correct places as this would be beneficial when it started to animate and the joints of the model bent.

Once I was satisfied with the overall positions and sizes of the CAT rig I could then start to animate, to do this I added a Skin modifier from the modify panel, and I then clicked 'add bones' and chose the bones of the CAT rig, this then meant that the model was allocated the bone structure of the rig.

I then clicked on the bone structure and went into the motion tab, from here I then clicked on the 'Add layer tab' and help the mouse, and this brought up some options, I selected the 'Add CAT motion layer' and this applied a walking movement to my character.

When this was played the character movement quite dramatically, there was a lot of swaying movement and some of the limb movement didn't quite look right, overall however the process was successful and with some editing I would've been able to change the way it moved to make it walk more freely and realistically.

Using pre-set CAT rigs

I then watched a couple of tutorials explaining how to use CAT rigs and how to adjust settings, I decided that I would restart the process and hopefully try and incorporate the eyes I created for the model this time, I thought that it would be ideal to attempt both techniques and I could then decide which I found best.

The process of creating a pre-set CAT rig was very similar to creating my own except it eliminated the process of creating individual bones, once drawn out I had a basic structure of a human, and all I needed to do was modify the shape and positions of each bone to fit my model, one useful tip I found was that once I had created one limb, I could copy the settings and apply it to the other side, this meant that each side of the rig was symmetrical. 

Again once I was happy with the positioned and the scale of the bones I could go through the same process of adding a CAT motion layer and apply the walking motion, this gave a similar result.

Once I had the character moving I was then able to apply a couple of techniques I learnt from tutorials on-line, I learnt how to change how much each bone moves, rotates, rolls etc. This mean that I was able to position the arms by the side of the character to give a more convincing walk, as well as change all the dramatic movement which made the walk look quite unrealistic, these settings could've been played with for ages, however I managed to achieve a fairly decent walk and I am happy with the outcome.

Another helpful tool I picked whilst watching the tutorials was being able to assign a specific object into a group, this was extremely helpful when trying to select the whole of the rig, I simply selected the rig and then at the top of the screen theres a small drop down menu which enabled me to give the objects a name, in this case I assigned the name 'Character Biped' (Although incorrect, should have been 'rig'), and from then on all I had to do was click on the drop down menu and select the name and this would select the whole rig.

This is the overall outcome of using the CAT pre-set rig, I am extremely happy with the result after finding it so frustrating at first, I have now got more used to working with CAT and understand it much more, and this was benefited by making mistakes and practising.

I did also manage to attach the eyes to the model so that it follow the movement and this was done by simply linking the eyes to the rig head. 

I was very fortunate with the animating that no part of the model interfered with another part, and therefore I did not have to adjust any of the envelops, I will however give the character a stress test and I may then need to adjust some of the envelopes. 

CAT Test

After creating my model I was itching to try and animate it, I used the CAT animation and used a technique taught in the lecture, I created a quick human biped and scaled down the bones to roughly fit my character, from here I used a walk pre-set and applied it to my character and this was the end result.

Overall for a quick draft I am rather pleased, unfortunately it did not animate the boots and the eyes as these are not joined onto my model, I did however select and link them but this didn't seem to work, so this is something I am going to have to look into. There is also a lot of movement and wobble in the walk, however I do know how to correct this and when I come to animating properly this will be amended. 

Applying materials.

Today I started to apply materials to my character, I searched for human face materials and found several online which couldve been used, however I found one in the 3ds max presets folder, I didnt want to use the features on the face as I wanted to add these individually and felt they were not needed when I applied it, I found that the features on the material didnt match up with the features of my character, so I edited the file in Photoshop to remove the features I didnt want.

This was the finished material I created in Photoshop, it is literally just a skin material with hair and cut outs for the ears, I then took this into 3ds max and applied it to my characters head.

I applied the material to my characters model and then used the UVM map tool to edit how it was applied to the head. This allowed me to scale the material to fit my characters head.

Once I applied the material and was happy with the outcome I imported the eyes I previously created and I placed these in the 'skull' of the model, I scaled them and positioned them to where about I wanted them to go.

The next step was to apply a costume to the character, I researched different types of police uniforms and from here I created my own using Photoshop, I used a combination of the Essex police force badge, the blue and yellow checkers and used a blue base colour for the material, as I am trying to create a hero type police man I applied it straight to the character, this gives the effect of a skin tight neoprene type suit, this allows the muscular features to be shown off and helps give the persona of a hero which I learnt from my initial research.

I am extremely pleased with the outcome of my character so far, the materials have brought the character to life and transformed the overall look, there are still a couple of things which need tweaking slightly however so far I am happy with the progress, and am looking forward to animating the character using the techniques I have been taught in the lectures.

Extra Models

I have been thinking about creating a police car for my character animation, I was going to create a car from scratch however due to the time scale of the module I managed to find a preset car in  the 3DS Max presets folder, this this what it looked like.

I felt that the car would be suitable enough as a police car so I begun to create my own materials to apply and transform the look of the car, I created number plate, and two decals, one for the side and one for the bonnet.

I applied the materials to the specific areas of the car, I also made materials in 3ds max for the windows and lights of the car, I added a reflective map so that there will be a reflection displayed off the lights and the windows, this was a technique I learnt from the previous module.

I am very happy with the end result, I would've ideally liked to create my own car as I cannot claim this to be my own work other than the materials I generated, however due to the time scale we have it wouldn't have been wise to create a car from scratch. 

The coming together.

These sequences of images show my progression of adding definition to my character, to do this I simply used the cut tool to had more lines and vertices, this then allowed me to pull specific areas of the body to create different muscles and defining areas.

I firstly started with the chest and abs, I needed to create defining pectoral muscles and abdominals too. I found that the best way to create these lines were again to look at the topology of the body and specific areas so I research some topology of the body and looked at images to give me some inspiration and some outlines of where I should be cutting in new lines, this should mean that when it comes to animating the character hopefully it will behave more naturally.

The next part I gave definition was the arms, I used the swift-loop tool in this instance to add some symmetrical geometry as this will be important when it comes to animating.

I then worked on the other different areas of the body; back, shoulders, neck, and legs. I used a variety of methods for manipulating the shape, but mainly consisted of cutting new vertices and then moving their positions, I found that because I was adding vertices and then adding the NURMS smooth, that some of the vertices needed moving quite significantly for it to make decent definition to the body .

Once I was happy with the definition of the body I begun to import the other aspects of the character into the scene, I firstly imported the head and simply attached it by using the target weld method, this process was very simply as I created the head to have 8 vertices to match the neck, it was a simple case of deleted the poly faces and connected the vertices via the target weld.

I then imported the hand and this deemed much harder than the connecting the head, basically because I followed a separate tutorial the amount of vertices were different on the end of the arm to the base of the hands, so this meant I had to cut more vertices in and then align them roughly to the same position as the hand vertices, and again it was the simple task of target welding.

Overall I am very very happy with the outcome of my model so far, It feels like everything is starting to come together and the overall look of my model is beyond anything I could of imagined creating at the start of the module, although the process has been quite long I feel that I have done a good job, I have looked at Auto-desks mud box which is a sculpting program, this allows the user to sculpt definition and lines into models, however I felt that with the time scale we have it would be impractical to learn a completely new program, however I believe it is something to look at in the future.

I know that some people have created human models in mudbox and exported them out to use as a model within 3DS max, this is an easy out option however feel that they're cheating themselves because they are not taking anything away from the module, I feel that the process I have undertaken has taught me loads about the program.

Modelling boots.

I begun modelling some boots for my character, I tried to find some tutorials on how to create shoes or boots however I didn't succeed, I then started modelling it from scratch with no references, I felt the best way to start was to create the sole, so I drew a box and shaped one half to a rough shape of a foot, I then used symmetry to create the whole shape, from here I simply used a succession of extrusions to generate the shape of a boot.

Once I had a rough shape of a boot I started to individually manipulate the position of vertices to create a more rounder looking boots, I looked at images on-line of dealer boots and Dr. Martens to give me a rough idea of the shape and also the design of the boot.

 I then added some minor details to the boots, such as a ridge for some stitching effect, and a rectangular shape for the elasticated material. I made some materials using Photoshop, and applied them to certain areas of the boot, I found this to be quite hard because of the shape of the boot, it was hard to manipulate the way the material applied to the boot, eventually after playing with the UVM map tool for a while I managed to produce this:

Boot with NURMS smoothing.

I am very happy with the outcome of the boots, I didn't use a tutorial so creating this from scratch with no references was quite a hard task, although I feel that the model looks very good, I had a hard time trying to create the boot, and it took me a couple of attempts to achieve the shape I was looking for, also the hardest part as mentioned earlier was applying a material, this took me ages to generate good materials and to apply them in the best way possible.