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.