Evaluation

when we were set the task of animating a aesop's fable i knew it was going to be something which i would enjoy doing and would take a lot of time to complete. The module started off really well and i soon began making mood boards for the two crab fable and generating ideas and the style i would like to make my two crabs in. it was nice to be able to make cartoon 3d characters rather then life like models in the first semester because this is something which really appealed to me. once i started making the models and environment thats when i realised i still had some way to go in completing the project but was very interesting work. The camera views and rendering process was all very new to me and to be honest the most enjoyable part of it all was making the camera shots of the final renders. not only have i produced a nice 3d animation but i've improved my skills with studio max a considerable amount and now feel a lot more confident going into the final year using it. I know we have two more 3d modules next year so that will be very interesting to see what i produce for them. although i have succesfully completed the task of the module but i do feel there is improvements to be made on the animation like putting more time into the animating and actually getting over some of the problems i encountered. e.g. like the fact that i couldn't rotate the eyes from the centre point, every time i tried to fix the pivot on the centre it wouldn't work so when i pressed the auto key to animate the rotation point was in the wrong place, so i was forced not to use the eyes which really annoyed me. also i had many problems with my copy of the software when rendering as it keep crashing which made me lose massive amounts of time. i think if i was to do this module again i would do it on the uni computers as they are much more powerful and will handle the programme better and are more reliable. Saying that the module was really enjoyable and am looking forward to more 3D work next year.

Final touches

After completing the sound track the only thing left for me to do was to complete the subtitles or characters speech. i was going to record my own voice but when i fort about it i didn't like the idea and decided to use subtitles at the bottom of the animation which i think work well and help explain the fable much better. this is actually a very simple attribute of i movie, you simply selected the type of text and border you want and drag and drop over the scenes you want text on and simply define how long you want the text to last on each scene for. i think it looks good and ties in well with the animation so i am pleased with the over all finished animation.

Editing (Finishing touches with flash)

After i had finished the audio i then decided that i wanted to make the intro and outro a lil different buy using a couple of flash animations i made specially for this project. the first was the intro which you can see above, a fairly simple flash animation but works really well in the finished version of the animation.

- i simply created the background and two crab characters in photoshop and flash. then converted the two crabs into symbols and applied motion tween to give them the bouncing motion with a few keyframes after each, using the scale tool to give them the effect of squashing a little bit when landing. i then repeated this process for the end credits, suing the same animation but adding my SID number and the moral of the movie" example is better then precept"

- then adding a simple circle shadow to give them a better look. converting the shadow to a symbol and using a motion tween to scale big and small depending on where the crab is in the air.

- then gave the text a glow to make it stand out a lil more against the background.

Editing (Sound edit in logic pro 8)

Once the film was edited i then began adding a soundtrack to my Animation. i needed something happy and up neat to accompany the animation as i was going to be used sub titles on the final version so didn't have to worry about sound effects and voices. i used logic pro because i use it a lot to produce my own electronic music and know the interface very well( to well in-fact). i used the libraries in it to find a piece of music it was called "Road trip" it ust seemed to go really well with the feel and mood of the animation so i used it.

Tech info

- created a audio track in logic and imported the song into the audio track (drag and drop in).

- then cut the track to fit the time of my animation about a minute i think buy using the cut tool to discard the unwanted audio.

- i then applied a volume automation which can higher or lower the volume on a line scale much like 3ds max's modify morpher. i did this at the begin and end to fade in and out the audio for the animation.

- then exported the file and dropped it into imovie behind the animation.

Editing

To edit my animation i used imovie i know he said to use (premiere pro) but my files i exported in quicktime where really good quality and all the other file types i exported look really bad compared to MOV files. ( plus couldn't get premiere pro to use quicktime files which is really weird). Im quite familiar with this software as i've used it to make stuff for youtube and other media things before. Once i had imported all the camera shots into imovie i then began the task of editing and cutting scenes together, much like premiere pro i used the cut and scrape tool to edit clip length and sorted them into the appropriate order i wanted them in. once this had been completed i went over the finished edited film just make sure i was happy with it and that nothing was out of place.

Lights, Camera, action...... Render :(

After i had completed all the camera angles, lighting and animation it was time to get rendering each of the camera shots. this took quite some time as i have been doing it on my laptop, and which would have probably taken half the time on the monster macs at uni. i render off each camera angle separately.

- render setup and choose to export in (MOV quicktime) and choose uncompressed because it was the best quality, but took a lot longer to render, was well worth the wait though.

- then i just selected the frames to render e.g. 100 - 250 and kept doing that for each camera scene 13 in total.

After i had all the frames render to my desktop which all in all probably took about 6 hours, it was time to begin the mighty task of editing it and trying to make it make sense. :S

Lighting

I tried a few different types of lighting for this animation but the one that i went with was the simple omni spot. i tried to set it up so that it gave the impression of sunlight, i realise that you can use a skylight to try and imitate natural light but it made the animation look very faded and dull which wasn't particularly nice. i like the way the omni gives a good depth to the scenery and the characters and really finished off the animation nicely. i must admit i don't know why the shadows are sometimes blocky and sometimes smooth but im sure richard will enligthen me lol.

Setting up the Scenes and camera's

After completing all the animation sequences it was time to set the camera views for each shot. i broke the sequence up into 13 different scenes for ease of editing later. i used a target camera because i felt it gave me the most freedom to get the right camera views in each scene. i fort about maybe just using one camera sequence for the whole film which i noticed a lot of people have done, but i fort different angles always make a animation look better and more exciting. Camera angles also help address character mood and expressions a lot better too. most of the camera renders are a few seconds long and involve panning and backing up which was done on the timeline.

- place camera in desired start point

- then hit the auto key button and move the camera to the desired finishing point.

- moving the auto key button to the desired frame to determine the speed and pan of the shot

i repeated this process on all the camera shots till i was 100% happy with how they looked.

Mum crab trying to walk in straight line

This a shot of the mum crab trying to walk in a straight line which is the defining scne in the animation. i did this just using the set key and moving the legs and body for in small amounts. also using the modify morpher to give expressions whilst doing the movement.

Shell Shocked!

Here is a facial expression using the modify morpher when the baby crab watchs his mum trying to walk in a straight line past the star fish. i just did various preset poses in the modify morpher and used them when neccesary.

Animation creation

Here is the first scene (camera angle not representative of actual view in finshed animation) were the two crabs walk along side each other for dialogue. ive just added the omni light to give a bit more depth to the scene and used the set key to animate the legs. i tried using the bone tool but it just didnt work very well for my models so i took the long route. For the facial expressions and mouth movements i used the modify morpher which rich taught to us earlier in the course and it work well for that purpose.

Enviroment creation

The bottom image was the photoshop background i made with a simple gradient, using the circle tool to create the clouds and delete them from the gradint to show the white background through. This came out really nice and adds well to the cartoon scene.

The second images was a quick screen shot while i was making the actuall scenery model. i know it should be a beach from the story board but i started messing around with this hills park landscape and i think it looks really good so im gonna use it and still do the crab fable but not at the seaside lol. something a bit different lol.

The 3rd image was the final scene render once i had finished modelling. simply started with a quad grid which is in the geometry menu and then converte it to a editable patch, and then used the noise modifier to make the hills rather then using soft selection it gices a much more random effect. then to make the little brown path which runs through the hillside was a lil trickier i had to use the line tool to create the shape and then use the loft modifier to give it depth and then had to map it to the landscape so it followed the contours. i then turned it into a editable poly and extrude it a lil to give it depth from the lanscape, then applied a brown colour to its material. then finally created the trees from sphere and cylinder, aslo linking them and applying the mateials. Rather then cloning lots of them i used the scatter modifier, and it randomly placed them over the lanscape, all i had to do then was adjust them in height and size and place my photoshop background in te render setup so it would show. all done :)

Envirment creation complete

Mum crab

Star fish model

Star fish mood board

Mother Crab mood board

The story of my first model baby crab

I started with a box and divided it up into 4 segments then it was all by eye from there on apart from my 2d cartoon drawing of a crab im basing the model off. Once i had made the finished model i then applyied a shellac red material to the crab and indivually added the colours for the eye and inner eyeball with the material menu. Im pleased with the finished model and may tweak or improve its looks if i have enough time but im really trying to consentrate on the animation and not the modelling.

first model of baby crab

Example Using path constraints

This is a quick example of how i used the path constraints tool. buy simply creating a object, then using he line tool to draw my path i wanted the object to follow. i then went into the paths menu and click apply to path this then snapped my object to the line and i further rotated the object using the time line to get the spinning affect with the key frame button.

Two crabs story board

Final fable mood board (The two crabs Fable)

Morpher modifier Animation

This is my first time using the morpher modifier, this is a great way of saving movments to use over and over again. we used richards pre made head and then went through the morpher tutorial in class. simply buy cloning the head five times and naming them different expressions. we then edited each head for the specific expressions and used the morpher modifyer to pre set them on to the original head to the animate buy using the key frames in the time line. this si something im gonna have to practice alot with.

Explain and Reflect on moodboards

The whole cartoon element of each mood board is a reflection of the direction i wanna take the animation in. id like to make the characters more child friendly and model them more on cartoon animation than the real representations. Thats why i did the mood boards in the style they are in, to give me more inspiration and ideas. so to sum it all up the style of the mood boards will be similar to the style of the animation i would like to do.

Mood boards

The Two crabs Fable: Final choice

After picking my intial three choices i soon realised that the one i wanted to do was the two crabs fable so just posting to show this is the fable im going to animate, partly coz i like the idea of animating crabs and ill be better at modelling them.

3 Aesop's Fables Story choices

1: The ant and the grass hopper

This was my first initial choice when looking through the storeys as i like the moral taught and think it would be the most straight forward to animate, because insects in my opinion are easier to model and animate than humans or animals.

2: The fox and the goat

i choose this as a possibility because i think the story would be a good one to animate coz of the moral taught, it made me laugh when first reading, but i did feel sorry for the stupid goat lol. i quite like the idea of animating a fox i think it could be made into a really nice character.

3: The wolf in sheep's clothing

This is probably one of the most famous fables, most people know of it and thats why i decided to pick it. it would be nice to put my own spin on this animation and could be a interesting one to do, which i think would be quite challenging at the same time.

Aesop's fables storys

Reaction to animation project

This will be the first time ive aniamted with max so should be interesting. we will be animating the asopes fable short stories which will be good but quite challenging. looking forward to mastering the skills to animate with max and seeing how the project comes along. but i must admit my modeling skills still arnt up to scratch so look out for some dodgy looking characters!! :)

First Animation

Here is my first animation in 3d max, it is of a bouncing ball, amazing youll say. simply buy using the time frame and keyframes to move the ball also clicking on the key button to lock each frame in place.