When we rendered the animation, we were really surprised by how well the animation had gone. The story comes through nicely with the use of a guard to sell the idea of him being a thief. Also the security camera feed was some post editing that we believe added a little flair to the animation.
With the Trax Editing done, we exported all the frames and put them together in Sony Vegas. This allowed us control over the editing more efficently than rendering out an animation directly from Maya. When we rendered the animation, we were really surprised by how well the animation had gone. The story comes through nicely with the use of a guard to sell the idea of him being a thief. Also the security camera feed was some post editing that we believe added a little flair to the animation. We rendered the animation using Sony Vegas in order to gain more control over rendering a video directly from Maya. At this stage we were happy with the overall animation however the brief stated that we should have dialogue for each member. Due to the size of our group (4 people) and only having 2 characters, dialogue seemed inefficient to do and instead we opted for sound effects such as grunts and groans. We believe that this didn't aid the original animation and opted to stick with the no dialogue animation.
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The Trax Editor enables animators to create 'clips' our of their animation and piece it together with other animations and edit them in different ways. For our animation, we used it to blend a stealth walk, ladder climb, window open and idle together. To begin with, we needed to cap our animations on all the controllers. This is to stop any other animations used in the blending process from taking control of the mesh from the original animation. To do this with the Morpheus Rig, I had to use a boTrigger script supplied with the download. This allowed me to use the UI at the side of Morpheus to select all the triggers in one click. After selecting all the controllers, I then set a keyframe at the beginning and end of the original animation for all controllers. Finally, I need to create a Character Set. This is an area in the Trax Editor where you will put the animation clips relating to the character you want to move. In our case we would have "Thief" as our Character set. Now we move into the Trax Editor. Here we take all the clips we exported and import them onto the character set. This allows us to blend the animations together to make a smooth motion. The blue boxes are the clips that play the animation when the timeline reaches them and the green arrows between them are the blends which insert keyframes between the end of the first clip and the start of the second clip to allow for a fluid motion.
We didn't use the Trax Editor for all of the project as it was deemed unnecessary in some places and it was also temperamental to actually working properly, Much like the Open Window animation, this one took a lot of tweaking to get correct as I needed the character to move forward while opening the door so that the mesh didn't stretch and to keep the hand on handle while moving the torso. In order to get the correct positions and flow to the animation, I kept opening doors constantly to see how the body is positioned and how you move into the room after opening a door, especially in a stealthy fashion. Starting with the idle pose again, I changed the angle on the body to get his side against the door in a guard/cautious stance. I also aimed his head towards the door so it was obvious that he intended to use the door. It also meant he could look through the window for threats before opening the door. From this I needed the thief to grab the door handle and begin to pull it down to open the door. I simply dragged the hand to the handle and positioned it. The arm automatically found a good joint angle thanks to it being an IK. For the gripping of the handle. I keyed the finger controller curl attribute on all the fingers to 4 and the thumb to 3. This gave a nice scrunch to the fingers and nicely fit around the handle. After this I wanted him to actually pull down the handle. Since this was a handle and not a knob, it needed a movement on the y-axis to convey the pull down as well as the rotation of the hand to maintain the grip of the handle. To do this I rotated the hand on the Y-axis around 30 degrees as I found this was a good rotation of the handle before a door opens. Then I began to open the door to let the character in. To do this he needed to move with the door while holding the handle and walking slowly into the room. I initially attempted to have him just open the door by extending his arm but quickly realised that this stretched the mesh and looked unrealistic. In order to first open the door I began using the full length of his arm before I began to stretch. I keyed his spine root controller moving forward to give the image of him pushing the door without moving. Afterwards I began to move the character by lifting the characters left leg first and moving it to an intermediate stage and adding a slight toe roll to the foot so it pointed towards the floor as would happen when you walk. I then repeated the process with the opposite foot so that, when played, the thief would move forward into the room. The last thing I wanted was the have the thief let go of the door handle (and the door to slow to a stop since it was no longer being pushed) and scout the room by looking around briefly. I took the starting key for the hand that was on the door handle and pasted it at the point that I wanted the hand to release the handle. Then, since I keyed the head to be looking at the right side of the room as he entered, I needed to change the direction the head was looking. This was a simple rotation of the head and keyed in to look both left and then straight ahead towards the safe. The animation is intended to be blended together in the Trax Editor with the walk animation and key hole peek animation created by Elliott. This makes it seem as if the thief is inexperienced but cautious. Later it would blend into a walk towards the safe located in the room he is opening the door to.
This animation was challenging in that after opening the window we wanted the character to vault or climb through the window. I opted to try a vault which I believe turned out well with the limitations of the rig. As with all the previous animations, I started with the Idle pose. This is to give me a good base so when we come to assemble the animation in the trax editor, it can blend nicely between animations. From the start pose, I needed the characters hand to slide under the window and pull the frame up. To do this I simply keyed the hands under the frame and set the keyframe tangent to Automatic to let the transition be smooth. I then keyed the curling of the fingers to more of a grip instead of open palm to add the effect of grabbing the frame. Next was the actual sliding of the window frame. For this I keyed the window opening at the speed I wanted and then placed the hands underneath the window frame when it had reached the top. This was done on the same frame as the window frame animation stopping. Automatic tangent meant the start and finish of these frames was smoothed meaning they were out of time with the movement of the window. To fix this issue I simply selected the frames of the hands and set it to a linear tangent meaning the animation was now constant between the frames. This is where the animation became tricky. I needed him to grasp onto the bottom of the window sill and the side of the window frame before raising himself onto the window sill and through the window, essentially vaulting through the window. I started this process by keying in the hands sitting where I needed them for the vault. However I found that the hands wouldn't rotate correctly as it was simply taking the quickest route to that location instead of thinking if it was accurate. Since the wrist wouldn't bend normally the way it wanted, I had to key it rotating its way back to the location. This fixed the issue but made the animation slightly more jagged. After this I raised the foot onto the window sill so he was ready to vault through. I tilted his foot slightly as it would be slightly difficult to place your foot directly flat on the sill and to negate any clipping issues with the rest of the mesh. Next, I took the hand from the side of the frame and moved it through the window as he was using it to balance himself. I also moved the head down so he could duck under the window frame. As with the jumping animation, this made the hands move out of position therefore needed relocating and re-keyed. At this point, I needed the other leg to go through the window so I moved the foot to rest on the sill to still give the character some balance then bring it through with the rest of the body to come back into the sneak walk/idle starting pose so that Trax Editor blending can be done easier.
The jumping animation proved a very difficult animation as the body and hands move relative to each other and since I needed the characters body to move a lot to climb after the jump it required a lot of keyframes to keep the position near to the original location. I started by importing the idle animation and positioning it in the correct location and setting the keyframes for the hands, feet and body. Deciding that I wanted to have him look from the bottom of the object to the top, as if he wasn't sure how he would jump it, I key framed his head slowly move up from the bottom. Alongside this, I wanted him to prepare for the jump so I raised his arms slightly towards the end of the head movement and bent his legs. The next stage was to have him hang from the overhang for a bit before climbing. From the crouch position, I moved the whole body up and stretched the legs to a relaxed but straight position to show maximum spring from the jump. The hands then raised up and connected with the top of the overhang. From the previous position I wanted to raise his torso as he was pulling himself up but keep the hands in the same position. However the hands were relative to the torso so everytime you moved the torso the hands would move with it. Therefore there were a lot of keyframes required to keep it locked in the original position. Alongside this, I needed to keep the hands from moving unnecessarily so I edited the keyframes in the Graph Editor. The graph editor allows for animators to change the position and frame a keyframe is set to without having to re-key anything. However it also allows them to change the type of transition between keyframes. I wanted the animation between the frames to remain as flat as possible so I used Linear Tangent. You can see a comparison below. The left is automatic which smooths an animation between keyframes whereas Linear creates a constant animation between frames meaning no slow or fast segments. From that point, I then have his arms raise up one after the other and place his torso onto the ledge slightly. Again, due to the torso and hand issue this stage required quite a few keyframes and manipulation in the graph editor. Here, I wanted the character to pull himself up and bend one of his legs onto the platform ready to raise himself up. Thanks to the IK handle of the leg, I can simply drag the foot and the leg will follow with it. Therefore it was just a matter of dragging the foot to the correct location and keyframing it. This didn't have the same issue as the hand as I didn't need it to stay in place when raising the torso. I then rotate the body slightly to allow the other leg to raise up. I rotate the foot and manipulate the knee locator to enable the leg to rest nicely on the surface. I then use the starting keyframes as the last keyframes to return him to the starting position, this slides the legs back into place and the torso to an upright position but now standing on the platform instead of the floor. The jumping animation was going to be used in conjunction with the push animation so that the thief would push the box to a window then jump on the box. With the creation of the scene, we added an alternate way to climb the building by introducing an access ladder to the side of the building. This eliminated the need for this animation.
Much like the Idle Animation, the Walk Animation would also be cyclic. This allows us to transition out of more complex animations and back into a set walk. For example, one part of our animation would be the thief walking to the ladder, climbing it, then dismounting and back into a walk. The animation for this would go: Walk > Climb > Dismount > Walk Using the Trax Editor allows us to blend between these animations. We were given an intro to the Trax Editor which allows animators to create 'Character Sets' which house the animation in a clip for use in the editor and stores a copy in the Visor. It acts much like a timeline but with editing capabilities. I will go into further details of this feature in a later post. Since our character was a thief, instead of a normal walk we wanted him to be more stealth/cautious therefore we lowered him to a crouch position and raised his arms to look alert. We all had a go at doing a stealth walk so that we could then choose the one we think would best suit the style of the character.
As we knew we needed an idle animation for the character to fall into at points, we set about creating one we could all use to base our animations upon. The idle would be a cyclic animation. Cyclic animations are, as the name suggests, animations that cycle meaning the start and end frames are usually the same (or they blend into each other nicely). This is especially useful in games where players control what animation plays by their inputs. For example, the player model could be doing a cyclic walk animation when moving forward but when the player hits the jump key, the walk needs to stop and instead play the jump animation and transition back into the walk animation when they hit the floor again. We couldn't get a good base idle without a reference so I offered to pose while photos were taken so we could better pose the character. These were taken from various angles to better position the idle. We then made an overlay of the reference to see the pose clearer. Using the references we posed the Morpheus Rig into position and gave a simple animation of him breathing. Here we added a little flair by making him alert by raising his hands up and looking around for threats. This is the extended idle which, in games, would be swapped every now and again instead of the idle to create some interest in the character. Since we had our basic storyboard and cyclic animations we would be using done, we moved onto the next planning stage which is the animatic. An animatic is much like a storyboard but animated to show timing and movement so animators better understand how long each pose should be. UPDATE: Our first animatic was timed around the music which meant that timings for animations were way out of proportion. While we were quite happy to keep the music, we need to base the music around the animatic instead. Therefore we created a revised animatic in order to get the timing better. You can see that the scene that the characters in is better proportioned to him. This is because we decided to construct the scene that the character would be interacting with. This helped greatly with animating the poses as instead of having to 'guess' where hands would be to open something or feet would be placed to climb an object we could instead position them on the props. This also helped as we could manipulate the objects for the animation too, such as have the character grab the window and the window open while he pulls it.
The push animation was a lecture task and we had the idea of the thief pushing a box up against a wall and climbing it to gain access to the bank. Below is the basic flow of the body for a push. This is a more exaggerated, cartoon feel over a realistic but the premise is the same. I started my animation by creating an object to position the characters hands on and importing a starting animation which was the idle pose and adjusted it slightly to the starting pose above. I then began on positioning the hands for each pose above and setting the keyframes. I wanted the first and last keyframes to be the same so that the animation could be used as a cyclic animation if needed. To do this I simply set the starting position as both the first and last frame. I then moved up the timeline and positioned the hands for position 3. I skipped position to as I saw 2 as a cartoony pose and wanted this to be more realistic and the blend between 1 and 3 within my animation created a suitable transition. As for the feet. You can see in pose 3 that one leg is bent and the other is practically straight. With mine, I checked some video reference on the push and found that people tend to twist the foot on the straight leg slightly for friction or balance purposes, therefore I added this to mine. Much like the hands, I wanted the start and end to be the same so set the frames for them and then created the keyframes for the pose below at the same frame as the hands hitting the box. Also in 3, you can see the characters back bends to reach the box and due to the weight behind the object requiring more force. Due to the way the rig works, when the back moves the locations of the hands move with it, therefore when I positioned the back and set the frames for them I then needed to reposition the hands again. Lastly, I repositioned the head to be looking down as if he's struggling to push the box. The next part of the pose was to switch legs as if he has begun moving the box and now needs to move himself along with it. To do this, I simply moved the rear foot to be in line with the location of the front foot then did the opposite for the other foot. This way they'd have the same relative location and would look as if it was walking. Alongside this, I also added a roll and lift to the foot so that instead of the foot sliding across the floor, the foot moving forward would lift to its new position. At this stage I was happy with how it looked however there wasn't enough of a pause between each foot's resting position. Therefore I opted to add a few more frames between the switch by copying the resting position of the feet and pasting it 10 frames ahead. This gave a nice pause between the movement as if he is struggling to move the box. Since I set the first keyframes as the last keyframes too, the animation resets back to its starting position. When I played this through I noticed the front foot would slide back to the start position instead of staying where it was and letting the rear foot lift up to its start. To negate this I keyframed the main control moving forward to keep the foot in place which remedied the issue. The final animation can be seen below. To follow with what we had been taught in the first year, we set about designing the storyboards for the scene to help us plan how the story of the animation would fit together since all we knew was a thief was breaking into somewhere. We discussed what we'd like to happen and agreed upon a storyline for it. We then designed a storyboard to go along with it. You can see that due to the amount of repeated animations, a lot of original animations we had thought necessary no longer were. To counter this and add to the story, we opted to add an additional character in the form of a security guard who would see the thief from the security camera and apprehend him.
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