Gentle's Animation learning thread

#21

Your form is really coming along! I might have to try that technique of sketching over photographs to practice proportions…the payoff really showed with you. Keep posting :slight_smile:

#22

A day of demotivation, narcoleptic bahaviour and the penultimate page of my waste-sketchbook :scream:


Gentle

#23

Nice job! Don’t forget to include line of action to get the pose down quickly, I can see your construction lines are present so that’s a great start :slight_smile:

#24

I believed yesterday was my least-outcome-day - but it even gets worse! Great! :smiley:
By the way, now my two sketchbooks are full and finished, here’s a photo of them… (the one is out of waste, with five pages of hyper-complex math terms from the former owner, the other one was created with waste and GAFFA duct tape, with which you can patch your shoes, make sketchbooks or heal cancer.


The second drawing week is over (I’m feeling that my motivation is going to hit the ground, so I appreciate that the next week is different) - the following week will be a reading week, so be prepared for some new reviews :wink:

Gentle

#25

This post is a bit longer because it includes - in fact - three days.

I partcipated - also because of different interests - to an acting school in vienna, http://www.schauspielschule.at/ is their homepage.
The course is expensive, and I took all five available modules (I have just four month left in Austria).
For a trimester I pay 1000€, and I am glad my parents helped me “a bit” to pay that, you know. as an unemployee the financial times are not that sky-high :wink:
The course is AWESOME.

I do it with a good friend of mine, Hannes, who isn’t into 3D but also interested in the side-effects of this coruse, as I’m too.
We have these five modules, one for voice, one for bodyworks, one for body-breath-voice, one for acting and one for emotional training.
We do that sunday and monday from 10am to early afternoon.
The groups are 4-7 people and one tutor, so it’s small and really relaxing, just great.

I’ll tell you what we did in the first unit:

-voice: analyzing our own dialects (German isn’t equal to German :wink: ), looking for tongue, throat and vocal chord’s functions in speaking. Training the pure sound “AA”. Reading a crazy text with 60% A’s in a group of foru and pronunciating it totally exxageratedly.
-bodywork: male and female gestures and behaviour analyzation, miming it and exaggerating these movements like you’d do it in character animation - there are soo many parallels!
-acting: analyzing our walks and walkcycles, feeling the muscle’s and joint’s functions in the walking process. Training axaggerated poses while walking - a freeze - to different emotional states.
-emotional basic training: wasn’t taking place as one guy just jumped off right before start, so we’ll try to find a new man for that for the next week.
-body-breath-voice: training berathing techiques like breathing-thourgh-stomache, analyzing the lungs and its functions, training right postures for the most efficient breathing. A big point I didn’t know yet was to shift the position of the sternum - its a huge, huge factor of radiation.

by the way, the three basics of the ACT&Fun-school , the 3 P’s, are: Power, Presence and Painfulness :smiley:

Damn cool!

The last two days, I finished a new book:

“Geheimnisse der Filmgestaltung” (Secrets of Film Composition)
by Arnold Heinrich Müller
ISBN: 3 7949 0711 6
(I think it’s just available in German)

A fantastic book about everything a semiprofessional wants to know about film design.
It’s 300 pages thick and has many pictures for explanation; it’s easy to read and fast to understand.
It begins with recapitulating the film history like the “Laterna Magica” and Edison’s “Kinetoscope”, ending up in the modern digital camcorders which are fitting into a handbag.
Then there’s a chapter about planning a film, beginning with an exposè, advancing to a treatment and finishing with a screenplay. It’s really important to make a concept of your film and planning it in detail.
By time, a film alnguage, a film “code” was developed, with which you can save time - for example, the character enters and leaves an elevator and everybody knows that he’s now on another floor.
Continuity is of enormous importance, so a film has always making it possible for the viewer to follow what’s happening. This can be done by a continuity in 1-3 of the 3 channels: time, location and action.
There’s a huge chapter about the design itself, which has many parallels to still-image design, with the doubling factor of another dimension, time. So it’s for example important when you film a formula-1-racing car, that you give it space in the parts of the image that are in front of the car, this creates a feeling of danamics.
It’s essential to have the camer positioned on one side of a dialogue, in a 180-degree-space, so that the characters never change their lef-right-position in the filmed dialogue.
If you want to cross that acting line, you can do that i.e. by making a hemicircluar move with the camera around the actors.
Concerning the shot size (the part of person that’s shown by the camera), you have to be “soft” with the viewer. When going from a total shot to a detail shot, you have to add for example an “American”-inbetween shot (shwoing the character from knees to head).
There’s a thick chapter about sound design, in which all the basic principles are explained like that the surrounding sounds have to be lowered when somebody says a text and then to be heightened again (concerning amplitude).
There’s a detailled chapter about drama, in which the importance of anticipation, excitement phases, the importance of rhythm in editing and the storytelling perspectives are furtherly declared.
For people who are interested in making films, it’s a great basic book and also an important reference book.

Gentle

#26

Today I read a bit, but it was too less,
so the next review comes tomorrow.

I wanted to go to a nude drawing course on university (altough I’m not a student, I wanted to try “just getting in”), but it was closed and is beginning next week. Soooo Thomas, Gerald and me went to the Nature Historical Museum Vienna and drew some animals… these are my scribbles with a graphit pen (I forgot all my drawing stuff, so I had no rubber):







Gentle

#27

Damn, I just make no progress with that book.

But I’m now involved - parallely - in a real-movie-project.
I met today with Hannes and Thomas to speak about our shots and settings.
Hannes and me will be directing the movie, so we made first quick sketches.

My first steps in storyboarding :smiley:

Gentle

#28

Just came home from going out … this is the next book:

“Storyboard”
by Marcie Begleiter
ISBN: 3861504987

This book was awesome. It has 200 pages, is very fresh to read, has a variety of content styles - tutorial-like, industrially relevant and personal experiences of Marcie.
Soryboards are a central element in the preproduction of films. The storyboard artist works veryclose to the director, the camera man and the production designer.
For better results, the storyboard artist should be participating the shot-discussion and take notes, so the process of visualizing the shot-list is a lot easier.
A storyboard artist has to be able to make the director’s visions come true, to transform the screenplay from words to images. For exapmle, if the whole team is on the set and nobody has an idea how to take the next shot, which setting etc. everbody is bored - and also bored actors cost a lot.
So storyboards save time and energy, which is a basic reason why they’re so important for the preproduction phase.
A storyboard looks like comic, all the images have numbers (two levels - scene numbers and take numbers) and uses visual elements like arrows to describe camera or actor movement.
For dolly zooms or transitions, the storyboard artist has to use extended image frames (like a very wide image to describe a horizontal camera rotation) or he makes graphic top views and marks the camera positions und transitions.
It is IMPORTANT to make a storyboard just as simple as necessary. When a film isn’t yet financed and the director shows the production company a too detailled storyboard, the producers recognize that the film is very strictly planned - and that’s bad for business.
When the project is financed, the director can prefer different styles: with pen, with ink, or even with light and shadow-painting,
In the last chapter, Marcie describes the most important point - “How to get a job”, as a storyboard artist.
Her hints were very helpful, I could feel her professionality and experience. She recommends to work at any project you can get, as whatever you want (she even had to carry away cow shit on an alpine pastuire for a picnic scene). By that, you can make your experiences “out there” in the real business world, and not some theoretical practices.
She also goes into detail if and how to work with an artist agency.
At the end of the book, there’s a huge list of online communities, homepages, literature and films.

Gentle

#29

Acting course, yesterday and today:

-SGK (Acting Basic Course): We m,at a clap-circle, in which everybody gave an impulse forward, so we clapped, stamped, leaned our bodies, made an expression and screamed, all at the same time. The next exercise was that we got together in pairs, and while one person closed his/her eyes, the other one lead her through the room without touching or colliding the other pairs and walls. Really interesting how much people are used to see patterns in movement and try to move like they think they’ll be led.
-EBT (Emotional Basic Training): Was hard this time. We first constructed, feature by feature, a very angry facial expression, watched each other and gave feedback. Then we had to affront and call each other names very quickly, what was really hard (we didn’t hate each other, so it’s way not that easy as if we were serious about that). Funny how everybody tried to smile after affronting somebody, signalizing not to be serious - altough this was an exercise. Then we used our anger facial expression and began to brethe very deep, shout and scream, stamp and throwingaround our arms.

A little notice: For usual, actors create their emotions based on memories or imagination. Act&Fun is the only school in europe that offers a body-based emotional training. For that, our trainer told us an anecdote: A director wanted an actor to play anger developing out of grief, so he told him to imagine a circus tent full of murdered children.
If an actor does that too long and too often, he’ll be very likely to start drinking or get depressions.
When he uses his memories, there’s the problem that after 300 shows in the theatre, the dead grandma memory isn’t that effective any more as it was in the beginning.
So this school creates emotions via the body, very technically, controllable and still realistic.

-SPKA (Acting Bodywork): First, we made a warm-up to feel all parts of our body consciously and improving our body coordination. Then we teached each other the typical male/female behaviour of the last week, and I tell you, it was damn great to watch two good-looking girls falling into their chairs and banging the imaginated beer bottle on the table while watching soccer. :smiley:
Acting like a woman was very hard for me, all the movements are so tiny, finetuned, small and soft… but I was able to produce a funny Bruce Darnell walk :wink:
-PH (Phonetik): Exact analysis of the sounds Mm, Nn, Aa, A and Ng. Additionally we trained our tongue and massaged the throat. Then we read senseless sentences with many A’s, threw sounds through the room, and trained to controll the amount of air we used for differend sound intensities.
-AKS (Atem-Körper-Stimme): Very vitalizing exercises, in which we stretched our lower-rib-muscles (these are partly those we need to breath), did breathing exercises, voice training, tongue position training and stretching with combined relaxation. Many exercises are similar to Yoga. Fresh! :wink:

Gentle

#30

This week will be a character modeling week - to understand and animate characters, I want to model some of them on my own.
http://www.3dtutorials.sk/index.php?id=166

I haven’t - except two comic characters and one deformed head - never experienced character modeling, so i sat eight hours modeling this woman. When it came down to the feet, I tried it on my own with photo references, but they look really male and weren’t fitting to her, so I disconnected them again.
I’ll model new ones tomorrow.
I’d be pleased about modeling critique, especially concerning meshflow and so on. :slight_smile:
What can I improve?
(btw. it’s one HyperNURBS tesselation)

Gentle

#31

Today I did the head, again Boxmodeling, after this Tutorialand without any references, what was damn hard (so I freaked out a few times :smiley: )

I also corrected some body parts - ribs, belly and breasts (so they lose their pornstar-character but keep the silicon-llok of my reference).

Gentle

#32

Today I began modelling the hands. I’ve never thought that a hand is sooo complicated - still in progress.
I went over the basic proportions, hip bones and breats.

Last but not least, the today’s nude drawing course - I had to get in without permission.








Gentle

#33

Today I finished the hand, based on this tutroail and some own insights:
http://www.3dtutorials.sk/index.php?tutorials=4&software=3&id=237&page=
and started the foot, after Steven Stahlbergs tutorial: http://www.3d.sk/tutorials/Modeling_a_foot_in_Maya.htm
I didn’t finish it yet - tragically - so I used the time toi make it very accurate and studied my own feet, especially volume. I attach an image where you can see my constructions.
The foot references come from this Page.

Gentle

#34

The feet are finished - and the character-modeling week is over! :slight_smile:

Gentle

#35

Acting course Sunday/Monday:

SGK: Clap circle with great speed improvement - because we tried to not think about the question “is it my turn or not” but just tried to “feel” it. Works suprisingly awesome :wink:
Then we made a shoe where we had to walk in front of the group, very, very, very slowly look at each of them and say “My name is [Tobias]”. It’s thrilling how hard and intime that is…

EBT: Thinking about the liver’s role in agression. NLP-like imagination of modeling an energy ball out of the liver and use it to enhance our facial expression. Hard to imagine, but works nicely. Gorilla-walking and screaming at each other in high agression - it’s really hard to control body tension, facial expression, voice, breathing and overall shape at the same time. Introduction to penguin-walking, some shape exercises and some karate-like movements.

SPKA: Warming up, some exercises and then four men playing extremely feminine ladies (our two girls in that class were missing). Extremely funny, but complicated to find the right timing and synchronization to the others.

PH: Warming up and massaging the mouth, tongue and cheeks, throwing Ps, Ks and Ts through the room. reading a text with widely opened moth, but at the same time no tension in the cheeks and a very forward position of the tongue. (that’s quite impossible :wink: ) When the tongue is too backwards, you get quiter, unfocused and dull.

AKS: Breathing into certain spots on the back, stretching rib muscles, deep belly breathing and three-level-breathing which resulted in 5 seconds of breathing in and 16 seconds of breathing out loudly. Training the pure “aaaa”-sound, posture training and important for that…: breastbone!

Today I watched a part of the C4D-learning DVD you get with version 10 package. Two hours of rigging-videotutorial, very detailled and highly interesting… hope, I watch the rest tomorrow and try it out with a “dead foot”. Hand-claps to Maxon, the rigging tools are, as far as I saw on the training video, really flexible and totally easy to understand.

Actually I wanted to animate something today, but a student filmmaking-project with four friends (real-movie, 3mins in length) is taking so much time in preproduction :smiley:

Gentle

#36

I watched the rest of the learning-vid “Flabio - Rigging”. (about 2-3 hours, 300MB)
And I have to say … gorgeous. Its such a flowing, smooth way to rig characters with the new MOCCA module, I imagined it a hundred times more complicated. I’m lookin forward to rig my first character :wink:
I just have to applaud Maxon for that tool…: You set the joints, polevectors and IK-targets, select the joints and the mesh, press the bind-button and overwork the auto-wightmap slightly (it delivers great automated solutions), mirror the weighting with the powerful character-mirror-tool and add XPresso-Userdata. That’s it.
I hope I’ll rig a simple foot tomorrow so I can start animating… :slight_smile:

#37

What a day … my father gives me some mail … from MAXON Gmbh … hrm, I fall asleep again. At 10:30 AM the phone rings, and what’s beside me on the bed, packed in a safety-mail? The 10.5 XL-Update for Cinema, and a 5,5 hours training DVD for character animation and especially rigging. Just for fun, obviously I didn’t bought or ordered the update.

So I watched a lot of the video material. I think about modeling a whole character and rigging it before I start with animating the feet or legs and “work myself up the body”. So I scribbeled a bit in the bathtub :wink:

Then I modelled a shoe, played around with rigging and making a jump-animation - it’s a bit mor complicated than I awaited it :smiley:

http://www.gentle.tk/anim/shoejump.mov

By the way, I was nude sketching today but forgot my sketchbook in the drawing room :wink:

Gentle

#38

Today I watched parts of this super-long tutorial. It’s about rigging a complete bunny-mesh - the English with French accènt is jùst à gòòdie :smiley:

Unfortunately, today my sketchbook was gone, lost forever, uhuhuhuuu - half that bad, the most drawings are digitalized in a low resolution, and whatever I was fond of this waste-style, the only thing that counts is my experience with it. Goodbye sketchbook, whoever may have taken you :smiley:

So today I had no sketchbook, and because I wanted to participate in the nude drawing course, I just took a BIG sheet (like Din A1) out of the wastepaper basket there. Worked nice :smiley:

By the way, I found out that there is a bunch of preset rigs for MOCCA, I played around a bit with them and the bast handling for me had this reggae-monster.

Gentle

#39

The last week, I had to think about many things… the dead foot is way harder than I thought, somehow I can’t handle a single foot. So I’ll directly continue to a whole leg, and I needed a leg… my conclusion was: I need to design a character, rig it myself and then begin to animate the little parts.

I looked up some reference images…:

So I sketched a bit around… the “character sheet”:

Actually, it’s not a chracter sheet because I didn’t yet decide what parts I put together. This is the reason for this “early” post: which elements, e.g. hairstyle and accessoirs, would you choose of these?

Gentle

#40

A discussion with my dad lead me to the idea, to make a couchpotatoe-guy instead of a nerd. Would be maybe a bit more attractive :wink:

like … a white undershirt with beer blotches, yellowish underpants, 12-day-beard, ****ed up hair and so on … what do you think about that?
I’ll draw one more character-sheet :wink:

For the next weeks, I split the MOCCA-IK-boy, this week I’ll animate one leg, the next one two legs and the hip, then legs and torso and in one month I’ll animate the whole body. During that, I’ll model my character, rig him and finally begin to animate him after succeeding with the MOCCA-standard-rig.

That’s from today:
http://www.gentle.tk/anim/Legjump1.mov
http://www.gentle.tk/anim/Legjump2.mov

Acting course from sunday/monday:

SGK: We did again the leading exercise, then we learnt a new game, something like a realistic ragdoll-thingy: one person stands on front of the other, while the person pushes him/her on different spots on the back. It’s hard to neither block the pushes nor exaggerate the reaction.
Then we did an interesting exercise in which you look your partner directly into the eyes, put your hands between you (so that they don’t touch), and try to feel the warmth of you partner’s hands and try to lead and follow subtle hand movements. That exercise is about 5-10 minutes long and really cool.

EBT: Penguin walk, more intese usage of the liver in connection to push the eyes aggressively out, one game for three persons, one in the middle, the second holding him under the arms and the third pushing into the hollow of the knees. A pity that I got a kick in the face :smiley:

SPKA: Warming up with closed eyes and the we did a posture analysis of everyone - with venezian masks, so that it was impossible to see any face expressions. AMAZING how different people look with these neutral masks!!

PH: Throwing different sounds through the room, tongue training and massage, reading a goofy text with focus on pronounciation and slo reading. And we did an exercise in which we had to read a sentence in one rush, to use more air in our voice. Was fun as usual :slight_smile:

AKS: Spot-breathing, breathing on counting, the cat exercise (making a hunchback and bendig the back downwards while breathing deeply), the tree-exercise from Yoga (in which you stretch you rib-muscles and get a more flexible ribcage) and some other stretching exercises.

Gentle