Final Workings and Animation!!

The Final Animation!!

So this is our final animation,

In conclusion, I am very pleased as a whole I believe that the team worked well together and we all played a valid role in creating our animation, It was pretty decent in length and there were some complex animations and alot of moving parts, and with four people working on the animation of two men, splitting up the animations of each and making sure that each shot lead on from the next was crucial. I believe that we did a very good job at achieving this, we had some problems along the way, such as trax editor but in the end for what we wanted to achieve we found it to be more of a hindrance than a help so we strayed away from it.

A special shout out needs to go to William Lambert as it was his original idea that spearheaded the project and also Will played the role of Director throughout the project timeline, right up to the last day where he was perfecting his camera angles of each animation and making sure he got his perfect shot, This really helps sell the action of the piece, and was a very welcome helping hand for all of us.
....AND!!! as he has previous experience with adobe premier, it was will that compiled our animation sequences into the final animation that you see here, So hats off to Will and a BIG thanks for Director Will!

And of Course a well done to the team too!

Week 13 - Animating and Getting My Shots

Its getting ever closer to the Hand in deadline and I have now finished all of my sequences, I need them now to be put into the final animation which will is covering in adobe premier as he has experience in it and I have none and the same goes for Bryan and Tsanko.. (Once again Will being the MVP) The other modules Workload is extremely heavy and most of my time now is being sunk into getting my AGAP finished, below are my screens from my Animations. In total I did;

1. 2 x Gladiator Idles
• Also Included 2 x Extended Idles - 1 x Shield Bash - 1 x Head Shake
2. 1 x Hand/Thumb Waiver/ Death Sentence
3. 3 x Overhead Two-Handed Sword Swings each changing after every swing to compensate for the other character moving and pounding him into the ground more and more.
4. 3 x Shield Blocks at Different angles and areas.
5. 1 x Gate juddering up and then being raised.
6. 1 x Bounding Beast/Monster Charging and jumping towards the Gladiators.
7. 2 x Cowering Gladiators in Fear preparing for Beast Attack!!

Just a little run-down of all the animations I created.

Lots of the reference that I used for these animations was running through the motions with my team, and watching them first hand and how each of them reacted to said sequences, so when the shielded gladiator is being beaten to the ground by the other, Tsanko and will were re-enacting this so that I could see first hand how the actor/character will react. This primary research is by far the best way of getting what you need, and in Hind-Sight would have been gold to have recorded these as video reference, but as we did all of our animations together as a team it was easy to keep re-enacting these with one another, and I didn't think to film it, Like I said in hind-sight or if I was going home to work on the animations the video reference would have been GOLD!

Week 11 - Easter Break and Working as a Team

It is now the Easter holidays and we are meeting today as a team to work on nailing down the props and setting up the rigs for our animation. This has been a little on the back burner due to the work load of other modules, and we decided as a team that we could spend our time together over the Easter holidays, So the first thing we have done is create some props for our Rigs to make them ours and more fitting with our theme.

These Props have been created By all of us. 

 

Bucket Helm= Me

Swords = Bryan

Shield = Will

2nd Helm = Tsanko

Will also created a Coliseum and I created a gate that I would be animating to reveal... THE BEAST!

Not only Have we created props but we have also Beefed up our Rigs, They have definitely been hitting the gym hard and have had massive gains in comparison to the standard Morpheus man.

Once I Changed all of the scales of the body parts of the rigs I then Attached and prepared the rigs for the team to use,

I did this by taking each of our props and creating locators for them, I then Positioned the locators and the props into the correct positions on each rig and parented the props to each of the corresponding locater's.

From this point I then renamed them all and gave them correct naming functions.

Then I Parented the locator of each prop to the corresponding CURVE control that would be affecting them, Simple stuff that we covered last semester during rigging but came in handy this semester. This allowed for easy movement of said props that stayed with their rigs, So the Helmets where parented to the head controller and the swords where parented to the hand controller and so on.

After I had finished preparing our rigs I then shared them with the rest of my team so that they could begin there animations too!

Week 8 - Putting together the Animatic

Today I created the animatic from the storyboards that will had made, Unfortunately I was the only member here this week so Had to do this alone, I tried my best to time the scene as well as I could but this can be edited later when the rest of my team are also here. I showed the animatic to Phil Morris and he really liked it, His one point would that it would be great with some sound :) Unfortunately I could not get any sounds that fitted it today but we will be looking for these for the final animation.
The animatic is below.

Below is the breakdown for the animatic that I created, and delegation of the sequences that make up the final animation, we sat down as a team and dished out the roles, this is seen below;

----------- BS= Broadsword SS= Sword and shield

BS Helm= Tim
SS Helm= Tsanko
Swords= Bryan
Shield= Will



Animation Cycles:

Sequence 1 Staredown: Shots 1-3    (Tim)
Idle x2

Sequence 2: Thumbs down: Shot 4    ((Tim (Most important))
Thumb down

Sequence 3: Charge: Shot 5         (Bryan)
Charge x2

Sequence 4: Block1: Shot 6-7       (Tsanko)
BS horizontal swing
SS block

Sequence 5: Riposte: Shot 8-9       (Will)
BS backstep
SS Jab
BS riposte
SS being riposted

Sequence 6: Shield jab: Shot 10-11  (Tsanko)
BS Jab
SS Highblock

Sequence 7: Beatdown: Shot 12-19   (Tim)
BS Beatdown
SS kneel block
SS struggle block (?)

Sequence 8: Recovery: Shot 20-23  
SS shield bash
BS stunned and knockback   (Will)


BS footslide
SS pick up sword   (Bryan)

Sequence 9: Charge2: Shots 24-27     (Bryan)
Charge x2
Sword lock
Staredown while locked

Sequence 10: Beast reveal: 28-32    (Tim)
Defense stance x2
Door rise
Eyes
Bounding camera
Reaction

Week 7 - Friday the 13th Again!! 2x Spooky! Plus some story boards

Soo this week, will has finished up the final storyboard (This is going to be his masterpiece!) and I think everyone is happy with it, We also showed it to Phil Morris and seemed to also like it, This is good progress but we need to really nail down the animatic and timings now.
Story Board Below.

The final Frame will also fade to black for dramatic effect this was not included in the story board as it seemed a waste of another panel.

Week 5 - Maya, Mo-cap and MotionBuilder

So this week with rosin we looked at Maya motion builder, and we also had some basic motion capture data that we were using inside of motion builder to apply the movements of the data to a skeletal rig that we had set up in motion builder. It was all very interesting and fun to play around with, but It was a little irrelevant to what we were doing. I can see how useful it could be for certain jobs and tasks but it doesn't share much relevance with me and what I am doing right now. Unfortunately I did not take any screenshots of this and failed to document the binding of the character and the rig.
What I do have though is the File folders From my HDD!! REJOICE!!! well not really but it shows I was there and did it! well if that stands for anything...

so yeah... Motion-builder.

Week 3 - Friday the 13th!! Spooky!

Quick little update today as been busy with other modules and presentations, but this is just to keep things updated on animation and where we are currently at as a team.
Okay so this week as a team we began drawing up the storyboards and how the animation would play out, William Lambert started to draw these and I helped choreograph the fight scenes.
Also in other small tasks we were doing some basic animation such as a man pushing against a wall or large block, I think this task was to mainly look at how the human body would react when pushing/ Pulling Objects.