My September Project (6) - Tweening

Hello HypefroActive fans and welcome to another edition of animations hosted here on Hypefroactive. Today  continues the sequels to My september Animation Project highlighting and revealing whatever it is i'm working on every fresh month. Well, i must say it has been wonderful animating as i learnt a whole bunch of stuffs and experimented on my theories and guess what? They all passed. Yeah, animating has never felt any better than where i am right now for me. All the talks about squash and stretch, moving holds, establishing contacts etc has never really meant plenty until now.

At this stage after setting most of the key positions, i am faced with the in-betweens. And so, animating continues and for once i just let me go without bothering my head about the principles. And what really put me on this project is facial animations, a stage that i've not yet reached on this project but learning how to place squash and stretch any where you want "that of course makes sense" is something i've always marveled about. And its just so fantastic when you understand the flow and other of things. Now, Animators that specialize in 2D Animations are mostly animating on one or two's or both. And i used to think that it was because they drew and had to do that for at least every frame for the most part. And sometimes watching or listening to other 3D Animators lecture, they'll tell you that because the programme interpolates the in-betweens you can go ahead animating on threes or fours. And again this works on 3D Animating programmes but might not turn out well for it's 2D counterpart unless of course you don't want to be taken seriously. Well, contrary to what they've talked about

"how to animate in frames in the 3D world", i've come to realize that whether 2D or 3D, the methods for frame to frame animations are the same and this holds truest if it has to do with arcs within four to eight frames or sometimes rubber-hold animations. Animating on ones just makes the characters want to pop out the screen and grab something. There's plenty of life, it's funny and you get to do what ever stupid stuff as much as you want that can be realistically possibly overlooked.

When you understand stuffs in this manner, knowing how thing work in real life and testing them out with it's accorded principle, then your problems become a lot lesser and all you look ahead and see in this stead is the frames and ideas for a story-line. There was a time when i accidentally animated stuffs like the way i'm animating now but couldn't replicate it because i didn't really understand what i moved or rotated that made the animation turn out like that. And for a very long time, i tried re-inventing it but never really got a hold of that Mangekyo Sharingan technique until some weeks back. And now, it is even better because i understand that it is all in the flow. That is basically what

you have to work on, "The flow". It dictates the order of things and how events unfold. Being aware and understanding this just puts the square pegs in the square holes. And alot of questions are answered like, what kind of animation do you hope to embark on? Is it a realistic or cartoony character type of Animation or a blend of both. For me, i think i'll love to do a blend of both but with more emphasis towards the cartoony type and don't blame me because i love funny stuffs.

Ok, as usual and somehow to keep you abreast of my progress so far, i've uploaded some images of a character i've animated on here that happens tobe the main character in this shot and funny thing is, i still i'm not done with the animations. Next in line is the facial expressions and some two hundred or a little more frames of animations and i'm done. The curve editor once again proved to be a very useful tool in this exercise, way to go curve editor.

My September Project (5)

Hello HypefroActive People and trust you are doing Great. Welcome to another spell bound, ground breaking and pace setting edition of Animations on HypefroActive. Ok, so this is the fifth in the series of what i'm working on for the month of september and i'm still on it. I am hoping to improve on my animation skills and though as you all know, i do low poly stuff, I hope to feature all aspects of animation in this recent video, from movement of body parts to the flow of facial expressions.

So, right now i'm blocking out poses for the animations, sort of setting up your characters for poses and maybe in a timely manner. Well for me it's a timely manner because i use them most of the time when i'm doing either dialogue or a dance and that's when it's most effective because the actions get executed at the exact place or position you want it to occur. Not a frame later or less, unless ofcourse you mistakenly pose the characters wrongly, so the software is justified in this regard if this is the case.

Yeah, i tried a couple of things out while i was wiring morph targets and they seemed to work at the time but while animating, i experienced different. It was disappointing realizing this because i'd put in alot of work, wiring every painful morph target and now this! Like seriously? What exactly happened you ask? Ok, i created this head for the character and thought to use it for all the characters in the scene and probably used this same technique for my future projects. This way, i get to save time and money by just copying the head and wiring all the morph targets created to the individual heads. so its two or more heads sharing the same morph targets. Well the morphs did work on the heads but after wiring the first head and moving it alongside the body about everywhere it should go, then i proceeded to doing the same thing to the other heads and guess what, they said no. No Mr. Fred i cant let you perform a Naruto edo- tensei on all of us. Ok, so they wont let me, too bad because i'd counted my chickens already and as far as morphs go, that was a wrap. Anyways there is nothing to fear because i still have everything under control. So it wont let me, BIG DEAL! i'll create another or cut it out my scene, too bad for you bad head.

As at today, i'm working on my block poses because i'm done with lip syncing. Starting very subtle i hope to bring in a lot of spark and finish strong in the video. I still have the urge to do a lot of things like i used to when i first started animating because i want it to be as interesting as possible but now i know better. In telling a story, no matter what you know or want to do, it's imperative to always stick to your aims and objectives. They can be improved with changes made and incorporated. And allowing yourself to go wild once in a while is ok, but when you loose focus of what you are animating such that it no longer tells the story, then that is bad. A lot of people draft 2d poses tellin g stories in different stages but me... I test it out in real life and go ahead animating with everything in my head. Bad yeah? I know. Ok, i have to get back to work, see you all sometime later when i have something worth sharing.

Just a thought, the headings to these edition of animations is kind of long you'll agree. So i'll be changing or modifying the headings to something shorter like "My September Project" then the I, II, III etc thing comes afterwards. Hey, its looking better already and i'll be starting with this one.

My September Project (4) The Lipsync and curve editor.

Hello HypefroActive fans and welcome to another Animation edition on HypefroActive. Well, this continues from where we left off creating animations for the month of September and is the fourth in the series. Ok, so i have left some little things undone to attend to them later because i couldn't resist the urge to animate something or at least anything as i took a long break from animation. So here we go, with me animating stuffs again.

I created a simple one minute or so script, got some beautiful people to voice it and was almost about perfect but i thought to include an intro. Something to introduce the Script and intended Animation. So, i created an intro of about eight hundred frames and will begin animating.

For me the biggest challenge i'll probably face is lip syncing. I hate lip syncing because it is boring and nothing really moves asides the lips. And if there was a way to avoid it this time around, trust me i would. But this same project is also about lip syncing and facial expressions amidst other little things i have in mind for it. However like any other project that involves lip syncing, it is

important to get the morph targets right because no matter how timely the lip sync is, if the morph targets do not fully interpret the mood to the audience then you wouldn't have achieved as much as you'ld hope to achieve. Well, lip syncing for me is annoying and the little grumpy sounds that sometimes add to the voice over just makes it a lot more annoying but that's what really adds spice to the voicing.

Ok, so reluctantly but compelled to do, here i am dragging shapes up and down to make the lips simulate the effect of speech. in all i have about eight targets for lip sync and the rest are just facial expression morph targets. Far from done, hey it's not as bad as i used to think it is, but i still hate it

though. So after a couple of slow progress and re-starts, i decided to bring in the oracle. Yeah, the oracle is "The Curve Editor". The curve editor doesn't only smoothens out animations only, it also is very good for monitoring wave forms for sounds to be lip synced. People, if you animate whatever it is that you animate and do not refer to the curve editor for further consultations, then you still are a long way to animating anything close as good. And like Jeff Lew said, The curve editor is your friend, use it and love it. And if you dont love it, well you gotta love it. And 3dsmax has two of em. The first is the standard one and can be found by default close to the far right of the tool bar. And the mini curve editor which is the other can be found above the frame buffer and at the same line and starts before the command line. Yeah, Again that's how you bring your sound in from external sources in your computer such as the desktop or any location it's been stored for use. Any of these two Oracles can be used and still produce the same results.

Well, at the top as you can already see is something i'll call a rough draft of where i'm going. So far everything has turned out well but then the magic has not even started. Just simple poses trying to tell a story and yeah, that's all i have for today. See you guys hopefully by next week and have a great day ahead.

My September Project (3) -------"Wiring Controllers and corrections to colour Bleeds"

The Old Scene

Hello Peeps and welcome to another edition of HypefroActive. This edition is a continuation of the My month of September reel and it's the third of that installment. Ok, maybe i should just go ahead with numbering them in chapters or episodes so that it's easy for some of you guys following these posts to identify properly which is which. It will probably bring some for of orderliness in reading sort of like numbering the pages of a book.

So, yesterday was not really hectic nor easier either, as i found myself wiring morphs to controllers for the characters in the scene.And though i estimated that it would not take time, say i should be

Spotted Bleedings

done within two to three hours but boy was i wrong. It probably would have been achievable but for the fact that, there were minor errors in setting up controllers to be wired. Yesterday i went against one of the things 3dsmax preaches against and funny enough it was intentional. The result? I leart the hard way. 3dsmax sorts of advices that helpers should be created in the top or perspective view. And i've always held that to heart until yesterday because i was feeling too confident like "hey, what can happen"? or perhaps, i just wanted to find out what would happen if i went contrary to the rule. So, i got carried away creating a number of helpers including linking and aligning them to the geometry to be controlled and everything was looking nifty. But when it came to wiring, the rotations were transforming in the wrong direction. Well, i tried a couple of other things but this strange thing wont correct itself until i erased and created new sets of helpers from the top or perspective view. And everything worked according to as planned with rotations happening in the right order after wiring.

Corrections to Bleeding

So, with that corrected, the scene is now set for animations but a quick peek again at my quick render of the set revealed that i had some sort of colour bleed happening on the walls. Though not noticable and wouldnt affect the animation technically in any way, i felt like correcting something so i dug in again. Yeah, if you re-call in the edition before this one, i did mention that i bake textures after applying them and in 3dsmax that would mean "collapsing the modifier stack". So, i had already done that to a couple of geometry in the scene including the walls having the colour bleed. Well, that would mean re-applying the uvw unwrap modifier all over again and taking the rendered uvw texture back to photoshop or you could leave the texture in 3dsmax and bring the edited photoshop texture to it. whichever way works, especially as it is an object with

The New Scene

straight edges. Back in photoshop, i took the bitmap that i worked on from scratch and corrected the colour bleed using photoshop's layer blend mode overlay and this time made the colour darker. Brought it back to 3dsmax and there you go below.

See what I'm working on for the month of September 2014 (2)----- "Creating Morph Targets".

 Hello fans and welcome to HypefoActive. Trust you had a nice weekend. Ok, continuing from my last blog post last week, I've further created morph targets that consists of expressions and letters for lip syncing. And i've gone ahead to wire them to shape controls for easier manipulation and animation. Next i'll be skinning both characters and checking the overall scene if its something i'ld like to fly with or not. Ordinarily in the past, i would'nt care too much about the scene as long as i can animate something. I guess some little things have changed about me, huh? Ok, i've uploaded pictures of the morph targets and i hope in all they dont cross thirty, as they are currently on twenty six. Morph targets are something i hate to do really, because it involves re-modelling of the head to give an expresssion. There are a lot of zooms and pans, shifting between local and view reference co-ordinate systems and sometimes the screen type. Also, you get to perform a lot of wacky faces to see what really is going on just like you are animating and other troublesome stuffs.

Anyways, creating the morph targets and doing that very well further brings out the realism in your animations. So the more real they look, the better. But  these things actually take time to create and one should really be patient when working at this stage. In the past, i'll go straight ahead creating these targets without using any references. Just me and my mirror and though this might seem a wrong way to create things like this but while using references this time around, i realized that some of these morph targets dont really look like they would normally do when mimicking these sounds yourself in real life. And what do you expect? I got the references from the internet where everybody can post anything. Matter of fact, i wouldnt be surprised if these pictures are there right now.

After all these, it is advisable to clean up and neatly arrange your scene using the layer manager "if you are using 3dsmax".

Ok, this paragraph down is way of an update on this particular post and i just put together a little something for the scene, did a fast render and voila, there you have it.
So here is the image consisting of two very simple chairs, cushions, carpets and paintings. I got all the textures from the web and applied the straight forward ones that look plain and regular like the carpet and paintings directly to plain objects without doing any uvw unwrap map modifier.

See what I'm working on for the month of September 2014. (1)

Hello Peeps and welcome to HypefroActive. Yeah in this edition, i'll be sharing some things about my recent Animation Project. Well currently i'm working on a story that's got about two characters or is it three now? Well that hasnt been finalised yet but for certain i'll be popping something out this month. Maybe two Anime shorts of about one minute each or less. The Journey to getting very good is finally coming to an end.

Ok, so i did say in my last post that i've been doing alot of photoshop and improving in other areas of 3dsmax. The key is everytime i'm on a project, i always model from scratch and rig everything allover also from scratch, this way i get used to doing everything i know and do them better than before until it gets saturated within me like the chakra levels of kurama in the naruto Shipudden series. At that point, yeah i must really have overdone it and i'm ready for something new.

So i modelled this male and female characters, mapped them and took them to photoshop for texturing and brought them back after the textures to 3dsmax and baked them. Yeah, Baking is a process in which you collapse all the modifiers into its base "editable poly" or "editable mesh" states. The advantage of this is no matter what you touch in its new current state after baking, nothing threatens to destroy the stability of the stack and the already baked in textures just sits down chilling waiting for further instructions. But the downside is that if you suddenly think like "ooohhhh, i wanna change this clothes or that shoe" then there i s trouble. Because you'll have to texture all over again and you dont want that unless ofcourse you've got plenty of time and just wanna go adding, baking and adding all over again as an exercise. Yeah that too, would work. especially if you are a newbie. as it will help build your confidence. Matter of fact, there is no better way to build your confidence than this method. dont be in a hurry.


Ok, so as usual i'm working on average  low poly characters and as of today, i'm done modelling and in the process of creating the morphs then skin the other male character. The female character is rigged with 3dsmax default CAT Bone rig as with most other my characters. The male Character is rigged with 3dsmax custom bones. And The initial story line required a simple studio scene but eeeerrr, right now i'm thinking changing that by means of composting. But that would mean the camera movement would be very much limited so as not to reveal that its two dimensionally faked to look like three. Anyways, animations will begin sometime next week and we'll see how it goes. Ok, until then keep animating and keep getting better, never give up and if you need my assistance i can be reached on chimatic@gmail.com.
 Ok, this is something i would call an after edit. I didn't really have the time to "PixMix" this and so is the case with all others i've posted on here. But seconds later google helped put it in a mix for me and i thin it's Awesome asides from the fact that thet called it awesome pixmix or something. Yeah , i viewed it liked it and couldnt resist putting it up here. Yeah, thank you google. And here it is.

Wow. Googles version of my pictures.

UVW Unwrapping and it's importance.

Hello HypeFroActive Fans. Wow, it's indeed been a while and pretty long one too. Boy, did i miss blogging. Well how do i start? I guess there's no better way than Apologizing  for my AWOL behavior. It was necessary and a just cause if i have to serve you better. Well for those that want to know and for the sake of it, even if i hate excuses, i wasn't really on any holiday like i planned i would earlier. Instead, i spent all that time reading, seeing movies and making animation researches. Yeah afterall, that is what this blog is all about, Animating. But of all that i've learnt and i'm happy about, the extra knowledge of Adobe's photoshop and the 3dsmax uvw editor are things worth being happy about.

Yeah, Been able to manipulate pictures of individuals or yourself, the cartoony effect and other things that you could possibly achieve with photoshop alone is worth been happy about. Not to talk about been able to texture your models as you desire by merging photoshop and 3dsmax uvw editor. Ok, what's the big deal deal some of you might say? well, nothing much about it is too big a deal but it does add some sort of colour to your scene and the overall animation work. With this People start to appreciate and understand from the point you are coming from. Yeah, i used to do some form of all these in the past but definitely not on this scale and that's what i'm talking about.

Ok, so asides the texturing sides to models, i further ventured into a research for better animations and how best to go about it. How did i do this you ask? By sitting down and watching all kinds of stuffs on Screen, especially 3D cartoons. And right now there's a whole lot of stuff that i've piled up and just waiting to put to work.

Now going back to texturing, the first three models are the same face, Though low poly, because of the textures, they don't really seem so, while the last two textures are same face. Though there are a lot of similarities between them, in that either the cheek bones or jaws are slightly wider but the texturing brings all the difference. you could relate to the untextured model as the base model for all these faces.

In conclusion, Texturing does bring out the beauty of any model, even if it is badly sculpted. And you can do this with photoshop. This i have tested time and over again but i hear Z-Brush is good as well. I hope to try it some day.