1402385yr3personalproject

[1402385yr3personalproject]

This is the newly updated version of the final animation. I changed the speed and cuts of a lot of the shots including splitting the shot of the shell casings hitting the floor so they make an appearances twice, this added more shots to the end of the animation which I feel further increased the speed of the ending. Everything in this version to me seems to build up with the music compared to the previous one making it a lot more dramatic. I am most proud of the beginning of the animation and how I perfectly synced the cuts to different shots with the music. However I feel the ending is left a bit lack luster, only showing the character hiding then the golden vault at the end of the hallway. I’m not too sure what I could have done or changed to have made this better, I think it would have required a completely different build up to the ending, like the character being chased for example. 

Overall I am really proud to have achieved my initial goals of creating a fully and beautifully rendered year 3 animation which can contribute to my portfolio. 

Quick note, the gun shot sound effects have been changed and amplified to sound more realistic in the submission version. This is a tiny update to the final animation but worth mentioning if you notice the difference between this and the submitted version.

[1402385yr3personalproject]

Conversation with Ben Smith

When I had finished rendering the first version of my final animation I uploaded it to youtube so I could put it on my blog. I received a message from Ben Smith on the same course who said he had just seen it go online. I asked him if he would be kind enough to give me some feedback on what he thought could make the animation better.

He made a note on how he liked how the animation was fully textured and rendered. This is what he said:

Whilst speaking to him I got back into my video editing software and was already improving on things when he said:

Once he mentioned this I instantly agreed and focused on speeding up some of the first person animations, I used velocity shift to do this. I then worked on removing a lot of the fades in the video which I originally set up to go with the music. Once I removed the extra fades and improved the cuts through out the animation I noticed that it worked much better with the song and it’s rising tempo. This is what I asked Ben after our conversation:

Ben also saw the newly updated version (The next post coming) and commented with this: 

Which I agreed with him on. The quick improvements he helped me see made the animation feel much faster paced and more of a fight for survival for the character.

[1402385yr3personalproject]

This is the first version I made of the final animation. This is the animation compiled as a trailer for the game I originally wanted to create. I was really pleased with how this turned out. I thought the animated scenes of the characters really needed speeding up to match the tempo of the song. I felt something was off with it but once I received some feedback from another student in the class they where deadly honest enough to give brilliant feedback and point out what they thought was needed. I will upload the conversations as another post. 

I also edited this animation to the song being heard which is Fragment of Bach 1 by COMPILERBAU. Available here on soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/compilerbau/fragments-of-bach-i

Luckily COMPIREBAU released the song for free as it was the first experimental version of his project, fragments of bach which is a synthwave/darkwave remix playlist of some of Bach’s best songs. From the beginning I have been looking at music for this project but made various songs that I made from free loop sample packs. I never mentioned them before because I didn’t really want to upload them due to how unfinished all of them where. In the end I settled to animating to this song as I found it much more fitting to the trailer than anything I could make. The songs tempo is constantly picking up from start to finish which was great for cutting the animations to also increase speed with the tempo of the song.

[1402385yr3personalproject]

ShootAroundCorner animation progression reel:

This is likely one of my favourite parts of the final animation. It is the retaliation of the main character as they start to shoot back at the enemies position. As the character was involved in a rebel group raiding these vaults I thought the main character maybe lacking professional military skills so I wanted to animate them to make mistakes and hip-fire the weapon a lot. This is another addition to a very select few amount of games that isn’t a thing in mainstream ones, the ability to freely shoot a gun, hip fire it over and around cover as to no expose yourself and so on. Perhaps this is something that VR can bring to the table if game developers can really come together with it as it does allow the free movement of a player in a game. I also wanted to start this animation with the character frantically hip firing their weapon around the cement support.  For the final version I added a zoom and contraction of the feild of view of the main camera which made it look like the character was focusing through the iron sights of the weapon for a few follow up shots on the enemy position. I think the animation of the special effects like the sparks and shell casings coming out of the weapon worked really well to polish of some small aspects for the final render. 

The weapon does continue it’s firing animations but I intend to cut it after the first shot whilst the character is looking through the iron sights of the gun.

[1402385yr3personalproject]

LookAroundCorner animation progression reel:

For this animation I wanted the character to tuck themselves behind one of the cement supports and then carefully peak out to check where the enemy is. With their weapon raised the character is ready to fire. The shot would end with the character experiencing a near miss from enemy fire where I would add a light hurtling toward the character to simulate a projectile. This is where I will firstly be using the before mentioned super sonic crack sound effect (YPG vs Militant video), I was really keen to use this because many films and games get the concept of this completely wrong. When a bullet goes past you in a game for example you will hear a whizz or a ricochet sound effect. When in reality even a bullet barely following a trajectory in your general direction would still create quite a noticeable super sonic crack as the shock wave generated by the bullet travelling so fast would still be able to reach your ears. Their are however many games (ARMA 2&3, Insurgency for example) and films (Black Hawk Down for example) that do include this tiny detail which makes the sound effects even more effective at immersing the viewer. Using super sonic crack sound effects compared to a whizz when playing a game can make being shot at genuinely terrifying. When the character is being shot at they will quickly retreat back to the cover of the cement support. I added some animated camera effects to when the bullets pass the character such as intensified vignetted and chromatic aberration post processing effects in Marmoset Toolbag 3. This is a common feature on more realistic video games as it creates the illusion of suppression of the character as their vision is constricted as they are being shot at. This is meant to simulate small details like the character flinching or recovering from something. 

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InspectAndLoad animation progression reel:

In version 001 and 002 you may notice the magazine has been removed from the characters weapon, this was because I was going to have them put the magazine in and cock the weapon when the character hears someone approaching. After I attempted to animate the magazine of the weapon to start in the characters hand and end loaded into the weapon, I found the key framing of the magazine would break the entire rig of the weapon. This would make all of the key framing of and the weapon itself to disappear, deleting it’s animation when imported to Marmoset Toolbag 3. I fixed this by simply removing all of the animation and constraints on the Magazine so that it stays in a static position relative to the weapon. This could have been caused by something not being set up in Maya’s animation baking suite or the constraints between the weapon and the character needed to be set up in a different way likely with controllers. Unfortunately this did mean that in the final animation I couldn’t feature any animations of the character actually reloading the gun. In the future I would have like to come back to this and try recreating an animation with a more advanced rig.

After all the issues that two handed animations like reloading the magazine caused I was going to leave this animation with the character only using one hand looking at and holding the weapon. However as a late edition I thougth I would make an effort to make this animation better by having the character cock the gun and then rest it in their hand during the next shot (LookAroundCorner). Overall I was happy with how this shot turned out but it did need the assistance of video editing to speed up the rendered footage to make it more fitting to the trailer. I should have focused on the timing of key frames more during the animation process of the shots in maya but I thought it was better to have more time to speed up than having less time to slow down. I did this because the animation was to be rendered in 60fps and when 60fps footage is slowed down it becomes very obvious that it isn’t running at the same frame rate anymore. Where as speeding 60fps footage up only creates a very subtle motion blur which instead of creating obvious issues, adds some extra effect to the final video render.

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Running animation progression reel (Unused):

Another animation made just for the purpose of testing and getting used to animating with this rig. I also made this in case I wanted a scene of the character running away from or too something. 

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Walk animation progression reel (Unused):

This was another unused test animation. In this I was mainly focusing on trying to create the illusion of the weight of the when the character is walking. I did this by seeing how much bobbing and tilting of the hands and weapon was needed when the character takes a step. This was also the first animation test involving the animation of the fingers which I found fun to animate. I also learnt that if I was going to animate the fingers that I shouldn’t animate them all on the same key frames because this would avoid them all moving at the same time making the hand look more like a claw, I gave the finger movement a 10 frame difference between each finger on the hand being animate. 

At the end of the progression real you might notice stuff gets a little bit weird. The second to last video is way to fast and the last video goes far too slow (This video has been sped up anyway). This was because I assumed that if I was going to rendering the final videos in 60fps that I would have to animate it at 60fps. This wasn’t the case however as I learnt when baking this animation in maya, when I got the animated model into Marmoset toolbag 3 it would playback far to slow. This is because Marmoset only imports animations at a standard of 25fps Aka my 60fps animations where stretched out due to this rendering the walking, running, turning and other test animations useless for the final animation (at least I found this out sooner rather than later). 

[1402385yr3personalproject]

Turning animations progression reel (Unused):

This was a unused animation of the project where I was testing turning animations. I wanted to make the camera movements look as realistic as possible so testing things like the camera moving out of sync with the weapon was useful and this test was good for that. I find when you watch first person footage of weapons or anything you find that there is considerable camera shake but more importantly not a consistent focus of what is on the centre of the screen, which many games fail to avoid making first person animations look very robotic. 

[1402385yr3personalproject]

This was a very early test animation that I forgot to upload. I thought I would add it because it was the first animation test I did that made me feel really good about doing this project. This was mainly because even though I made it with a simple rig it still looked quite good. I could see what was achievable with all the stuff that I had been working on for the past few months. The main purpose of this animation was testing all the constraints and movements of the rig and how it can interact with different parts of the gun. 

[1402385yr3personalproject]

Camera Panning through scene progression reel:

This is the camera panning animations. Because this shot was animated fully in Marmoset Toolbag 3 all the progression reel footage of it is rendered with the final scenes. You may not be able to notice some differences in the versions apart from a large difference to the final which I completely recreated for the purpose of making it better. The first version was a simple moving camera test. The versions following this are updated with added shell casings and other decals such as bullet holes and blood you can also see where I was playing with different rendering and lighting settings. I also used the character body model in the corner of the first few seconds of this animation. This was because I didn’t have time to model a whole new enemy body so I only showed a hand of the enemy implying it is the dead body of whoever the character was fighting with. Later I added smaller shell casings and an weapon lying near the enemy to give some continuity to the fact that the character was being shot at. I also modelled a radio for the scene which would have a flashing LED adding some more detail to the scene. There is also a version with sound in this which I submitted as animation progression, I just wanted to test a load of different sounds that I could apply to the final animation. 

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Animatics, test animations and setting up for the final production.

Before finding out what program I was going to use to render the final in I had already done a few animation tests in Maya which where still useful as I was going to use Marmoset Toolbag 3 to render and didn’t need to redo them for Unreal engine which would require a more advanced rig. This meant I now had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen in the animation, what kind of scenes I had to animate which brought me back to this page in my sketch book. 

By this point I knew what I was going to do for a camera panning shot through the scene but I wasn’t too sure what I would do for the character animations. I decided to focus on action shots, the first half of this page focuses on the specific actions I want the character to perform in the first person camera. The second half of the page shows a basic animatic of the actions shots as a consistent shot.

The plan was to have the camera panning shot end at an open vault which is where the character starts there animations from leading them towards where the camera started. When these two animations are spliced the camera will be fore shadowing the events of the shootout between the character and the enemy. Where as the character animations will be showing these events happening whilst the camera reveals their reason to be there.

This is a Gif of the first half of the page showing the. I drew simple sketches of the action shots the character will perform. The first shot is of the layout of the scene where I plotted out the entrance, enemy position and the exit where I will add the vault. The next shot is a reload animation showing the character removing the magazine and adding putting it back in. The next shot is the inspect and cocking animations of the weapons which will be the first shot of the character, introducing them and the weapon. The next shot is of first person, crouch, run and walk animations which reminded me to try different these animations. The last is an image of aim, fire and recoil animations which are all implemented to the final animation as extra effects to the animation..

The next Gif image is of the basic animatic for the scenes which I need to capture for the final animation. Shot one to two are of the character walking to the first corner (closest to the vault/exit), shot three to four are of the character hearing someone creeping closer, then the character leaning around the corner where they start to take fire which is now revealed to be from an enemy. Shot five to six is of the character leaning back around the corner, then shooting at the enemy who is taking cover behind the other corner in the hallway closest to the entrance. Shot 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 is of the character moving towards the enemy. The enemy then hears them and goes to aim at the character. A large shootout then commences between the two characters. I simplified these scenes for the final to just have the character being fired at whilst charging up the hallway and shooting at the enemy. I thought this would work better for the final animation being a trailer increasing the tempo of the final shots.

The following gif is images from sketchbook that a drew during life drawing challenges and sessions. I took advantage of drawing any sketches possible of the model turning, curling their back or leaning as I thought this would help when it came to animating and positioning the characters waist, shoulders and arms in the shooting and looking around corner animations.

This is a test animatic of the action shots where the character approaches the corner, then walks around it approaching the enemy position where they expose their self. The main character aims, shoots and disables them and then reloads. Doing this helped when practising for what is happening in each scene involving the character of the final animation.

The images below are of the main animation folder I created for the project. Once everything was finished and the scene and rigged objects where set up in marmoset toolbag 3 fully textured I could create this file and fill it with only the assets I need for the final animation. This saved me so much time when it came to actually rendering the animations and getting everything completed.

Most of these folders are self explanatory by their name. 

Animated models including all the baked models used in the animations that will be imported into Marmoset Toolbag 3.

Animation complied folder is where I created the final video file for submission. It just includes all audio and video assets needed for rendering the final video.

Renders folder where I kept each rendered .mp4 video from Marmoset Toolbag 3. I was sure to back this up 3 times in case something tragic happens. 

The textures folder which held each final texture for the models used in the scene.

This was one for the more important folders holding all the scenes set up fully in Marmoset toolbag 3, here I saved the final version of the scene with all textures. This meant that once the animations where completed in maya all it took was baking and exporting the models then importing to Marmoset and applying the textures to the model. After this all that was left was to key frame any advanced camera animations and special effect animations, including the shell casings coming out of the weapon.  This kept everything from the lighting, rendering effects to special effects on the cameras consistent throughout the whole animation.

This is the folder that contains all of the animations from maya with everyone of their iterations. I wanted to show these images not only to show an insight on the work flow and how I did the animation but also because I thought it would be best if from here on I post videos which are progression reels of each of the animated scenes in the image below. Which will leave me to post the final animation.

I broke the final animation up into 6 parts which will be rendered individually. This is because I found out that if I was animating a scene for too long with the simple rig that I was using things would get messy after 600 frames of animation such as out of sync movements between joints or the joints will have been moved in so many directions that the getting them back into a perfect pose such as holding the weapon again took far too long and looked messy. 

The first part to animate and render is the camera moving through the scene. The second part is the reveal of the character and weapon (named inspectandload in folder). The third part is the character crouching and checking around the corner (named lookaroundcorner). The fourth part is the character shooting around the corner back at the enemy (Name shootingaroundcorner) The fifth part is a last minute addition to the animation, a slow motion scene of the characters shell casings hitting the floor following their shooting (named shellshittingfloor). The sixth part is the character coming out of cover, charging up the hallway whilst shooting back at the enemy then assuming cover behind on of the cement supports (named chargeuphallway). 

With this explained I feel like from here on out I can upload the progression reels of each animated part even ones which are not mentioned here as they where not used in the final animation. This should close the blog well with the posting of the final animation.

[1402385yr3personalproject]

Unreal Engine 4

I explained in an earlier post (Marmoset Toolbag 3) in detail why I didn’t continue to use Unreal Engine 4. I did however try to practise using it over the summer break. I do admit that I don’t have anything to show for it which I’ll explain in abit. The following list is of links is to tutorials which I used to try to create simple scenes in the game engine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5om4EeY-fV0: This is a link to a playlist that contains a 42 part tutorial by TheSargKyle on creating a first person shooter game. I found myself loosing track alot of the time when in UE4 but I still watched a lot of the videos just in spare time to see how the program works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PNcnF-2f0g: Part 4 of the tutorials by Joe Hudson shows how to implement particle effects in the UE4 when shooting a gun. This video includes how to create a detection system for bullet impacts. I found this video interesting considering that I wanted to include particle effects and destruction elements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHGyVJ4LD6Q&list=PLZlv_N0_O1gb2ZoKzTApbv3LvhaXJ9elg&index=16: This is another playlist of tutorials except it focuses on the advanced rigging tools available between Maya and UE4 and how to get rigged models into it. This is where I was getting concerned the most about using this software. I don’t consider myself great at rigging and this is where I wished focused more on for my animation. There is nothing to say I can’t return to it thought and attempt to make more advanced rigs through tutorials like this. 

Through these tutorials I did manage to create a controllable first person camera. I first imported a old hallway from my year 2 Kosmo animation. I then created a rectangular mesh beneath it. I then used UE4′s blueprinting system where I could make the rectangular mesh have collisions. The scene I was using already had artificial gravity applied. I then created a capsule shape with a camera attached that was blueprinted to move forward, backward, left and right when pressing the W,A,S,D keys, the camera would also move in the direction that you move the mouse. When this was set up I could press the play button which would make the capsule hit the collision mesh in the hallway. I could then walk around the scene and of course fall off the edges of my rectangle into infinity. As mentioned before I can’t show this as I lost the saved file around the end of summer when unreal engine updated causing it to crash the moment I launched it, I uninstalled the program forgetting to keep a back up of this scene. I didn’t reinstall UE4 after this as I was so busy over the end of summer. 

I feel bad for not continuing on my original intentions to use UE4 but when I started tested in it I got the same feeling that my chat with the games art teacher and student gave me, that this was too much for me to do. Perhaps if I wasn’t so busy over summer and when coming back to uni I could have made a better start on this. Even so I do not think I would have been able to create something in UE4 with all the extra time put in that would have looked how I first imagined it. I would like to say that this post is here for me to come back to when I have more time and can perhaps achieve creating the simple game I originally intended to do. 

[1402385yr3personalproject]

I wasn’t too sure about posting a video like this but I thought I would as I used it as reference purely because it’s one of few videos on YouTube that show the inside nature of modern combat using the same rifle I chose to model for my character.

DO NOT FEAR! This video contains no blood or gore, or people being shot, nothing of the sorts I simply used it for an advanced insight on using a Kalashnikov rifle during combat I chose for the animation! 

The video just follows a YPG group taking and giving fire, moving and using cover in the Kobane battle, Syria. I thought it would be really helpful having a video which shows the gun that I am creating for my animation in actual combat. Where I can see how people are shooting it around objects, the recoil it generates and using it between covering and peaking to take shots. It also helps when positioning the characters arms to see how someone is holding the gun in different positions to use it. Ontop of this I can find a sounds that are fitting to the weapon the character is using. 

Another note, at 0:50 seconds to 1:00 minutes in the video the two parties participating in the battle converge in a large shootout. What is most interesting about these 10 seconds is how when the gunshots change and you can hear someone shooting in the direction or past the position of the camera man. This creates very audible super sonic cracks of the bullets passing by. References like this are very helpful to understanding how I should choose sounds for the animation to replicate this effect when the character is being shot at.

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This is another video that I used as reference to get an idea of how loud a gun can be in closed spaces. In the video only suppressed weapons are shot but it still gives an idea of the crack that firing a weapon inside generates. I didn’t use this too much to my advantage because with the animation being a trailer I would prefer to have music to it so the individual sound effects don’t have to be perfect. On top of this the video features pistols which will sound a lot different to the sound of an assault rifle.

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During the time I was doing this project I looked to Youtube to watch videos of people shooting weapons. I wanted to do this to get an idea of how much recoil is caused by real guns, what kind of effects would I need to make shooting it look as realistic as possible. 

I was aiming to make the animation look like a first person camera rather than a smooth moving animation which is seen in a lot of games. What I mean by this is the gun will be being help up by the character nearly all the time in a stable position. This is quite unrealistic because after a short time the character would likely be getting exhausted from supporting all that weight. 

This video starts with the shooter firing a model of a Kalashnikov which is the reason I chose to post this video. It’s quite useful for me to check that I’m not over animating things like the recoil of the rifle, making it look far to dramatic for the round that it is firing. This video also reminded me to never forget the sound of shells casings hitting the floor after a gun has been shot as they are shooting over a wooden platform which creates quite loud impacts.

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Another game I thought would be mentioning in respect to it’s animation was Farcry 2. The game featured a advanced weapon system for the time that would cause your weapon to become less reliable over time. Eventually the weapon would start to jam and fail to shoot causing the character to have to fix it and reload. The weapon would eventually be destroyed if over used causing a violent explosion which makes the gun fall to pieces in the character hand rendering it impossible to use again.