Introduction:
For this week’s blog post, I’ll be talking about how I went about animating my first scene, touching upon my preferable animation settings and how I ideally like to animate. Secondly, I’ll be speaking about my camera set-up workflow, explaining why I made certain alterations to the camera controls. Afterward, I’ll be discussing why I made small adjustments to my ceiling lights and why they worked out better for me. Lastly, I’ll be listing down the personal objectives that I’ve set for myself to complete by next week.
This Week’s Task:
Editing Animation Settings:
Before I began animating, I needed to sort out the animation settings in my preferences. Whenever I animate, I always make sure I block out any key poses and polish them afterward. This meant I needed to set my tangents to:
Default In: Flat
Default Out: Stepped
Animating Scene 1:
Now I had my animation preferences sorted, it was time for me to begin animating. I wanted my first scene to consist of my character waking up, not knowing where he is. To achieve that waking-up effect, I needed to create that hazy feel to it. I got this idea from past video games I’ve played in the past.
But before creating any sort of effect, I first had to position my character so it looks as if he’s sleeping/knocked out on the floor.
There weren’t many controls I had to animate for this scene as I don’t plan on showing the whole of the character’s body. As shown in the video above, I want my camera to show what my character is seeing from their perspective. This meant I had to position my camera in the same position as my character’s eye later once I create it. However, for now, I animated the character’s arm, using the elbow control, to look as if he was ready to get up.
As I set the keyframes, they were automatically blocked out and set to stepped keyframes. Once I finished placing all keyframes for that control, I converted those into Auto Tangent Keyframes, meaning they now consist of some ease in and out.
The next thing I had to do was animate the eye which was going to consist of some blinking animation. I only needed to animate the one eye where the camera would be positioned.
Setting Up Camera:
Now that I had animated the body parts I needed, I was ready to set up the camera and position it.
I usually like to create a Spot Light to add additional lighting to the scenes just in case the environment or character appears too dark when rendering out a scene.
In real life, you would usually have a flashlight alongside your camera for moments like this; however, that’s not the case with the cameras in Maya. However, to recreate a real-life camera, I match the translation of the Spot Light with the camera’s position, so that the Spot Light aims where the camera is looking.
To match the translation, I went on:
Modify > Match Transformation > Match All Transforms
To make things easier for myself, I then parent the Spot Light with the camera so that they can both move together.
Now that I had the camera set up, I selected it and my character’s right eye object and matched their position.
My camera was now facing where my character’s eye is looking.
As my camera was now set up and positioned, I was actually ready to animate my scene. However, I wanted to create that hazy effect which I was able to do using depth of field. I was quite unfamiliar with how to use depth of field, meaning I followed a Youtube video, guiding me through the controls.
The first thing I had to do was enable the depth of field inside the camera’s Arnold attributes, as they’re turned off by default.
To focus on a specific object, I had to find out the distance value between the object and the camera. To do this, I had to click on:
Display > Heads-Up Display > Object Details
Toggling the Object Details, I was able to see all the details of the selected objects on the top right-hand side of my screen.
Looking at the object’s details, I would input the object’s distance value into the camera’s Focus Distance box. Now my camera is focused on the selected wall.
This method was good to use; however, the tutorial also suggested another method that was easier and quicker, where I wouldn’t always be required to input the distance value into the Focus Distance box. I began by creating two locators using a Distance Tool. To create a Distance Tool, I clicked on:
Create > Measure Tools > Distance Tool
I selected one of the locators, as well with my camera, and matched the transformations so that the locator was now positioned inside the camera. I also parented the locator to the camera so that it moves whenever I move the camera.
I then renamed the locators so that I don’t confuse myself.
At this point, whenever I move the target locator, the Distance Tool would tell me the distance value between the two locators. Now I needed the distance value to automatically update the camera’s Focus Distance. I was able to do this by firstly opening up the Distance Tool inside the Node Editor.
From the Node Editor, I had to middle mouse drag the Distance property to the camera’s Focus Distance box, allowing it to now automatically update whenever the locator is now moved.
To further make things easier, I created a simple script, so that it sets the focal point just by selecting different objects within my scene. To do this, I first selected the object I wanted to focus on, as well as the target locator, and created a Point Constraint. After doing this, I went back into the Constraint menu and removed the target.
Afterward, I opened up my Script Editor and selected the last three lines of code. Using these three lines of code, I created a MEL button by dragging them to my shelves. This now means just by selecting those objects, I can move the locator and focal point to that specific object by clicking one button.
The last thing I had to do is keyframe the Aperture Size, allowing me to animate the amount of depth of field so I could reduce the amount of blurriness as my scene continues.
Adjustments To My Ceiling Light Material:
During the video tutorial, the man briefly showed us a way how he set up his lighting. I found this way a lot more ideal for me, because I was originally suffering from too much specular noise from my previous lighting, and was forced to alter certain settings to fix it. However, in doing so, significantly increased my render time. Therefore, I decided to try this new route.
I began by applying a new Ai standard Surface Shader to my ceiling light material.
The only change I had to make to the material was to increase the Emission weight to 1.
I then selected the Area Light and lowered its position, so that it was no longer inside the actual ceiling light itself.
I gave it a quick render and was really satisfied with how it looked. Not only was the render time lowered, but it also displayed more of my ceiling which my original light struggled to do.