Introduction:
This Week’s Lecture:
In this week’s lecture, we didn’t cover any particular subject; instead, all our attention was put on a ‘Useless Machine’. For this lecture, our lecturer wanted us to animate a useless machine, expressing our creativity. For inspiration, he showed us a few examples of different variations on how we could animate the useless machine. From what I saw, the useless machines shown in the examples all gave the machine some sort of personality. In my opinion, the machines all seemed stubborn as they didn’t want their user to toggle the switch. Our lecturer asked us to complete two animations; he first wanted us to create a basic useless machine animation. Afterward, he wanted us to create a useless machine animation with added variation elements, no longer than 15 seconds.
This Week’s Task:
Before working on the useless machine animation, I looked through the videos my lecturer provided to us during the lecture of how we could animate the useless machine as they were shown to us for inspiration purposes. From browsing through the videos, I decided I wanted to give the handle of the useless machine some sort of human-like personality. I wanted to animate the useless machine in a way that it seems like the handle didn’t want anyone or anything to toggle the switch, expressing emotions such as curiosity, suspicion, and frustration.
Workshop Task 1:
So for my first workshop task, I wanted the handle to appear suspicious and curious as to what toggled the switch. I thought the best way of showing this was by animating the handle to look left and right before going back into the machine, making it seem like it’s looking around for the person/object responsible for toggling the switch.
Before I began animating any objects, I wanted to change the appearance of the useless machine firstly as I personally thought it was isn’t aesthetically appealing. Therefore, i inserted a few edge loops and smoothed the objects.
As the workshop file consisted of the basic animation already, this meant there wasn’t much for me to animate yet as the handle already jumps out of the box, toggles the switch, and jumps back into the box. The only section I had to animate was the rotation of the handle as it slowly goes back into the machine, making it look left and right. To help me achieve the movement and pacing I wanted, I used the animation graph editor to control and move around the keyframes.
I properly played around with the graph editor towards the end once I finished animating as I mainly used it to clean up my animation. I switched a few linear keyframes to spline keyframes and moved around the tangents to achieve the movement I wanted.
As the animation was now complete, all I had left to do was set up the lighting and camera. As I was only going to playblast my animation, I only had to create a quick lighting setup, as most of the lighting details can only be seen through a rendered version.
Before I’d playblast my animation, I toggled a few buttons found within the panel toolbar to help with the quality of the playblast. These buttons enabled motion blur, screen-space ambient occlusion, and slight shadow.
Workshop Task 2:
For the second workshop task, I wanted to include additional switches that get toggled, causing the handle to express frustration, as well as suspicion and curiosity. Even though this was a separate task from the first, I continued on with the same work file, meaning I didn’t need to smooth out the model again, nor set up the lighting and camera.
I began by duplicating the original switch four times, resulting in having five switches in total. I spread them each out evenly so the handle could move along the bar it’s mounted on to toggle all switches.
Whilst I was animating the handle, I found it difficult at times as I couldn’t entirely see the handle’s movement due to objects covering it. Therefore, I temporarily hid the cover of the useless machine, helping me to animate clearer.
As I came towards the end of my animation, I viewed it from my camera view and noticed that at one point, the handle and a switch overlapped each other. This was an issue i wanted to fix before i playblast.
Therefore I went into the animation graph editor to identify which keyframe(s) are responsible for the overlapping problem, and played around with them until it got to the point where the handle and switch were no longer overlapping.
Once the animation was cleaned up, there was nothing left to do, other than playblast my animation as the lighting and camera setup were already completed.
Story Brainstorms:
In regards to my assignment project, It was time to come up with a narrative for animation. As the subject of my animation was based on mental health, I went on YouTube and looked at multiple mental health awareness advertisements for inspiration. I wanted to outline what each advertisement had in common so I knew what needed to be included in my animation.
Whilst browsing through the videos above, I outlined and brainstormed a few elements that I could put into my animation. I separated my brainstorming into three sections, beginning, middle, and end, to help me come up with a rough timeline that I will further establish once I begin my storyboard.
Objectives For Next Week:
- Storyboard animatic.
- Search for Character Rigs to use.
- Adjust Character Rigs to my preference.