Here is my documentation of following the tutorial for blocking out and animating a rigged character shifting its weight from side to side. As always, I found this informative in terms of how (relatively) human anatomy prepares for its movements, its interaction with weight in terms of physics, and the idiosyncratic body language imbued even in small movements like this one. It’s especially interesting and illuminating to me how animators use movement to communicate identity, emotion, and personality in these movements in a way that the conscious mind behind an untrained eye wouldn’t notice, but the subconscious recognises as significant.
The process began with ‘blocking’ out the movements in five frame increments; I like working like this – it sets out the bare bones of how things will look in the graph editor in such a way that editing it later is straight forward.
This is the first iteration of the fully animated weight shift from start to finish. Every movement is happening at 5 frame increments, but the result is that the ball with legs shifts its weight from side to side. I’d say this looks alright, but it would be an interesting challenge to try to communicate nervous energy in the same movement, as the ball in this animation looks fairly confident.As can be seen in the graph editor at the bottom, some keyframes have been spaced out more than others to prolong certain movements in line with how gravity would interact with a body moving in this way. Other movements are shortened to communicate the necessary rushing as gravity drags the body down. I was surprised again with the amount of personality communicated by this lightning and lengthening of certain movements, it puts a spring in the step of the rig. (I apologise for the massive green frame on one side of the video – I don’t know why that’s there and when I try to crop it out it disappears).The same sequence from the side.I’d noticed that somehow I’d started my animation sequence on the wrong pose instead of a neutral one, so I moved my sequence back by a few frames and input a neutral pose at the start, then a slight shift to the left before the initial bigger shift to the right. I also put a polygon cube under the rig to act as a floor for the scene as I’d just learned we were meant to be doing that the whole time.On first editing my work into spline from blocking, it appeared I’d created a monster. The joints moved seemingly of their own volition and the rig looked possessed.
I’d hoped to continue editing the graph to improve the stepped to spline transition, but my file stopped recognising the reference (the rig) and refused to open the Maya file with the rig even after locating the reference in my hard drive, which essentially dumped all my progress. So I will have to start again.
Having only recently moved to London, I’d been so impressed by the outrageously creative and eye catching window displays in the touristic shopping areas, I decided to go back and properly inspect them including the products they’re meant to be advertising. These are four of the Christmas visual merchandising displays on the street facing exterior of Fortnum & Mason – a tourist hotspot for certain. The animals entered in each window are paper and plastic sculptures.
The above is one of my favourite windows from the Fortnum display, and below I’ve edited together two videos of animated window displays. I’d like to keep my work as simple as possible in order to give myself the best possible chance of finishing it to a high standard, and the below moving windows inspired me in that sense.
I included the video above to show the subtle, small animatronic movements in some of the display windows. I envision my own work being slightly more complex than this but it’s a good starting point for me to generate ideas.
Above I’ve edited together two photographs I took of the Liberty display dedicated to Wicked (film) coming out this year. These displays contain fresh flowers as one of the signature products Liberty is known for, I was astounded at the creativity and clever use of colour contrast to generate instantly recognisable elements reminiscent of the film’s best known posters and set designs. Left: wicked witch of the West meets the good witch of the East, right: follow the yellow brick road.
The flower based display above impressed me so much, it’s hard to imagine a better use of Liberty’s resources for the sake of promoting this film release.
Below is included the lowest quality image in this collection (it was taken indoors and the store was too bright to avoid the reflection seen in the glass) but the display itself is so clever and creative I decided to include it anyway. The display perfectly encapsulates the meaning of what it’s meant to be showcasing, the dark blue acts as a perfect contrast to the gold jewellery encased within, and the thorn motifs tie in effortlessly with the velveteen forest surroundings. This small display is the perfect starting point for me to begin sketching ideas and creating assets for working in 3D, as it’s so easy to imagine how it would move and the design itself speaks to so many of the things I like.
We Dress A Certain Way: an animator’s exploration of fashion and people watching. I found this article on It’sNiceThat about Jiaqi Wang’s street style based game, the project started out as a simple walking cycle with twelve characters wearing different outfits based on the animator’s observations of people walking down the street, but eventually transformed into a desktop game: “Sometimes it can be hard for us to connect to an audience with our art, but my making it interactive is like a warm invitation welcoming them into your world.” (Clarke, Y. A., 2024).
I messed about with the desktop version for a while to understand the game and came to the conclusion that it’s a fun and whimsical way to express the artist’s interest in street style, as well as a creative way to invite other people into her introverted world of passive observation over active engagement. I thought it was an interesting way to combine fashion and animation, and while I’m not planning on creating anything similar to this project, I recognise the importance of the starting point being something that genuinely inspires and interests me, while respecting my own limits with regards to engagement and technological ability.
Wang, J. (2024) JiaqiWang. [Screenshot] Available at: https://www.jiaqiwang.org/about/ (Accessed: 07/11/2024). My composition crowding my favourite outfits from the game together.
Yinka Ilori collection brought to life by Jon Frier’s unique stop motion basketball animation, where the basketball enters another dimension on its journey through the net. Ilori’s collection for Autumn/Winter 2023 featured this collection within a collection which was basketball themed, based on Ilori’s experiences growing up around the sport’s culture (Gorny, L. 2023). Stop motion makes sense as a creative choice for a fashion related animation, considering the ease with which textural elements can be woven into the production. I liked the silly character design of the basketball also.
On further exploration I saw that Yinka Ilori is also known for his pop-up shops, where he takes over a space with his full creative force in order to best showcase his design works for the right audience, and his use of bold, maximalist colour serves as an eye grabbing invitation to the uninformed passer by:
Loewe have been long time collaborators with Studio Ghibli to create dreamy ready-to-wear and accessories collections based on the animation studio’s most beloved characters, but also beautiful pop-ups around London to welcome these collections onto the scene.
It’s not lost on me that these Loewe X Studio Ghibli displays are so effective due to the popularity and recognisability of the Studio Ghibli characters and scenery, but even with this in mind they are my favourite examples in this short research compilation. It’s not just the association with the Ghibli films, but their sheer commitment to bringing it to life, completely transforming the space to best feature the collections, and the whimsical juxtaposition of the titular moving castle against the cold, sterile interior of the ultra-modern Selfridges. The displays are more like set design than visual merchandising considering their scale, commitment and attention to detail.
We also were due to receive feedback today on our projects in progress, and knowing this would be the case before entering the lesson it had truly dawned on me how far behind I was as a result of the personal difficulties I’d been trying and failing to work in spite of. As usual, though, I felt more capable after speaking to Serra about the directions my work could potentially take. Having lived in London for all of a week I’d recently explored some of the city centre, taking particular note of the changing shop displays in preparation for Christmas – a somewhat dull family tradition was checking out the Harrods and Fortnum display windows in the lead up to Christmas for their ingenuity. As a fashion illustration graduate I’m generally inspired by and interested in branding and corporate visual merchandising, and the application of 3D digital animation to these areas of industry, so I’m deciding to move my research and initial ideas in this direction.
A Dior Winter jewellery display in Harrods I particularly liked, London, November 2024
I was shown this previous student’s work because she similarly chose to produce animated work relevant to advertising and product design. I actually love it and felt inspired by it, she created a product to be cheeky and silly, produced a fun animated feature of that product which manages to be funny, ironic and frivolous while still showcasing impressive conceptual, 3D technical and animation skills. As an LCF graduate, committing to a project like this which features product design and animation seems much more doable to me in terms of the practical undertaking, and such a project appeals to me more as someone who thinks in terms of product portfolios more than character design.
The two images above are from a 2024 campaign by Gentle Monster, a Korean eyewear brand known for their unique and intensely creative takeover of spaces for the sake of visual merchandising and setting a scene to surround their collections for pop-up sales. By entirely taking over the sales space, Gentle Monster’s innovative merchandising team invite their clients to step into their creative vision and share the inspiration behind their design ideas – it’s a more immersive version of visual merchandising, making a sensory experience of browsing the new collection.
The above three images are also from Gentle Monster’s website but depict their 2022 pop-up display commemorating their collaboration with K-pop group BlackPink’s Jennie – intended to recreate an imaginary, beautiful village scene. This example in particular stood out to me because not only is it similarly immersive like the earlier example of Gentle Monster’s work listed, but because of the level of detail and the way this scene particularly lends itself to animation – it’s easy to imagine what could be done with a 3D scene like this.
Serra Ozdemir (2024) ‘3D Computer Animation Fundamentals: Week 7, Dynamic Lighting in UE’ [Lecture]. PU002332: 3D Computer Animation Fundamentals. London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. 6 November.
Unfortunately due to an electrical fault in Stockport I wasn’t able to get to this lecture in person, so I followed the recorded lecture at home.
Anticipation: The action that immediately precedes the expected action; the mechanical buildup for force. Anticipation is the most natural way to build up internal force in order to execute dynamic motion. “Any animation consists of Anticipation, Action, and Reaction.” (Bill Tytla)
An object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced force – this law applies to everything in the universe, including us. It’s precisely because of this law that anticipating left before walking right results in a conservation of energy.
Anticipation is the key to describing how much strength and force go into a movement, while squash and stretch ‘sell’ the action as realistic and believable.
(George Toombes (2024) ‘Friday Session 11/10/24: Critiquing Pendulum animations. Differentiating weights using spacing via Pendulum. Planning/animating Ball with Tail.’ [Recorded Lecture]. PU002332: 3D Computer Animation Fundamentals. University of the Arts London, London College of Communication. 11 October.)
For now, this assignment will be blocking only – fluidity of movement and spline will be added at a later stage. Settings: 100 Frames, 24fps, side view only. We are advised to push too far at first and then pull our animation back rather than starting with small movements and continuously adding to them bit by bit, this is often what makes animation more dynamic and interesting than real life.
Keep it Simple, Stupid.
In order to ‘block’ in the poses for this assignment, we had to set the Default in Tangent space to Linear, and the Default out Tangent to Stepped in the animation tab of the preferences window. This stops Maya from interpolating the in-between stages of our set keyframes, so instead of making the object float gradually between location changes, it will jump suddenly.
I posed the rig this way as the default starting position based on the video references of squirrels shown in the lecture (I also changed the root of the rigged model because I I like foxes).
This is what the keyframes looked like when blocked out – this was an interesting way to work and to see how cartoonish motion, more loosely based on reality is set out before being fully fleshed out and perfected. I like this way of working.
My fox-ball jumping. It’s obviously clunky and jumpy due to the way the movement was set out in the timeline, but I like the way this moves, at least at this early stage.
In this class we had to learn first how to load a project from the Epic Games library, then use samples from the scene to learn some of the fundamental elements of animating a complex scene in Unreal Engine.
We were also shown the difference between Possessable and Spawnable active elements (typically rigged characters) within a scene. Possessable characters are described as non-playable character type additions, and remain visible when working on other elements within the scene. Spawnable characters are the active characters, hidden from view when not an active element within a scene or aspect of the sequence being worked on.
I am unfamiliar with Unreal Engine and find the software intimidating, so I focused primarily on making sense of how to use the sequencer and got to grips with some simple controls such as camera focal length, location, zoom and rotation. I also rendered a sequence which was meant to cut between three different active cameras to demonstrate that this was something I spent time learning to do. Unfortunately, the camera cut function wasn’t doing as I asked – I noticed it wasn’t generating keyframes in the video editing sequencer but had no idea how to proceed. This is something I will return to work on at LCC (my laptop does not have enough available storage space to run Unreal Engine while I work at home).
I was reassured to get the chance to stay behind after class and speak to Serra who told me in clear terms what is expected of me in the completion of this unit, and showed me some previous students’ work as a frame of reference to aspire to. Serra also made an excellent point about choosing something familiar to me in terms of development, and as a graduate of LCF I decided to start drafting ideas based on fashion media, I started considering things I would have liked to be able to make in my previous studies as an undergraduate.
This served as my introductory session to Friday’s lectures on animation fundamentals as I’d missed the first week of teaching. I was introduced to a set of core principles I want to make a note of here:
When working in Maya, always save as Maya Ascii format
Import rigged objects into Maya via the Reference Editor
Attach all files to project titled Animation Fundamentals, saved to Hard Drive or desktop
I was added to the Microsoft Teams group where resources are added, including tutorials to work through tests at own speed
We were reminded to buy or borrow a copy of the Animator’s Survival Kit, and to familiarise ourselves with the twelve principles of animation
Then onto the pendulum test:
We used the ultimate rigged pendulum found on Behance via the following link: https://www.behance.net/gallery/17774421/Ultimate-Rigs-for-Free
We were told to create Quick Select Sets for the Pendulum itself, then the joints separately for ease and speed of selection while animating. Quick Select Sets are added via the Create tab > Sets > Quick Select Sets > the set is named, then added to shelf.
First we keyed in the movement from left to right, but Maya automatically gradually slowed the pendulum down as it stopped, when what we wanted was an abrupt stop. To do this, we used the graph editor. Rather than manually editing the curve along the Z axis to straighten it out, we were advised to use the Linear Tangents feature shown here:
Next we rotated the joints in line with the pendulum’s movement along the Z axis to illustrate the sense of gravitational pull, being dragged behind:
After the abrupt stop at frame 40 comes the tricker part, the pendulum joints swing back with the force of the energy with which they were dragged up to this point. They have to be animated snapping back in a way that makes realistic sense in line with the speed at which the pendulum was moving – remembering also that the force will never match what it was before. The pendulum will never swing back higher than it did in the first instance.
At this point in the lesson I was starting to appreciate the fluidity of the pendulum joints’ movement and how they illustrate the sudden force with which the pendulum stops moving, and beginning to get more comfortable with the software and rig we were using.
By the end I was spotting something like a pattern in the graph editor:
But watching the playback I’d clearly rushed through some of the keyframes when they should have been spaced apart more to denote the slow fluidity of the joints as they gradually stopped swinging:
Even a relatively small adjustment in spacing made a difference:
This is how playback looked after cleaning up the keyframes and offsetting the bottom control/joint by 3 frames:
Planning this out I began thinking about weight values and squash and stretch – the first few times I scrubbed through the keyframes I’d added so far looked uncanny because the ball didn’t behave like a ball, it didn’t change shape on impact with the ground and wasn’t stretched by its upward motion. The ball also appeared as if it was floating up and down rather than being moved by a force from left to right as it bounced, so I had to “break” the tangents in the graph editor first so that they could be adjusted:
The green line, representing the ball’s movement from left to right, had to be adjusted by each individual keyframe to round out the ball’s trajectory, this produced a more realistic looking bounce.
Adding in squash and stretch using the scale controls shown below. Using the Object tab on the right hand side I adjusted the Translate Y axis from 0.4 in the frame before impact to -0.5 to the frame containing the impact.
The below screenshot shows the keyframes clustering around each impact of the ball against the ground:
I wanted to rotate the ball as it moved but I wasn’t able to find the controls for this in the rigged model, if I have more time in the future I can revisit this task to include rotation and texturing.
