Month: December 2021

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Week09_Phonemes and performance

Challenge 10 (Part 1): Phonemes & Performance (Lip Syncing & Facial Animation)

Part 01: Find audio clip

I have chosen a line from the animated film The Lion King as a reference. Here is the audio

Next, I performed and recorded the performance according to the audio. This part was a bit difficult for me because I don’t know how to act, and when I looked at the video I could see that I was acting very unnaturally and the rhythm of my speech didn’t match the audio.

Here is the Jaw animation

Only after I spent a lot of time adding details about the heads to match the audio. I also added a bit of breathing, although it doesn’t look that obvious

Finally, I added some body movements to make the animation look more interesting.

But I think there were still some problems with the rhythm of the speaking, which didn’t seem as natural. I’ll spend some more time practising animating the mouth next, fighting!

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Week08_Renewal Research

Research Areas: 

The Application of Continuously Changing Lighting in 3D Animation

Keywords:

Light and Shadow, 3D Animation, Successive Contrast, Changing lights

Outline Structure:

Introduction

Introduction to the background of the topic

The importance of light for 3D animation

the idea of writing the article and the target audience

Critical Review

Critically comment on existing research. Present my own views and summarise the findings

Main Body

Application of lighting changes to story narration

(1) Use the uniformity or difference of the front or back of the light to set the visual style.

(2) Rendering a unique ambience

(3) Setting the scene for the story

The role of light and shadow changes in shaping the texture of props and the image of characters

(1) Strengthen the character’s emotional expression

(2) Revealing the character’s attributes of good and evil

(3) Guiding the eye to highpoint the main characters

Conclusion

Summary of findings and conclusions and recommendations to the reader

Reference

Does the topic motivate you to research and discover?

I chose this topic because I had already studied the use of lighting in animation before. However, I think I have not researched it enough and many ideas have not been explained in enough detail, so I would like to continue to improve this topic.

How might the research impact present or future theoretical and practical study? Are there potentials to apply new learning?

It is clear that light and shadow is highly expressive artistic language. A director can express a lot of meaning through light alone. With the continuous development of rendering techniques, contemporary animation creators are also paying more and more attention to the use of light. Therefore I believe that an in-depth study of light is necessary and that there is great potential for its use in the future.

Audience: who and what is the report for?

My target audience is students and animation creators, and through my research, I hope to enable animators to become more aware of the use of changing light to enrich images in the process of creating animation.

Purpose: what do you want them to know?

By summarizing the application of lighting in outstanding animated films, the creators will know that lighting is not arbitrary in the film, but purposeful, and hopefully they will also set lighting purposefully in their future creations.

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Week08_Advanced Body mechanics

Challenge 9 : Advanced Body Mechanics

The shot I chose was boxing footage, which I thought was cool. Before this, I had tried performing boxing myself and recording it, but this didn’t work well because I’m not a professional boxer and I didn’t feel I had a good sense of striking or rhythm, so I eventually chose to go online and find a video of a professional boxer and import it into PR for analysis and processing.

As when making the jump animation, I analysed the video in PR before making it. After determining the timing of each key pose, I then started keyframing in Maya.
During the blocking phase, I focused mainly on the position of the character’s feet and waist to ensure that the character’s centre of gravity was correct

I then smoothed out the curves in the graphics editor and adjusted the rhythm of the animation to make the character’s punches look more powerful.

Finally, I added some lights in Maya and exported the animation, then imported it into AE to add motion blur

Here’s the final result, which looks not bad

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Week07_Research Areas: Light and Shadow in Contemporary Animation

introduction:

3D animation is to express the three-dimensional space in the two-dimensional picture. I think that light and shadow is the soul of 3D animation. It can create a specific environmental atmosphere and make this kind of atmosphere appeal to the screen to produce different scene feelings. Firstly, light and shadow generally control the effect of scene changing, highlighting the theme and foil atmosphere. Secondly, light, objects and animation can produce a good 3D effect; light and shadow performance can help to express specific emotions, guide the audience’s eyes and emphasize the content that the director wants to present to the audience. For the more, light and shadow create a certain atmosphere and metaphor for the plotted trend.

Structure:

  • 1、 The effect of light and shadow performance on the film atmosphere.

(1) Create a specific environment atmosphere

(2) warm-up for the narration of the story

(3) Describe the time, environment and space of the event

  • 2、 Shaping character of the role

(1) stress the emotional of the role

(2) Reveal the good and evil qualities of the characters

(3) Highlight the key roles

  • 3、 Design method of light in 3D animation

(1) Determine the location of the main light

(2) Flexible use of auxiliary light to show the difference between the background and the main object; rich the screen and create an impression of space and administrative levels.

(3) Clever lighting design can make the finishing point in 3D animation.

thanks for watching