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Author: Mingyue Pang

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22/23 Design for Animation

WEEK 10 – Design for Animation

The title of this critical report is How to personify non-human characters in animation. From the perspective of anthropomorphically designing appearance, expressions, body language and human nature, I specifically analyze the non-human characters in Zootopia, Wall-E and The Secret Life of Pets. In order to make the video presentation better, I think it is necessary to use some clips and behind-the-scenes design of the animation to make the analysis more convincing. So I select and edit some clips based on my presentation. I hope this kind of video presentation will make it easier for the audience to understand my opinions and analysis.

https://youtu.be/7QjJ2CkJi08
Video Presentation

This is my critical report. It was a very interesting experience. How to personify non-human characters in animation? I really like this question because not only have I studied a lot of non-human animated characters, but I’ve also seen behind the scenes and manuscript of many animation designs in order to know how character designers create animated characters. This will be very helpful for my future animation creation.

Critical-Report_Mingyue-PangDownload
Categories
Nuke Term-01-Nuke

WEEK 10 – Nuke – Balloon Festival

Balloon festival is a challenging project. We are going to make an interesting video with a hot air balloon and a valley video. My idea is a hot air balloon going through the valley with wind and rain. First of all, I will change the color of the valley to dark blue to create a dark atmosphere. Then I added dark clouds, lightning and rain to the picture, and adjusted colors, and control their movement track and appearance time. At the same time, I made a short animation for the hot air balloon. The hot air balloon came out from behind the mountain. Here, you need to use the roto node to extract the mountains in front. In order to make the picture more vivid, I controlled the lightning to hit the hot air balloon. Whenever lightning strikes a hot air balloon, it will shake and become bright. As a result, the whole animation will be more natural. Moreover, in order to increase the interest of the picture, I added lines to the hot-air balloon, and shaped it into a child who was being spanked by his mother. In this way, with thunder and cheerful music, the whole atmosphere will not be dark and scary, but a little funny.

Process
Categories
Maya Term-01-Maya

WEEK 10 – Maya – Final Render

This week, I modified the animation according to the reference. Just the mouth moving will be very stiff. I let the character’s neck move with the reference, adding a lot of details. In this way, the characters will be more vivid. Then I set up a scene in the car, lighting and rendering the characters and scenes again. Then I combined characters, scenes and rain materials in Nuke. From this exercise, I found many improvements and practices. For example, the animation of characters needs more detailed binding in order to make the animation more natural.

Animation
Blend Shape
Scene – Car
Nuke
Categories
22/23 Design for Animation

WEEK 09 – Harvard Citations and References

The focus of this week’s lecture is on how we can use Harvard citations and references in academic report. The most importance of a critical report is a clear and systematic structure. In this way, the analysis and content of the article will become organized. The Harvard format is that all text in the article should be Ariel or Times New Roman with a size of 12pt and spacing of 2.0 lines.
How to use academic resources correctly and effectively in a critical report is very important. Choosing good academic resources can make the analysis in the critical report more convincing. I saw Bliss’s Redefining the anthropomorphic animal in animation this week. This article analyzes some examples of anthropomorphic design. He believed anthropomorphic design can strengthen the emotional connection with the audience (Bliss, 2016). I was very interested in his example of the chicken running. The chicken in this claymation is no ordinary chicken. They have human teeth and run like humans. This is a very classic and basic anthropomorphic design of animal characters.

Bliss, G. E. (2016) Redefining the Anthropomorphic Animal in Animation. PhD thesis. Loughborough University. Available at: https://hdl.handle.net/2134/27423 (Accessed: 09 December 2022)

Categories
Nuke Term-01-Nuke

Week 09 – Nuke – Clean up

Clean up is a very interesting and important content in synthesis. If we need to erase some elements in the material without destroying the picture, we can use the rotopaint node to erase. Then we need to add a roto node to follow the motion of the picture, and a framehold node to change the pictures of all frames to the erased pictures. Furthermore, because the picture has a perspective angle. If we want the material to follow the motion at different angles of the screen, we need to track the position with the tracking node first,  then export the information of Cornerpin 2D. Here is a note: the form of Cornerpin 2D should be consistent with the size of the screen.

Categories
Maya Term-01-Maya

WEEK 09 – Maya – Animation

This week’s class was very interesting. We looked at mouth shapes and needed to make a short animation based on a video. Because there is no facial binding, we need to use the blend shape to create different mouth shapes and allow movement of the face muscles, eyes and eyebrows. With these steps, we can make the avatar animation be more natural. Furthermore, we need to import the video and audio into maya to make the animation fit the reference better. Then animate each frame according to the speed and content of the reference.

Reference
Final Render (Arnold)
Animation
Blend Shape

Categories
22/23 Design for Animation

WEEK 08 – Critical Report

I’m writing my critical report about how can non-human characters be personified in animation? And I already have some opinion to discuss this topic.

https://characterdesignreferences.com/art-of-animation-7/art-of-zootopia-part-1

The main character is an actor from an animated film. People, animals, plants, or inanimate objects can be performers. In animation, anthropomorphism gives non-human characters human characteristics, making them more vivid. The anthropomorphic style allows animators to create more touching stories and deepen the emotional communication between the animation and the audience. Therefore, the method of personification is becoming more and more important to the shaping of non-human characters in animation, especially the design of their appearance and humanity. Good anthropomorphic design doesn’t leave the viewer feeling incongruous. At the same time, the designers will retain the natural features of the non-human characters. Thus, through this design, people tend to feel that non-human characters are alive, especially by giving life to inanimate objects. Anthropomorphism has a unique advantage in designing non-human characters in animation. Anthropomorphic design can subtly make non-human characters resemble humans in appearance. In this way, the characters will become lively and cute, interesting and give people a sense of intimacy. Moreover, the anthropomorphic approach not only simply makes non-human characters wear human clothes and walk and talk like human beings, but also makes them take on human characteristics. At the same time, because of the anthropomorphic approach, non-human characters can take on human nature if they can’t speak human.

Categories
Nuke Term-01-Nuke

WEEK 08 – Nuke – Poster Tracking

In this week’s lesson, we learned how to use CornerPin 2D. The CornerPin 2D node can be used to replace a picture somewhere in the motion picture. The purpose is to map the four corners of an image sequence to or from a position derived from tracking data. In fact, this node allows you to replace any four corner feature with another image sequence. For example, you can use it to place images on a TV screen. For the picture to be replaced in the picture, the Tracker node can be used to generate four tracks on the features to be replaced, one for each corner. Then export the information of the tracking node to CornerPin 2D and connect it to the replaced material.

Process
Categories
Maya Term-01-Maya

WEEK 08 – Maya

This week’s lesson continues with binding and skin weight modification.  While the simple binding only makes the avatar open mouth, we can add the blend shape to the binding in order to add facial expression and details. For example, when the head opens its mouth, it can make the face a little sunken to make it more natural. At the same time, we can use sculpting tools to enrich the expression. I rendered a small animation to test the binding and blend shape I made.

Final Render (Arnold)
Blend Shape
Categories
22/23 Design for Animation

WEEK 07 – Group Discussion

https://www.pixar.com/feature-films/walle

This week is a group discussion on the topic of critical reporting. Many students put forward a lot of interesting topics, and I also got some useful suggestions and references. This critical report discusses how to personify non-human characters in animation in terms of appearance, expression, body language and humanity. Combining academic articles with actual animated films can make the analysis of this paper more convincing. I chose Zootopia, Wall-E and The Secret Life of Pets as the reference of animation resources for this critical report. There are a lot of different anthropomorphic non-human characters in these movies. At the same time, I also read some academic articles about anthropomorphic characters to analyze the different anthropomorphic designs of non-human characters in animation.