CSC2529 Assignment: “Championship”
A Short Animation by Noah
Lockwood
The Idea
I
originally had a large, grandiose plan for my animation (which I’ll post
pictures from, eventually), but unfortunately I had to scale things back a bit
when I realized just how much time creating an entire animation takes! I ended up conceiving a simpler animation
using figures made entirely out of blocks - actually, everything in the whole animation
is made of boxes. That way, it’s
not “copping out” – it’s stylistic.
Modeling
I
used 3D Studio MAX for every aspect of this animation. I’d originally intended to model in MAX
and animate using Maya, but I’m already pretty familiar with MAX so I
stuck with it to increase my amount of animating time.
For
the main character, I copied, er…borrowed the proportions and rough setup
of the Stikfas
figures:
The
figures have slightly exaggerated, “heroic” proportions which I
tried to emulate:
The
environment was made of simple boxes with a tapered bottom to force
perspective and
make them look like they go on forever.
At least, that’s what it’s supposed to look like (the
attenuation of the lighting aids in the effect):
Animation
Fortunately,
both characters are identical except for colour (and
their demeanor) so character setup was simplified. Most of the characters were animated with
simple forward kinematics, but the legs/feet were done with IK. While it took a while to set up (I was heavily
yearning for Maya’s Pole Vector) it was definitely worth the effort
because bad foot placement or sliding can totally destroy the illusion. There were problems with getting the legs to
move exactly how I wanted (creating arc-like motions is more difficult), so in
some situations where foot placement wasn’t important (such as characters
freefalling) I switched back to FK.
One
artistic, rather than technical, difficulty was showing when the characters
looked at something. Their heads are
rotationally symmetric (since they’re boxes) so if I turned the head too
much, it was easy to lose track of which side was the “front”. To fix this, I over-exaggerated their torso
twists so that they turn with their whole body instead.
Ballistic
motion is hard. I didn’t have the time to mess around
with the graphs for my characters’ position data, so often it looks like
there’s very little gravity (who knows?) because there’s not a lot
of ease in/out by default in MAX. I
tried to compensate for this by over-exaggeration again, this time having them
really wind up and follow-through after jumping.
Finishing Touches
I
put the animation together using Adobe Premiere, and added some simple effects
such as the title and fading to black/white.
Overall,
I’m quite pleased with the result. Even animating stick figures is very difficult
– I have even more respect for my earlier sources of inspiration! It was interesting to see how much personality
can be conveyed by such simple behaviour (I think it’s
pretty clear that the red dude is the bad guy), and even by colour
and shot framing (for example, I tried to keep the focus on the blue character
when both were in frame to emphasize that he’s the protagonist). This was definitely a lot of fun. Perhaps they will return in the future…