Today is the final day of the AN5002 project, and all things that could go wrong have gone wrong. While rendering my final render for the module project, disaster occured when my dog (Satchi) broke my hard drive with all the data I have for the final end of module project. Luckily for me I had already done a render the night before, albeit with a slightly older version of my animation and fairly grainy quality. This is the Final render of my final project after some post processing:
After a fair amount of post processing, I was able to reduce the amount of noise within the render quite considerably, add in some depth of field in the second part of the animation and some sound.
My final module project all started with coming up with the animation that I wanted to complete, I wanted to create something different to the animations we had created up until this point. In the starting weeks of the project we mainly focused on leopard and big cat cycle animations. After much consideration I decided that I liked the fast snappy movement of birds and that I would find it challenging to mimic.
To start the planning process of my final animation I needed to find some references that I wanted to use within the animation itself. For this I used youtube as my source to find some good quality references that I could use. These are the reference's I found:
My next step after finding some good quality references was to create a storyboard to clearly plan out the action and camera movements of my animation shots. After about an hour or so, this is the storyboard I came up with:
This is the first interation of my storyboard, after about a day of on and off thinking about the storyboard and looking for scene sets. I decided to alter the setting of the storyboard to a more natural and wild environment as I felt that it fit the animation better. This also had the added benefit of having easier to find assets for the scene design. This is the second iteration of my storyboard:
This is the storyboard that I submitted for feedback from my tutors. After having the feedback from my tutors that I should focus on only one of the birds. This is the third iteration of my storyboard, with the feedback from my tutors:
While improving my storyboard, I was researching what rigs and sets were available that would suit the animation I was planning. I found my rig fairly quickly, however I had a harder time finding tree's and grasses that would fit with my animation. Eventually I found some assets that would fit nicely within my scene, however I did have to edit the model slightly to better resemble my references.
After selecting the rig and assets I wanted to use, I decided to set up my scene as I knew this would consume a fair amount of time to get how I wanted it. Furthermore it was important to set up the scene so I knew where to add in the cameras and the placement of the rig.
Once I had all that set up, I started animating the first part of my animation. I created 2 cv curves and I parented one to the other. This one would be the master. The other I constrained to the root control of the rig, this would be the offset control. I moved the master control into the postion I wanted the animation to start, and began to block out the body movements with the offset control.
Once I had blocked out the main body, I started to block out the rest of the action of the first part of the animation. After blocking out most of the action for the first part, I began refining the movements of the bird.
Once I had refined my animation, I submitted a very early test render I completed to show my work for feedback, Here is the animtion I sunmitted for feedback:
I recieved lots of useful feedback from this render. Such as: the staging of the bird doesnt flow as well as it could. The bird enters from bottom of the screen and exits from the bottom of the screen. Furthemore the bird is very symetrical when jumping off the branch. This animation still needed alot more work to get to the standard I wanted. For example I needed to add some bounce on the branch, refine the birds animation further, add depth of field to the camera, etc.
After a couple days of refining and adding in some extra animations, such as the branch moving and depth of field one the camera. This is the result I had:
In this new render, I have changed the staging of the bird, with the bird entering screen right and leaving screen bottom. I have also added depth of field and some animation onto the branch.
After more refining of the first part, I decided to start blocking out the second part of my animation. I found this particularly hard to start as I had trouble setting up the camera to follow the action of the animation.
For the animation, I started by attaching the bird to a motion path and created another for the camera, so that it would follow the bird. I then baked this curve onto the bird using 4's. With this intial block out of the bird motion, I started to block out the rest of the animation. For example when the wings would open and close, when the feet would go up and down, etc.
After refining and getting feedback, I made the adjustments mentioned within the feedback, such as when the bird flys, it will have a up and down motion as it flaps its wings. However the version I had these adjustments was destroyed when my hard drive was broken. This is the final result I was able to achieve as a result:
With this render, I then proceeded to post process it to clean the render up, add in depth of field and sound. This is due to the render not being as high quality as I would of liked. However I am still very happy with the result I was able to submit.
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