Final Evaluation

Through out this module I have learnt a lot in the area of 3D animation. I also feel as though this has been an opportunity for me to focus express my particular interest in the area of character design. There have been a lot of aspects to this module which I have found really challenging, because I have had very little experience using Maya, so I was definitely taking a big step out of my comfort zone. Also, this is the first time I have properly collaborated with another student on something like this, so I have been able to get used to working under different circumstances, as well as managing my time and communication not only for myself but also for my partner.

One of the main stages of production that I have become familiar with, and gained a much better understanding of is the stage which took me from modelling, right up to the point where I was able to animate my character.  Being given video guides for each of these stages, has been extremely helpful for me, because I do have quite a low attention span and it sometimes takes me a while to retain information, especially when I get a lot of it in one go, so having the video guides and being able to use them in my own time has really helped. This also made it much easier and quicker when it came to modelling, rigging, orienting and binding my own character. There are some areas that I would need to improve upon the next time I do anything like this. Firstly, I think Ollie and I as a team were slightly over ambitious with our idea at the start, we origioanlly wanted to create realistic water, and after much contemplation and conversation with tutors and other classmates, we realised that it just wasn't realistic in the time we had. Also, I had to do a lot of tweaking to my character, because she was too complex. I underestimated how long the process of getting a model ready to animate would take. Also, at the start, both mine and Ollie's character did not look right together. I decided to shrink my character down and make her slightly rounder, because originally she looked to elongated and slightly threatening. This has definitely taught me to be more open to the possibility of there needing to be adjustments and improvements to make an animation work better as a whole, even if it means extra work. However, there are parts of this model I am pleased with. Considering I have had very little experience in the area of 3D animation, let alone Maya, the work I have produced is much better than I imagined it would be at the start. I have started to pay more attention to smaller details when it comes to positioning and animating a character. This was also something I learnt quite early on with the "Strike a Pose" study task.

During my time working on this project, the way in which I think of a story or a potential character has changed. Now that I have a much better understanding of how 3D animation works, it has influenced my thought process for the better, and not just for this kind of animation. I have learnt to keep things more basic at the start and to not get sucked into the excitement of a new project by thinking that anything is possible. If I were to do this again, I would asked more questions at the start, because I don't think I quite appreciated how long it would have taken to stick with the original design ideas Ollie and I had. I have also become more used to working with somebody else, which is something I am not used to, because I like working alone. However this project has made me realise that sometimes, collaborating can have better results than always working alone. This has been very beneficial because I think this is something I need to get used to before stepping into the industry. However there have been a couple of down sides. This module has made me realise that I need to be slightly more vocal about my thoughts and to try and keep up communication, because there were some areas where this resulted in a disadvantage. Such as, Ollie and I at one point had different  ideas on how to transition from one scene to another, but this wasn't apparent because we didn't speak often enough.

The study tasks, also helped with the technical side of things, in a way they prepared me for what was to come. The model that I created from Matt's tutorial videos was quite challenging but at the same time, really helpful because it helped the information to sink in, and made me feel a bit less scared to use Maya in the future. I was pleased with my final outcome of this model, but was aware that there were a few things that were't quite right with it, such as some of the influence weights, and some of the heir achy, so some of the body parts were incorrectly influenced by other areas of the body. There was also a problem with the eyes, this was also an issue with my mermaid model, however I managed to fix this so that they eyes moved with the head. There are a few little glitches with the final animation, for example there is a scene where one of the mermaid's eyes sinks inwards, however luckily this wasn't too noticeable due to the positioning of the camera. I would definitely spend longer next time, making sure that little mistakes like this were rectified. However overall, I am really pleased with the outcome of this module and feel that I have learnt a great deal. I no longer feel afraid to use Maya, and honestly believe that over time I will improve further.

3D modelling in Other Fields.

Something that is often forgotten is that 3D software are often needed in other areas. For example, 3D renderings and animations are used for architecture. Often a company will present some single 3D renderings along side some animated footage in order to give a realistic idea of a plan for what they will produce. There are a lot of well known companies who use this strategy when working with clients, such as "American Institute of Architects" and "National Association of Home Builders."

Some of the work that is produced as part of planning is to such a high standard that it looks photographic. The fact that 3D animation can be used to such a high standard for business purposes shows that it has the potential to lead to the creation of some fantastic architecture, which in itself will presumably be there for years and years to come. It could be argued that in this case, 3D animation has the potential has the potential to go much further in comparison to 2D animation, because it is a vital part of development for people who work in a range of other fields, and not just animation specifically.   

Final Animation!

I'm really happy with the outcome of this animation, especially because I have had very little experience in the past using Maya. I was especially happy with the lighting and how the natural sun and sky setting in Maya turned out. However, there is always room for improvement, and after watching this back a few times I can now see changes that I would have made if I were to do this again. 

• If there had been time, we would have liked to add some 2D ripples to the water, to give it a bit more life, as well as some 2D visual splashing to match the sound effect when the robot falls into the water. 
• Just after the mermaid pushes the robot into the water, I think it would have looked better if she then dived under the water herself, because she appears under the water in the next scene. 
• If we had more time, it would have been nice to have added some 2D or 3D elements to the background, such as birds or bubbles. 
• There is some inconsistency with the horizon, at one point it is all grey and then in another scee it becomes blue. This is something we would have fixed if we had a bit more time. 

One change that Ollie made to the underwater scene was that he added another layer over the top and animated it slightly in After Effects, in order to make it slightly more water like. This worked really well and I'm glad that we deiced to do this because it looks a lot more effective! 

Post Production Part 6 - creating the sound

When it came to adding the sound, we used a range of resources. We researched the web for potential sounds, created some ourselves and also looked at the sound fils that were available in college. I focused on the ocean sounds, and the sounds of the mermaid. I decided that recording my own sounds for the mermaid would be better because it would add more comedy, plus I was able to watch the animation whilst recording, so I knew I would get the timings right. 

Ollie focused on finding sounds for the robot, so once I had finished editing in the background sounds as well as my character sounds, he was able to crack on with his part. Editing the sound in didn't take as long as I thought so we were ahead of ourselves slightly, which left a little extra time to make sure we had all of our documenting up to date. 

One of the sound transitions that I added in, was the change from above water, to under water. Ollie and I decided that this would be really effective because it made it clear not just visually, that the environment had suddenly changed. We knew we wanted the sounds to also go over the credits at the start and end. This was because, the ocean sounds really help set the scene, so it was a good idea to have the sounds there before the actual environment wad visible. Also, at the end, the continuation of the electrocution sounds added more comedy, which is what we wanted. 

I found the recording of the mermaid sounds to be quite fun, because she doesn't speak, she just makes odd noises, so it wasn't too stressful! The robot sounds that Ollie added in really helped bring the animation to life, because before hand there was still quite a lot of just plain background noise. Ollie also added in one of the robot sounds just as the ending credits draw to a close. This made it even more funny, because it sort of indicated that the robot was concerned that he had somehow caused the mermaid to be electrocuted. 

Luckily, this whole process of recording the sound, and then getting it all into Premiere wasn't stressful and didn't take long at all.  

Final Storyboard

This is our final storyboard for our animation. looking back at this now and seeing our final result, I'm really pleased with how well we stuck to the idea we had, and how well we stayed on track with it. 

Orienting, Binding and Weights

 When it came to orienting the controllers to the joints on this model, I did struggle at first because every time I clicked "orient" things kept going a bit wonky. However it turned out that it was because "maintain offset" was turned off.
Once that was turned on, everything was fine.

I then went through and simply oriented each controller to it's respective joint. This enabled the skeleton to be influenced by the movement of the joints. It was then time to bind the mesh to the rest. I did this by selecting the skeleton, appart from the end joints, and then selected "skin" and then smooth bind. This enabled the mesh itself to be moved by the skeleton.


Painting the Weights



The weights on the body needed to be changed in order to make sure that parts of the body weren't getting moved around and influenced by wrong areas of the geometry.

I did have a few problems with this:

• At first, the right foot was being influenced by the movement of the left foot, so I needed to go through and paint it with a value of zero so it would not be moved. This is something that needed doing over all areas of the body. 

For the turn around, I decided to keep the pose of this character quite simple, because there were a few issues with it,

• Not all of the influence weights were completely right, so for example, when the left arm was moved up too high, it did effect the left side underneath the arm .
• There was also a problem with the legs, I thin this was because I didn't bind something correctly. The knees were not able to be moved, however the controllers and heir-achy were all in place, so I may have oriented something incorrectly.  
• Also, at the end I realised that the eyes on this character were not moving with the head, so I must have missed out a stage of parenting the head to the eyes. 

Final Outcome

I am really pleased with everything I learnt whilst building this model, because before hand I had no idea how the process worked. However, if I were to do this again, I would pay closer attention to the smaller details. In this case, the character works fine for a turnaround and to show what I have learnt, but I wouldn't at this stage hand it over to somebody to animate, because there are some areas that are not quite right. I am aware that the eyes are not bound properly to the head, so they don't move when the head is moved, and some of the influence weights are not quite right. I had some trouble right at the end with the controllers for the knees, I think this was because I went wrong somewhere when it came to putting in the heir achy.

In all honesty even though there are some areas of this model that aren'r right, it did genuinely help me to improve my mermaid model and make me aware of some problems to try and stay clear of. On the whole however, I have learnt a lot whilst doing this, and really enjoyed it! Asa result of this study task, I was able to Finnish the whole modelling process of my mermaid much faster than I had expected.

Final Turn Around

Post Production Part 5 - Creating the Credits

Because if the fact that our animation seemed to work better without credits showing over the top of it, and because it only reached one minuet exactly, we decided that we would put the opening and closing credits on either end of the animation. At this point I already liked the idea of the audio also stretching over the credits, and the idea of having juts a plain background didn't seem very appealing because it would't really fit with the animation. I decided this was a possible opportunity to refer back to the water backgrounds that I had made.

After some experimenting with the different backgrounds, it made more sense to not use the same background that had been used for the animated under water scene, because at the end it would look quite strange if the character were to vanish and the background stay. I decided to go for the background above, because it the brush effect I used allows it to look like bubbles. Having a separate background for the credits establishes the opening and closing of the animation a bit better. 

Creating the text

Quite ironically, I can actually write with a Wacom tablet better than I can draw, so I saw this as an opportunity to use my strength in this area.  

I decided that it would be nice to have the text the same colour as the mermaid, partly because black or white would have looked slightly too harsh on this background, but also because it seemed like a nice quirky addition to create a connection between the credits and the animation itself.

We also decided that it would be good to have the text itself fade in gradually, because jut having it appear as one looked quite harsh. Also, the gentle fade in fit much better with the gentle wave sounds in the background. (However, we did decide that at the end, we would continue the electricity sound effects over the end credits, to add in the comedy element.)

Post Production Part 4 - Creating Backgrounds

For the end scene, where both character appear underwater, the frames were rendered out as a PNG so that a background layer could be applied in After Effects. We decided that I would work on creating a number of potential backgrounds which could be used in this scene. I had originally had the idea of creating a background using traditional mediums such as watercolour. However, after some discussion, we decided that it would be a good idea to keep it 2D but digital, in order to fit with the aesthetic of the rest of the animation. 

I played around in Photoshop with the gradient tool, because I wanted it to be relatively obvious that the setting had changed from above water to below water. I decided to g with the bottom left background, because it had the best alteration from light to dark, and it looks as though there is sunlight coming from the top of the water. 

Ollie also decided that if there is time, when he incorporates his speech bubbles into the animation, he may add another effect over this background, to make it look slightly more blurred.

Post Production Part 3 - Editing in After Effects

Once the majority of the scenes were rendered, I began to put them into After Effects to get a better idea of how it would run as a whole piece. I was really pleasantly surprised with how it looked, we had definitely achieved the sunny, calm atmosphere that we wanted.
All together, there were 14 scenes to be placed into After Effects.



One of the things that Ollie and I did notice, was that there was a greyish strip of colour between the skyline and the water, which we assumed was something to do with the placing of the Indirect Lighting that we applied in Maya. However, after some discussion, we decided that it actually worked quite well, because it looked a bit like land on the horizon. So in this case it was a bit of a "happy accident"




Fixing and Editing

When all of the scenes were together and I played the whole thing back without any credits, I noticed that we were 14 frames short of a minuet. I realised that this was because, earlier in the animation stage, I received a scene off Ollie that he had animated, it was the scene where we see the robot suddenly appear underwater.
The movement of this scene didn't begin until the 20th frame in, so I only rendered it out from there. The problem in doing this was that I didn't think ahead to the fact that this would take away some of our animation time. The way I resolved this was to take the first scene which pans over the ocean, and simply extend that for another 14 frames. This worked for more than one reason:

• It brought a little focus in on the robot
• It would also allow more time for the audio to develop over those few seconds
• It resulted in the time length of the animation to be just right. 

I think this mistake that was made was due to a lac of communication from both myself and Ollie, however I managed to resolve this without it effecting the quality of the animation, and without loosing too much post production time.


There were some things that needed adding to some of the scenes, such as the importing of the speech bubbles. Ollie and I decided that he would do this part, because he had created them. 

Post Production Part 2 - Further Development

In order to achieve an animated texture for the eyes, the best way to go about it was to create a selection of main eye positions, making sure they were in line with the UV maps of the eyes and put them into After Effects to make an image sequence. This process didn't actually take too long, also I only needed to do this for certain scenes.

There were however a few things I needed to make sure of in order fort his process to work:

• The image sizes in After Effects needed to be 256 x 256 so that they would correlate with the sizing of the UV maps. 
• The length of the image needed to be the same as the time length for that particular scene. 
• When this was imported into After Effects, I needed to make sure that I ticked the box which said "Use Image Sequence" otherwise the eyes would have just stayed stationary. 

I kept the eye design quite simple in order to fit with her overall design, because through out the design process this character had been simplified a lot. Also, her colouring had changed slightly and I was unsure as to what colours would work best fort he eyes, so I didn't' go too over the top. 

Render Testing

Before starting to render each scene, I carried out a quick test render to make sure the lighting or everything was right. I was really happy with how my character looked when rendered, because she was still in keeping with the surrounding environment, but the fact that she was green gave her some more individuality. 

Bringing It Together

 As the rendering process was coming to an end, I started to bring each scene together in After Effects to see how it looked. I was actually pleasantly surprised with the how it all looked, because as a whole it all looked quite pale and "minty" which Ollie and I really liked.






The process of bringing in all of the renderings was easy enough, one thing however which I did need to fix was a glitch in scene 4. The problem was that scene 13 had not rendered, so I just had to re-render this individual frame, and then things ran fine after that.

This first section of the animation below is the first 6 scenes put together. This is un-edited, however I have put this up to show, because there were immediately some things I knew I Ollie and I were happy with, however some things that needed to be altered in post. We were really pleased with the colourings and lighting, however we do plan to alter some of the lighting in certain scenes to make it less intense. For example, in scene 3 where the mermaid first rises up out of the water, the lighting is a bit too bright, which has resulted in parts of the mermaid's body to look quite white. Once all of the scenes are together and the timing is right, we will go through and edit the areas which need editing. 

Adding the speech bubbles

Also, another aspect which needs to be added was the 2D speech bubbles. This is something Ollie is  focusing on creating during the rendering time, so they can be added through After Effects. We are feeling optimistic that the incorporation of 2D will give out animation a nice aesthetic. 

We also still need to add the audio, which will be a mixture of robot sound effects, vocal sounds for the mermaid which I will create in the sound studio, as well as some water sounds which can also be created in the studio.  We were originally going to have quite a lot of wave sounds, however now that the water is very calm, it would be a bit contradictory to have those sound effects when the water is making very little movement. 

Post Production Part 1 - Render Tests

When it came to adding the colour to my character, I decided to use a simple Lambert effect, because I had originally had some issues issues with painting the texture onto it through photoshop. I think the reason for this was because when I unwrapped by UV, I had unwrapped my character down the front and every time I added the texture there was a line down the front centre.



 I decided to use the lambert effect and add a colour ramp so that my original idea of having the tail gradually fade into a darker colour would still work.


When I rendered this out I was really happy with how it looked, because the colour scheme of this character fit in really well with the surrounding environment as well as Ollie's robot character.

However I did encounter some problems when it came to putting her into the water..

When rendered, the parts of the character that were in the water seemed to be going white and her upper body which was out of the  water was going much darker.


After getting Ollie to take a look, and after moving her around a bit, it seemed apparent that when ever I moved the actual character around, it was also moving the cooler scale on the UV map around too.

This was causing the head to pick up the darker end of the colour ramp, depending on where she was placed. After getting my tutor to take a lot, and after A LOT of problem solving, it seemed that the best route to take was to treat the texture as an image projection. To do this, I needed to:

• Select the mesh and assign a  new material as a lambert
• select Colour and right click "Ramp" and select "Assign as Projection" 
• Select Fit to BBOX
• select the character and the lambert shade and in the hyper shade window select "file to texture"
• Make sure Anti-Alias is turned on and then convert and close. 

This could then be saved as an image in the source images folder so it could be applied to each scene. This stopped the moving of the texture so things stayed the way they were supposed to. 

HOWEVER..

I did like the result this gave, however I decided that the colour ramp was a bit extreme and her upper body was far too white. It was when I was trying to fix this that I encountered another problem..

I was sure that the UV map was the same in each scene, so therefore it would have been easy to just place the image on to the character in each scene separately, but the positioning of the maps were not consistent, I assume this was because I have must have moved them about with out realising, because I was confused at first as to why they weren't all the same.

The way to get around this would have been to move each part of the UV map around until things fit and looked right, but I was unable to position it with out there being a break in one of the  shoulders or the front of the head.

After getting Ollie to give me his opinion on the situation, we both decided that the mermaid could do with having a slightly different tinge of colour, which would possibly help bring her out from the background slightly. So instead I went through and applied a lambert effect to each mermaid and gave them a slight green tint, which actually, in our opinion looked much better than the original idea of just having her grey.

Another reason as to why we were happy to go down this route instead is because the mermaid's tail is for the majority of the time, not visible, so not having the colour ramp didn't really feel like a loss.

Environmental designs

Since Ollie and I had been slightly too ambitious with wanting to create a proper ocean scene, we decided that creating two flat planes with transparency between them would work much better, because it allows the characters to be seen not just above it but also partially below, making it look more realistic.

Original Ideas 

 At the start we were considering having 2D style water in After Effects, where the waves could be animated and looped. However, we knew that this would not have worked well with the storyline of our animation, we needed the water to be calm and for the attention to not be taken away from the characters.




There was the possibility of having
a proper ocean setting in Maya, however we realised that this would take a very long time to render, and we wanted to be realistic with our goals.


We decided to go with the sun and sky render setting to give the effect of natural light.



Our main scene

For animating we both worked from the main scene Ollie had put together, because this made sure everything was the right scale. The two planes set down for the water worked really well, especially in the scene when the mermaid is swimming under the water, because she is still visible from above which made it look much more effective. We thought this technique for the water was much simpler but would still go far. 

"For Those Who Fly"

My second piece to be submitted to this competition focuses on "Fantasy" I knew that I wanted to produce something which incorporated wings, as well as being a much looser piece of work, since I spent much longer on the previous piece. I knew I wanted to use a mixture of inks, so I started by throwing some stuff out (even if some of it really was a mess) into my sketch book.

At first I played around with different types of wings because I was pretty unsure about the kind I wanted to produce for the submitted piece.

For these first few experiments I used a mixture of gouache and ink. After looking at these and getting further into experimenting, I decided that they looked a bit too precious and I wanted to go a little bit wilder with the ink.


 I carried out some research on bird wings, because I really liked the idea of creating the look of feathers, and the ink would allow me to create some quite heavy tones.

I knew that the main colours I wanted to use were blue and black, sticking with the original colour scheme of the emperor butterfly wings I had originally produced. This time I decided to try dragging the ink across the page with the end of a straw (my original plan being to blow it across, but it didn't look how I wanted it to) I literally just made blobs of ink and then started dragging them in the direction I wanted. I much preferred how these looked and I definitely was a lot less precious about these, but I thought they turned out to look much more effective. 

I wanted the wings themselves to be the main focus of the piece, so I drew the rough base of the body before hand, so I knew where I would be painting. 

I started by using black drawing ink and a straw to drag the colour upwards in the direction I wanted. After it had built up slightly I started gradually dragging in the blue. 

Change of plan

I noticed that the surface I was working on wasn't taking to the ink too well so I decided to stop, allow it to dry, and work into it further with a mixture of water colour, fine liner and pencil crayon. This added on some time however I was much happier with the result. 

Another thing I decided to add on was some watercolour to the background to it a bit more depth. I felt as though it all looked a but plain with just a white background. 

I'm glad I decided to put in some pencil crayon because this made it much easier to add lots of tone.

I was much happier with this after i'd spent some time tweaking little bits, to be honest I could have carried on but I had to stop at some point! 

Further Progress With Animating

After getting the majority of my scenes animated, the three I had left to complete were all focused on my character. For all of these scenes the movements were quite repetitive, and only focused on the chest upwards of the mermaid, so luckily I didn't have to spend long amounts of time trying to move the whole body, like I did with the swimming scene!


At this point, there was still no colour or texture on my mermaid, so she still looks quite dead in the eyes, because..well, you cant see the emotion in them. This is all something I had planned to incorporate after the animation stage was complete, but before rendering.

Problems I came across

• When animating the arms, and after talking to Ollie about his experience with animating my character, it became apparent that they weights I had painted on the model were not all 100% accurate. There were some small areas that were influenced by certain movements which didn't look right. 
• Also, because these shots of the mermaid were quite close up, I didn't worry too much about where I placed her, however this meant I would need to figure out the positioning for the lighting so it wouldn't look as though it is constantly going from light to dark!
• Some of the movements were just a little too slow or too fast.

How I solved these

• Luckily, the majority of the mermaid's body is in the water, and not completely visible for these scenes, so I didn't need to worry about going back and re-painting the weights. If the problematic areas were noticeable, then I would have had to go back and do this.  However, I wanted to be realistic with myself and my time, as well as my partner's. 
• For these scenes, I will need to spend some time making sure the lighting looks consistent by moving it around and doing some render tests!
• For the adjustments to the movement, I kept referring to the Graph Editor where I could simply move the key frames across forwards or backwards with in the time frame. 

Final Crit Feedback

In all honesty, before this final crit, I was not feeling happy about what I had to show, because I was spending much longer on the rigging and binding of my character than I had anticipated. I had animated the swimming for the mermaid, which was 4 seconds long, so it was better than nothing, and I actually got some really confidence boosting and helpful feedback! People seemed to be impressed with the movement of the mermaid's tail, especially once she was placed and positioned in the water.

The main bit of advice we were given was simply to "Keep going!" because it seemed quite obvious that Ollie and I had reached a bit of hurdle and had lost a bit of motivation, so this crit really did make the both of us feel a lot more confident and motivated.

Organising The Work Load!

Since Ollie needed to spend longer focusing on rigging his model, I began with the animating of my own character. By the time he was at the stage of being ready to animate, we looked over the animating I had already done and decided to split the work load by working on specific scenes and not characters, this meaning we would also need to be prepared to animate each other's character.




We decided to go through the animatic and note down the key scenes to then decide who would animate what. My final list of scenes to animate had quite a nice balance between the two characters so I was glad to get the chance to animate Ollie's robot too.



Passing on the work

Ollie and I spent some time arranging our files and created a specific shared project folder that we would both have and simply pass the individual scenes on to one another through this folder.

Ollie had created one "Ready Scene" which would be the starting point for the rest of the animating, to save time having to drop in the characters and position them accordingly every time.


Robot Time!

Apart from the two scenes that I had previously animated (Scenes 3 and 4) I decided to work through them in order so I could tick them off one by one.


The scenes in which I needed to animate Ollie's
character, he stays quite stationary, and the majority of the movement was in just the upper body, apart from the occasional movement of the feet and legs to show that this character is very uncomfortable.

Also, apart from the first scene where we see the camera pan slowly at quite a distance from the robot sat on the raft, these scenes all consist of quite close up shots with not a huge amount of camera movement, so the animating of these first few scenes wasn't too time consuming.







Problems 

Through out the process of animating this character, things went pretty smoothly, however there was a small problem with the eyes of the robot. I noticed that if the head was moved too far to one side, the eyes began to sink back into the head. After getting Ollie to take a look at his model, it seemed apparent that it was to do with the grouping of the eyes.

After both Ollie and I playing around, it seemed that the best thing to do was to not move the head too far in one direction (which wasn't a problem because apart from this one scene, there are no scenes where the robot's head turns with the camera staying at it's eye line)


How did we fix this one scene?

The movement of the head was only too far by a very small amount, so I simply pulled it back slightly, it didn't look any different, apart from the fact that the eyes no longer moved back into the head.

Time to Start Animating

I wanted to get the scene with the mermaid swimming out of the way first, because this is the bit that requires the most animation. Ollie had created the surrounding above water scene in which the majority of the animation would take place. I began however by animating in the scene which I had originally built my model, because I found it easier to see if I was on the right track and that way I would just need to drop it into the scene later.

How did it go?

The whole process of creating this motion of of swimming was quite challenging because I kept making the mistake of moving the tail the wrong way in relation to the fin. However after playing around a lot and positioning her correctly in the scene, as well as adding in the key frames to make her move through the water, things were starting to look much better.


What problems did I have?

The animating process was much less stressful than the stage of creating and orienting the controllers, however I did still have to rectify somethings.

• Some of the influence weights I had previously painted weren't quite right in all areas, so I had to go back and black out some of the influences to make the body move better and more realistically. 
• I also had to play around with the graph editor because originally it all happened a bit slowly so everything needed pulling in to fit the time frame.   

Hello, its me! 

The first time we see the mermaid, she is simply coming upwards from under the water, up to her shoulders. This obviously wouldn't take a huge amount of time to animate, however it required a bit of playing around in order to get the timing right. There is some movement in the mouth as she comes up realises what she is looking at, so I did experiment a bit with how much to manipulate the mouth. The first attempt I did showed the mouth dropping open more dramatically, I also did a second which was more subtle, because I wanted to be able to sit with Ollie and see which he thought looked better.

When it came to animating the cameras, we decided that it would be good to have some movement in them, so give it a bit more life, also it made the shots look much more effective. 

 

Wiggle of the Tail

After Ollie and I settled on having just a flat plane for the water in our animation, it became apparent that the lower body of the mermaid wouldn't be visible for the majority of the short. That took off some of the pressure of needing to animate the tail, however I still wanted to experiment with giving it some movement because I still thought it would be necessary to play around with it.

I got quite frustrated with the tail whilst trying to animate it for the first time (I think some of the controls were having too much or not enough influence on other parts of the body) However, I managed to give it just a simple wiggle, which would be the kind of movement it would have if she were visibly swimming. Even though the majority of the animation will be going to the top half of the body I'm still glad I did this because I now feel that I will be able to produce the movement of the tail much quicker.  

Problems

My main issue with this experiment was that I noticed that the tail doesn't stay completely smooth as it moves, it looks quite ridged. I think this had something to do with the influence weights. This is something I'm not going to spend too much time trying to fix because the tail wont be noticeable for most of the time, however, if it appears to be an issue for the upper body then I will have to figure out what went wrong. 

"Love Struck"

After my set back, I got cracking on producing something new. Before I was even 100% sure what exactly I was going to be drawing, I starting using Brusho to create a background, because I figured this would drive the direction I went in.

Before continuing I carried out some rough sketching to get an idea of what I was aiming for. I needed to do some practice drawing faces with wide mouths because that isn't something I usually draw (but have come to realise I love how it looks) I liked the idea of having something going through a face, such as an arrow or a knife. I thought an arrow would be better because it would be slightly more elegant looking. 

 I had originally wanted to have quite an up-close piece, but as i began the drawings, I realised it would be good t get an entire body in there, because I could also use that to give it more edge. Also, it opened up the opportunity to have some dripping in there, which has helped make the piece as a whole seem much more morbid. (yay!)

I wanted to put lots of emphasis on the anatomy of the girl, but I wanted her to look withered and demonic, which I think I managed.

For this piece I used a mixture of Brusho, pencil, watercolour, gouache and acrylic. The white acrylic was pretty necessary because it brought the body out from the paper and allowed it to look more three dimensional.