In this course of Advanced and Experimental 3D Computer Animation Techniques, I have gained a lot and deeply learned the essence of animation production from many aspects. The content of the course not only covers the basic knowledge, but also delves into the advanced techniques, giving me a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the production of 3D animation. Here are a few important things I learned in the course:

1. Make planning

In this semester, I have deeply realized the importance of making planning. Shooting references and making storyboards by myself not only helped me to clarify the overall structure and visual style of the story at the early stage of animation production, but also enabled me to effectively plan the composition, character positions and movements of each shot. Through practice, I mastered how to express complex scenes and actions with simple sketches and annotations, which laid a solid foundation for subsequent animation production.

2. Body Mechanics and Physics

Understanding body mechanics and physics is key to making realistic animations. You learned about the movement of characters in different situations, from the shift of center of gravity to the principle of inertia, to the physical properties of various materials. I learned how to guide the animation production by observing the movement in reality, so that the actions of the characters are more in line with the laws of nature, and the performance is more realistic and credible. This not only improved my animation level, but also gave me a deeper understanding of the principle of movement.

3. Mouthing and dialogue animation

In the middle of the course, I went deep into the production of mouth movement and dialogue animation. This part of the content made me understand the importance of sound and image synchronization. Through detailed analysis of the audio, combined with the characters’ expressions and body language, I learned how to create natural and smooth lip movements. Especially in terms of keyframe Settings and interpolation adjustments, I got a lot of practice, and I was able to control the character’s mouth movements more carefully, making sure that every line accurately conveys the emotion and tone of the character.

4. polish animation

Finally, in the process of optimizing and improving the animation, I learned a lot of valuable skills. Through constant testing and tweaking, I learned how to optimize the Settings of keyframes and reduce the amount of unnecessary computation while maintaining the fluidity and accuracy of the animation. In addition, I learned how to use various tools and plugins for post-processing to make the animation effects more detailed and professional. This knowledge not only improves my work efficiency, but also enables my animation works to reach a higher quality standard.

Summary in the end:

In general, this 3D animation course not only enables me to master many practical techniques and methods, but also cultivates my creative thinking and problem-solving ability in animation production. I believe that through continuous practice and learning, I can exert greater creativity in the future animation production and produce more wonderful and vivid animation works. Thanks to the support and help of teachers and students, this learning experience will become a valuable asset in my career.

Live playback:
Play the lip animation in real time in Maya to check the synchronization. Make sure your mouth movements match the audio.
Fix unnatural parts:
Correct the unnatural parts according to the playback effect. Adjust the keyframe position and interpolation method.

Feedback this week:

Blocking plus tips:

• Refine the transition: Add more keyframes between each key phoneme to make the lip transition smoother. Use the Graph Editor to adjust the keyframe interpolation.
• Emotional expression: Adjust your mouth movements according to your character’s emotional state. For example, mouth opens wider when you are happy and lips tighten when feels embarrassed.
• Synchronized expressions: In addition to mouth movements, the character’s other facial expressions (such as eyes, eyebrows, cheeks) also need to be synchronized to show the emotion and attitude when speaking.

This week, based on last week’s feedback, animation changes. It mainly increased the preparatory posture of the action, and also added the mouth animation.

This week‘s feedback:

First, I broke the audio down into three sentences, the first sentence was, “Oh, a ladybug,” and the second and third sentences were the same: “Make a wish.”

In order to make the difference between the two identical sentences, I set up completely different actions. From the beginning of the hesitation, did not think well, to the back to settle down to think about the desire to achieve.

This week, instead of focusing on whether the mouth shape corresponds to the audio, the body movement is blocked. The purpose of doing so is to adjust the mouth shape later on the basis of determining the action. Steps are very important in animation.

Here is my blocking this week:

Feedback:

Intro to acting – planning submission and defining lip sync

Approaching Lip sync(Phrasing)

• Phrasing describes what is important using connected speech.
• pick the syllables! Stress weak and strong vowels
• When blocking out your sound think about what sounds are going to be made not the words themselves!
• Focus on the vowels but don’t forget that these body parts play a significant role in creating really good lip sync.

Phonemes:

setting up my scene and starting blocking:

reference:

planning:

last week’s animation polish: [Mainly modified the hand, as well as the sandbag movement, and the pose issue when punching]

Through the previous steps, step by step production, there is no big problem in the general direction of the action, but now you need to polish the animation. In the process of polish, it is especially important to pay attention to the movement of the hands and the sandbag

feedback:

On the basis of blocking, modified the action. Change the blocking to a standing position by turning your head on the spot for two seconds.

When doing spline, pay attention to timing control. Converting from blocking to spline will have some problems with the action, which should also be modified. At the same time, on the basis of last week’s blocking, after modification, we started this week’s spline.

Here’s the spline:

This week’s feedback:

Blocking tips and tricks part2

• Don’t rely too heavily on the timing of your reference out this point just be sure to utilize the thumbnail/sketches of the poses you have and just capture those. There is no need to be super in-depth about where certain things move or how long it takes this early on just trust in your drawings and create your poses off that first. Then once you have done that you can go back and make a timing/clean-up pass using your reference to help you a bit.
• Be sure to use FK/IK where it is needed! If you are making a character rotate like flip, or roll you can switch it to FK and avoid all those unnecessary keys and instead utilize the free animation you get from it. Another reason for this is that you can get something called a gimble lock where you
• Only need to adjust these IK/FK controls when your character leaves/touches the ground.
• If you are working in stepped it would be a good idea to switch to spline now and then to check the motion path when it comes to extreme rotations.

This week do the blocking plus and I’m focus on the time, and how to show the power of the model.

feedback:

Blocking tips and tricks

• if have similar poses going on throughout the animation, copy those poses and just give them slight translation and rotation adjustments so they are not the same.
• Make sure the hand/fingers in your blocking on the key poses! They don’t need to look amazing but a nice rough pose especially if it helps the rest of the pose will help you a lot later down the line when it comes to spline and polish.
• The main objective in blocking which goes for any type of animation work in the future is; Establishing KEY POSES/ POSES that tell the story and understanding the timing between these poses.

Here’s my layout:

feedback: