sally animation tests

We got the sally rig yay =D and as i have been assigned animation director before me and jen started animating the shots that contained only sally in i needed to make some test animations. This is so that when we started animating both of us had an idea of how sally would move. Then with the actual shots in the film the animation would flow and the viewer hopefully won't be able to tell a difference between who has been animating what.  

With Sally's personality we need to show her cute and playful side so with the walk i tried to make it bouncy. One of the problems with spiders is that people are freaked out by the way they move so i tried to make her not scary in her movements which i think works with this test walk. sally's walk was a challenge as the swaying i gave her made her look like she was strutting or a gangster which wasn't what i wanted but think it worked out alright in the end.

I then went on to making test animations of sally pushing and pulling something. The push test i kept simple and she reminded me of a puppy while animating it as i gave her a bit of a bum wiggle before she went to push. I think this shows she has a playful personality.

I really enjoyed animating the pull test as i played around a bit more and i like the part where sally pulls the key and the first look at the key shows her interest. However i wasn't happy with bits of the animation like the second look at the key at the beginning didn't really work for me but didn't really know what to add either which was annoying. Also after showing the tests at the production meeting they commented on how sally rubbing her hands in preparation to pull the key doesn't really come across and that her personality doesn't really show very clearly in this animation. Which i completely agree with and if i had more time i would of liked to alter it but it is still a good reference for how sally would pull something and the comments are really helpful for when we work on the actual animation. I really enjoyed animating these tests specially as have been excited to play with the rig and has been quite a while since i have been animating. I was impressed with the sally rig as well as dan is learning as he has been rigging the character and she was very easy to use and there wasn't that many problems with her that needed fixing which was great =D.

Spider clips

As me and jenny will be animating sally soon YAY!!!!! we decided to look up clips of spiders movements to help us. Georg had given us a video of the spider animation and heres a clip 

i remembered watching this episode when i was little and still remembered the tune haha =D the spider in this animation uses exaggerated comic movements which show his character very well. I think this style of movements would work really well for sally. I then tried to think of other animations that used spiders to get different ideas of styles of movement and thought James and the Giant Peach!!! which i haven't seen for ages and really want to watch now!! and heres a clip i found of some test animations of Miss Spider

Completely different style of movement compared with the previous animation as well as being stop motion the movements are less comical and she walks more lady like...... in a spider way =D I then tried to think of a 3D animation with a spider and could only think of Charlotte's web and heres the trailer and skip to 1:10 to see the spider

Her movements are more realistic. I think that sally would work well with more comic movements seen in the first animation but perhaps a little bit more realistic in movement.

and finally here is some footage of a real life spider

cuckcoo clock animated

textured environment

The environment is now pretty much textured well done to harriet =)

unfortunately we have had a few issues as one the render time was taking a very long time and one of the reasons Pete found out was that our textures were very big in file size!! so me and jenny had to resize all of the textures.....but now the render time has been decreased because of this so its all goood =D

another problem we've found is that when me and jenny check the textures on our own computers for one of us there might not be a texture but for the other there is.....which makes no sense sometimes but ah wells!! worked around it as i have now checked and changed issues with the environment and hopefully it will be okay now (fingers crossed) and here are some renders. It does have lighting added by pete in the renders but this isn't the final lighting but gives an idea.

web bow, hook string modelled

jenny modelled the hook to add for the last wind up web shot and i modeled the web bow and string to hang from the hook which will have toys hanging from it.

UV unwrap change, Environment problems and textured environment part 1

For the moment no more animating has been done as the characters are still being rigged but we have come across some problems to keep us busy. We found out that there was a problem with the UVs in our environment as they were not right for when we give them to harriet to texture. So me and jenny adjusted the UVs for the objects that needed to be detailed in the animation so that they are now right to be textured. We then updated the objects in the environment however for some reason which we can not make sense of everything decided to move around and disappear and do all sorts of weird things. So jenny ended up moving everything back while i applied the textures that harriet had finished for the ferris wheel shot that jenny animated. Then i tried to open the environment when the textures were applied and it froze my computer =/ so we will have to see if there is something that we are doing wrong when we next see georg. I will put up an image of the environment with the textures applied so far soon.

animating shots so far

so far i have animated

• the ball flying through the air after being shot from the catapult,
• the end web wind up scene (without web at the moment)  
• POV jack in a box scene. 

The POV jack in a box scene i enjoyed animating the most as it was fun to make that come to life. The problems i had with this scene was getting the movements to be more exaggerated without pushing the rig to far. I feel the timing is working well with this scene. Another problem was getting the camera angle right for this shot as he needs to jump out at the audience but think this angle works well. It will be interesting to see what this shot looks like when it is textured and lit.

The end we wind up scene needs to be added to as we need to add the web that winds around the pencil display. We have had a talk with georg about it and he said he was going to think of ways to achieve this. In the meantime though we have decided that we want to make this scene more interesting for example we were going to have the web tied up in bows and hanging through washers to keep it up. Also we are going to add some hooks around the pencil display on the shelves so that the web can wrap arond these and hang some toys from them. So far though the scene is working well the main problem i had with this shot was getting the camera to run smoothly as for some reason there was a hiccup when it was rotating around. I tried looking at the motion trail (which i have never used) to see what was happening and i sorted it out by looking at the movements on the graph (which i also couldn't remember how to use as haven't touched since first looking at it opps) and worked out how to make the movements smoother. It was a lot easier adjusting it on the graph so this scene ended up being a learning curve. 

The flying ball scene is also not finished yet as we need to add Frankie who also needs to be added in the web wind up scene.

Im looking forward to getting to be able to animate sally and frankie.