Character Animation

Blocking Second Pass (part 2)
I have taken the second part of the sequence through the same process I described below. This time however I filmed some reference footage for the first shot because I was not happy with the blocking. I recorded myself repeating the dialogue several times on my webcam until I got a few interesting gestures. I especially wanted to get rid of the "For Me..." gesture where he put his hand on his chest. That just seemed too obvious and in fact when I acted it out, that was the last thing I would do when saying those words.

In fact it still needs some tweaking because I haven't captured the second part of that gesture properly, but this is looking much better and more interesting than before. Now I could do with some feedback before taking it further.
Next Installment: Splined

Character Animation

Software/Rig choice
Now that we have the audio file, we need to decide what we are going to animate with. If like me you decided to specialise in animation then you may not be able to model and rig your own character. That's ok though because there are a multitude of rigs out there built by clever people who do have those skills and are willing to share their generic/practice rigs for us animators to use. Just don't go using them for commercial or profit making films.

Here are some of the rigs I found at 11 second club. They have a great website where you can enter a character animation competition each month. Some rigs are better than others, the three in the middle of the above picture are the ones I have chosen. Partly because I have used them before and know they work well and partly because they fit the characters of the dialogue.

As you can see I have chosen to use MAYA. This is the program I am most comfortable with but there are a multitude of choices around. The best bet is to decide based on the industry standard software of the field you want to crack into. High end character animation almost always uses MAYA. Games animation would be 3DS Max. Investigate the companies you want to work at and see what they use.

Character Animation
A look at the process and progress of an animated scene.

It has been a while since I animated a really juicy dialogue shot in 3d animation so I've decided to create one as a centre piece for my show-reel. Since I always learned a lot from seeing other people's working method I thought I would also document it on this blog. I will try to go into as much detail as I can. Before we start I suggest you look at my current show-reel.

Picking the audio
To begin with you have to pick a piece of dialogue to animate. This is a very important part and there are many options. The industry standard method of creating a piece of character animation for a show-reel is to take a clip from a film or TV show or similar source, and animate a short clip in your own unique way. It is down to personal preference but you have to consider who you want to see it and how they may react so don't have anything offensive or nasty. I try not to pick anything too well known, if it is from the latest blockbuster film then your audience already has preconceptions of the audio. And if you're trying to out act Robert DeNiro you might come away looking a bit silly.

I have picked some audio from a podcast that I listen to. It is from the Ricky Gervais podcast and features Karl Pilkington and Steve Merchant. It is quite well known I suppose, but it has only ever been in audio format so you don't know how they would act it out themselves which gives me free reign to invent a performance.

There are a lot of clips I could have gone with but I narrowed it down to this 39 second clip. It has some very interesting rythm's and beats in the dialogue which is what you should look for and also it inspired me (probably the most important thing) and made me laugh. I would suggest a shorter clip if you are just starting to animate. About 10 seconds is good. But I want to go for something that requires some different camera shots and movement. We will see if I have taken on too much!