Skip to main content

Prop Animation

Alongside our character animation, there is more to our scene that just an environment and moving characters.  The assets that these characters engage and draw attention to, also play an important part in the overall dynamic and quality of the story.  Assets such as the coffee pot, paper, crayons, clock, cloth and menu are some of the elements of our project that also need to be animated and worked with in partnership with our characters.

 Within this blog, I will discuss the process of animating these elements and provide playblast videos of what these models look like in action.


Firstly, our menu.  The menu has been talked about a lot ever since we have our story line finalised way back in October.  We never really tied down how this object would appear, how it would animate and what features it would have.  Originally, the AI waitress would pull the menu out from behind her back when welcoming us, set it on the table and it would come to life.  After this proved difficult, I decided it would be best to have the menu already on the table, and then the AI would mention it and wave her hand to activate it in front of us.

 The issue we had with this is that many of our user testers wanted to touch this menu and interact with it.  Especially because our AI welcomes the user to explore the menu.  We needed to introduce a warning into the scene that informed the user that interaction had not yet been developed.  This lowered the desire to touch the menu.  Below is a look at the menu animation that has been created for the scene.  It appears, spins and disappears after the little girl starts to get aggravated.

Another key asset from our animation is that of the mug that the young man uses throughout the scene.  He takes a drink and moves the mug within my section of animation.  I struggled to get the mug to stay in his hand but with intricate key framing, we got there eventually.  Below is a screen grab video of the animated mug -

After animating my section, I realised that our AI waitress was missing something.  While she is cleaning the tables, she is just moving her hand across the table...we forgot to model a cloth.  I threw together a quick, low poly cloth model to be brought into the scene and paired with the waitress's hand to make it as if she is cleaning the tables.  Below is the cloth animated -


Below is a GIF image I got from Cassie's blog and it features some of the page animation I completed that would feature within the girl's section of narrative.

ezgif.com-video-to-gif (1)

The last asset I want to discuss in this post, is the coffee pot.  The coffee pot plays a big part in the first glitch of our narrative.  It is important that this animation was smooth and linked up well with the actions of the AI waitress.  Below is the animated coffee pot after it was exported from the AI animation -

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Optimising Models

To optimise our scene even further, myself and our Director, Cassie, decided to start deleting faces for various models in our scene that are never seen by the user.  These are mainly on furniture, large counters, table items, counter items, fridge and kitchen door.  In this blog, I will post the videos of a few of the newly optimised models, some images from the process and explanations from other blogs and videos I watched as to how basic models need to be to ensure our scene is optimised as much as it can be. I found the article from Evermotion on optimising scenes to be very helpful in giving me the knowledge and understanding of why optimisation is such a large part of a project such as ours.  The real time rendering that we will be using within unity is processing a lot of information at one time.  If a project has a lot of textures, geometry and animation, this can be described as an expensive project.  Not that it costs a lot of money, but rather i...
Post a Comment
Read more

CV and Business Card

Before heading into the big bad world of employment and potential freelance work, it is essential we leaving Undergraduate level with a professional portfolio of components we can use to sell our skills and help put us on the industry map to propel us towards a future career. This is in regards to two main pieces of self promotion.  The CV and business card.  It is important we have these designed, printed and accessible on the night of our end of year show so that company reps, directors and other industry members can view our projects and then take something tangible away from it to remember who we are and what we are capable of. When it comes to CV, I have always been taught through my years of business orientated education that it is simple, clean and not overly creative.  I was always taught that colour is tacky, images are resented and icons are acceptable but need to remain minimal.  When I approached this initial design stage of an updated and a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Expressions and Animation Testing

As key posing and refining animation have begun and have progressed, myself, Lorna and Megan who are animating our narrative, decided we needed to gather a larger collection of research.  For this research, we wanted to gain both primary and secondary assets that could be used to assist us in giving our characters life, personality and attitude.  We knew that the best way to do this, yes, is the way the voices are recorded and spoken, but from an animation perspective, it all comes down to body language and emotional expressions. With this in mind, we set out to gather our own, and trusted research material that could be used as reference for us as we develop our animations.  Firstly, we captured images of our own faces portraying various emotions as we see them.  Secondly we were fortunate enough to receive a book full of expressions and references from our tutor Henry, and this was so valuable to us and we took many photos of the emotions and shared them on ou...
Post a Comment
Read more