Having booked a stop motion camera I began doing this weeks exercise on block interaction and hopefully some work on the bouncing ball exercise or refining the pendulum stop motion. Whilst waiting to collect my camera I printed off storyboards from Blackboard to sketch out my story idea for this exercise. The idea I had was to have one block annoy the other block forcing said block to get angry and kick him away only to come back again to bite him and result in a chase away, in this I wanted to include some jumping effects with rigging so that I could get acquainted with the idea of using rigs in animation. I used storyboards because I knew I would need to sketch the story visually so that I could see how many frames it would take and make an estimated guess on how many shots to take. See below:
I set up the camera using the hand out guide into using the stop motion software and then worked on the animation and thankfully there were two cubes available for me to use in this animation. When taking the beginning shot I noticed that the camera had been set to taking 25 shots which whilst was an advantage in the beginning frames for the hold it later turned into a draw back when taking the other frames since I needed to run back through the animation frames and delete the remaining 24 frames to 1 frame which was very time consuming in the time I had with the equipment. I soon discovered later in the animation that I could change the shot count back to one via the settings in the program. However during the animation I realised that I needed a rig to accomplish my jumping actions and thankfully a student in the group was able to provide one that was already set out when he was done with it and said the rigs were kept within the store cupboard which wasn't always open.
The other issue was that the cubes needed holes in them in order to insert the rig to the cube however on the cubes that I was using there weren't any holes at all, thankfully the student suggested that I could use blue tack as a substitute but this meant I would need to take the shots quickly as I wouldn't have long before the cube would fall off due to the weight. When taking the frames I tried replicating a kicking motion from the cube by tilting it up first with plastercine under it then using the rig to lift and move it back and fourth to replicate the fast motion. This took time but I did this to the best of my ability. For the next frames I had a notion to do a close up shot of the first cube and have it facing the camera to show he was surprised to see the next cube back again. However this did have a down side if I proceeded I would possibly lose the position of the last few frames in the animation, but I noted the position of the previous frames and moved the camera tripod slightly forward and increased the zoom on the camera lens.
I set up the camera using the hand out guide into using the stop motion software and then worked on the animation and thankfully there were two cubes available for me to use in this animation. When taking the beginning shot I noticed that the camera had been set to taking 25 shots which whilst was an advantage in the beginning frames for the hold it later turned into a draw back when taking the other frames since I needed to run back through the animation frames and delete the remaining 24 frames to 1 frame which was very time consuming in the time I had with the equipment. I soon discovered later in the animation that I could change the shot count back to one via the settings in the program. However during the animation I realised that I needed a rig to accomplish my jumping actions and thankfully a student in the group was able to provide one that was already set out when he was done with it and said the rigs were kept within the store cupboard which wasn't always open. 
The other issue was that the cubes needed holes in them in order to insert the rig to the cube however on the cubes that I was using there weren't any holes at all, thankfully the student suggested that I could use blue tack as a substitute but this meant I would need to take the shots quickly as I wouldn't have long before the cube would fall off due to the weight. When taking the frames I tried replicating a kicking motion from the cube by tilting it up first with plastercine under it then using the rig to lift and move it back and fourth to replicate the fast motion. This took time but I did this to the best of my ability. For the next frames I had a notion to do a close up shot of the first cube and have it facing the camera to show he was surprised to see the next cube back again. However this did have a down side if I proceeded I would possibly lose the position of the last few frames in the animation, but I noted the position of the previous frames and moved the camera tripod slightly forward and increased the zoom on the camera lens.
I then noted that the first cubes face was the front face so that I wouldn't get confused when doing the looking back and fourth motion in surprise to see the cube. Once the shots were taken I pulled the camera back and placed it back into the correct position with the other frames acting as a reference in the animation. I thought at first it was the correct setting however when I came to doing the rig removal I realised I'd made a mistake. When finished I made one movie with the rigs and one without it so that I could show the difference between the two and even show my working in my blog post.
In terms of removing the rig I did some research into the feature in this particular software that allows me to remove the rigs and it was located in the tools section of the software under rig removal but there needed to be some settings for the frames that I needed to edit and the type was as follows
Tools-rig removal-Type-stored frames plus full resolution frames
According to the tutorial that I watched on youtube the key to getting the best result was to use the end frame which was blank without the blocks to capture the shadows and the exact colours of the background to make it blend in, then using an eraser tool you could carefully erase the rig, and make it appear like the cube was lifting by itself. This however was where things got complicated and where I regretted doing the close up shots as when trying the rig removal on the rigs the colours didn't seem to match up with the background as a result the removal on some frames wasn't very smooth in presentation. One way to work around this was to use the frames before the end frame, so that it would at least look smooth in the frames, however this was slightly difficult as the rigs and cube were in different positions. When erasing the rigs I had the option of either selecting that area with the selection tool so that the erasing would be confined to that selected area or to shrink the brush tool to compensate for confined areas.
Once completed these were saved and made into movies for my blog post, sadly though I didn't have time to work on other animations given the deadline for handing back the equipment. Looking back on this task I would think I did a good job in the animation and that I remembered a feature within the animation software that is being used in this course that helped in terms of the rig removal without the possible use of After Effects.
In terms of improvement I would possibly have not used close up shots if it meant compromising the rig removal of the animation and perhaps look at the cubes before using them in the animation in terms of using rigs. One other element would be to add faces to the characters or mark them with colours to tell which was which. However I would think I did very good and hopefully the feed back on this activity could help me refine the animation story or the speed and timing. The next task which was Ball bouncing, I would need to seek more information on in order to know how to do it in stop motion but perhaps using maya first will give me a basic idea on frames and positions.
final stopmotion vid.
Maya exercise:
In terms of doing block interaction in Maya, the process would be slightly different and Joe informed me that the block interaction for this version could be done differently. So in the Maya version I would have one cube shove the other, and the second cube shove the first which would then turn into an all out fight of strength pushing each other back much like Triceratops do when competing for mating rights. I sketched out a storyboard then worked on Maya. From the catch and throw test, this involved using two polygon shapes and setting the frames on each object. As I progressed synching the two together in terms of the clashing was very difficult as both cubes had to stay together and when translating key frame Z it was getting more and more difficult to make them move together as they were at times not moving in synch or even moving at all.
Thankfully though I calmed myself down and worked out the issue by selecting both cubes at once using the selection tool and holding the shift key, this allowed me to move the blocks together. Once completed I ran over the animation and it seemed to work very well. However looking back its clear that I would still need some practice in terms of animating more than one object in Maya, which may indeed be something we later learn on the university course. However this was the point to learn from our work and mistakes and be ready for refining them.
Maya block interaction.
In terms of doing block interaction in Maya, the process would be slightly different and Joe informed me that the block interaction for this version could be done differently. So in the Maya version I would have one cube shove the other, and the second cube shove the first which would then turn into an all out fight of strength pushing each other back much like Triceratops do when competing for mating rights. I sketched out a storyboard then worked on Maya. From the catch and throw test, this involved using two polygon shapes and setting the frames on each object. As I progressed synching the two together in terms of the clashing was very difficult as both cubes had to stay together and when translating key frame Z it was getting more and more difficult to make them move together as they were at times not moving in synch or even moving at all.
Thankfully though I calmed myself down and worked out the issue by selecting both cubes at once using the selection tool and holding the shift key, this allowed me to move the blocks together. Once completed I ran over the animation and it seemed to work very well. However looking back its clear that I would still need some practice in terms of animating more than one object in Maya, which may indeed be something we later learn on the university course. However this was the point to learn from our work and mistakes and be ready for refining them.
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