My free period task this week was to work on doing some tracking work for our 3D animated environments. The plan being I would animate the bees then using what I'd learned from the After effects workshops in the first few weeks I would create the bee flying through the 3D environment that Stephan had done earlier.
The rendered animated environment were in the google drive for our group. I downloaded them and set to work. I decided to animate the bees from my turnaround sheet as we would be working from different angles in the story. I animated in Adobe Animate as I felt this might change what I'd already attempted in After effects to see if I could improve. I made the bee in separate layers in photoshop, imported the piece into Animate then animated the wings and body parts one by one. The wings would be done in an arcing motion and I duplicated the frames on each wing to save doing the process over and over.
At first the finished piece was saved as an SWF file as I learned from past experience the file wouldn't have a background. I opened this and the 3D environment in After effects. Using the notes I'd taken in the workshop I tried to replicate the tracking exercise. I remembered the track and stabilise option right clicking on the 3D footage layer and the tracking square appeared. I aligned the square to the black circle in the shot which Stephan used to mark the bee. By clicking apply the marker followed the black circle.
However while applying it on the bee, it wouldn't play along it was frozen. I therefore tried an MP4 version and tried using the key light effect on the piece. However the background wasn't green and I couldn't green screen. The solution was to make the stage in animate green so when I imported the MP4 file into After effects the keying effect would work. One benefit was it changed the colours to that of the environment.
I felt this was a happy accident as it worked in synch with the environment. Whilst the bee flew through the animated environment I used the scale and rotation transform options to make the bee look like it was avoiding certain elements in the background. I rather engaged with my task as I was editing two different animation styles together.
I felt rather pleased with the end result of the tracking exercise, I was confident I could translate these skills to the other animated environments.
One thing I was concerned about when doing the bee in animate was the time it was taking when animating the layers one by one. One other thing was the movement of the legs as the body was moving up and down to show the bee flying as the body moves. In hindsight I should've done the leg parts separately instead of one layer as it looked like a shadow puppet. However this in my view was an animation test which was what Annabeth suggested we approached.
Like the fly through the football field shot was rather simple to do using the tracking motion elements.
However when doing the opening shot I had a small problem. The black dot goes behind a sheet or grass. I remembered a trick about adjusting the footage to show the character going behind something but my notes didn't give much detail about this. Therefore I had to resort to old fashion methods of using the scale and opacity transform function. When I showed this to the group on our messenger chat Stephan didn't seem to pleased with this. However he admitted this had something to do with the speed of the shot.This is something we may have to discuss about on Friday.
Later he had done a birds eye view of the pond for an angled animation. However to me it seemed a little high up for what we were doing. Never the less I used the tracking methods on the scene. However like the opening shot I encountered an issue the tracking block didn't follow the dot and I had to reposition it myself and this time it followed the dot but when the bee for that shot was applied it didn't follow the circle very well.
However I corrected this and the scenes were finished.
Looking back I was rather pleased with the work that I had done for the project. However looking back I feel I could have improved on some areas. One of which would've been on animating the bees. I felt that each of them were different when I animated them in animate CC such as the legs being further apart or the body moving at a fast or slow pace. This use of 2D and green screen however confirmed that this was a method Kieran and I could use when animating our characters in the animation.
In addition whilst I couldn't remember all the details of the tracking tutorial I did remember some of the key elements and used them very well. I could see exactly why were were taught this in the first few weeks for elements just like this.
In conclusion I had done a good job at the animation in the bees and scene and look forward to translating similar elements into the next few backgrounds of our animation. It seemed our project was beginning to come to life.
In future I shall take more detailed notes on exercises like the tracking in after effects to better help me if I applied them to our future projects.
The rendered animated environment were in the google drive for our group. I downloaded them and set to work. I decided to animate the bees from my turnaround sheet as we would be working from different angles in the story. I animated in Adobe Animate as I felt this might change what I'd already attempted in After effects to see if I could improve. I made the bee in separate layers in photoshop, imported the piece into Animate then animated the wings and body parts one by one. The wings would be done in an arcing motion and I duplicated the frames on each wing to save doing the process over and over.
At first the finished piece was saved as an SWF file as I learned from past experience the file wouldn't have a background. I opened this and the 3D environment in After effects. Using the notes I'd taken in the workshop I tried to replicate the tracking exercise. I remembered the track and stabilise option right clicking on the 3D footage layer and the tracking square appeared. I aligned the square to the black circle in the shot which Stephan used to mark the bee. By clicking apply the marker followed the black circle.
However while applying it on the bee, it wouldn't play along it was frozen. I therefore tried an MP4 version and tried using the key light effect on the piece. However the background wasn't green and I couldn't green screen. The solution was to make the stage in animate green so when I imported the MP4 file into After effects the keying effect would work. One benefit was it changed the colours to that of the environment.
I felt this was a happy accident as it worked in synch with the environment. Whilst the bee flew through the animated environment I used the scale and rotation transform options to make the bee look like it was avoiding certain elements in the background. I rather engaged with my task as I was editing two different animation styles together.
One thing I was concerned about when doing the bee in animate was the time it was taking when animating the layers one by one. One other thing was the movement of the legs as the body was moving up and down to show the bee flying as the body moves. In hindsight I should've done the leg parts separately instead of one layer as it looked like a shadow puppet. However this in my view was an animation test which was what Annabeth suggested we approached.
Like the fly through the football field shot was rather simple to do using the tracking motion elements.
However when doing the opening shot I had a small problem. The black dot goes behind a sheet or grass. I remembered a trick about adjusting the footage to show the character going behind something but my notes didn't give much detail about this. Therefore I had to resort to old fashion methods of using the scale and opacity transform function. When I showed this to the group on our messenger chat Stephan didn't seem to pleased with this. However he admitted this had something to do with the speed of the shot.This is something we may have to discuss about on Friday.
Later he had done a birds eye view of the pond for an angled animation. However to me it seemed a little high up for what we were doing. Never the less I used the tracking methods on the scene. However like the opening shot I encountered an issue the tracking block didn't follow the dot and I had to reposition it myself and this time it followed the dot but when the bee for that shot was applied it didn't follow the circle very well.
However I corrected this and the scenes were finished.
Looking back I was rather pleased with the work that I had done for the project. However looking back I feel I could have improved on some areas. One of which would've been on animating the bees. I felt that each of them were different when I animated them in animate CC such as the legs being further apart or the body moving at a fast or slow pace. This use of 2D and green screen however confirmed that this was a method Kieran and I could use when animating our characters in the animation.
In addition whilst I couldn't remember all the details of the tracking tutorial I did remember some of the key elements and used them very well. I could see exactly why were were taught this in the first few weeks for elements just like this.
In conclusion I had done a good job at the animation in the bees and scene and look forward to translating similar elements into the next few backgrounds of our animation. It seemed our project was beginning to come to life.
In future I shall take more detailed notes on exercises like the tracking in after effects to better help me if I applied them to our future projects.
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