Starting at AnimSchool

In the end of last year I took all of my half baked university animation projects that I could use and gave them some polish. Here is the demo reel that was compiled out of them and submitted to Animschool:


todorImreorov- Animschool application video
4 or 5 hours after I submitted this, I was accepted in the 3d character animation program.

Now you may ask yourself- why did I apply at another animation school when in fact I just graduated from The University of Bradford - 3d computer animation bachelor degree- with a first class honors in 3d animation? I even got an award from the university- for excellence in education.

The reason is simple. The University of Bradford is an excellent place, where you get to learn many of the aspects of the entire pipeline of 3d animation and cinema/media theory. You can not however specialize in one thing- that being character animation - the thing at the end of the pipeline. 

The University gave me the materials to do so on my own (the library and the software), but not the time -

 in every single 3d animation class we had to model the character, build the rig, optionally texture, build the background,etc etc. Leaving a week or two for animating. 

Final year was also full of too many projects to tackle. That was partly my own fault too.

So I came out of university with a lot of half baked animation shots and the SODA TRIP project- half finished as well. I didn't get to learn and practice a lot of the theory that I still need in order to consider my animation showreel worthy of a good job application.

Some old progress on the Soda Trip project - cartoony character texturing.
Note that Soda Trip is still under development - as a hobby project!

Animschool is a prestigious online course, ran by Dreamworks, Disney, Blue sky, Pixar and other big studio animators. It's a school that doesn't let you graduate if your showreel is not at a level that makes you employable. They have strict quality control and reputation - with complete focus on animation. No rigging or modelling (for the "animate characters" course, they also have a separate "build characters" course too).

From now on I am going to be placing my focus on graduating from Animschool with a better animation showreel. You will start to see more animation work related posts in the future. I know that recently I have been posting a lot of general 3d and even game/software design related stuff.
Yes, the name of this blog is animation diary after all. :)

Here are some of the other prestigious online courses for 3d character animation:

Animation Mentor- The oldest of 3d animation courses. Founded by Pixar animators.
IAnimate- Highly competitive course with a lot of good rep. This was a close call for me. They have a great "game animation" class that focuses on animation for video games.

They are all excellent choices. I went with Animschool out of a hunch really. It's probably best to research them yourself and see the differences before picking one. Please don't ask me for opinion on which is the best. They are all really really good, but also expensive and not that easy to get into. Also I can't really compare them without being in all. This is a highly subjective matter.

And finally here is something I made while playing with Renoise DAW. It's a small music piece made for fun and to learn Renoise.

Reusing 3d animation and rigs for games - research report for university

One of the university modules in this semester had for an (optional) assignment the research of reusing character rigs and animation to be imported to a game's engine.

I was given a deadline to write a greenlight pitch, a research paper (almost 30 pages!) and then create a technical demo video.

 It's pretty much do it yourself sort of a thing set by university(just as many other things).

In this case before even delving into reusing animation clips, I decided that it's more important to find out what exactly are the best practices in character rigging and animation for game engines - where the data has to be created in a specific way that will make it friendly to use by the programmers and the engine.

In the research paper I used for sources the excellent presentations on animation in Uncharted 2 by naughty dog, among  other things.It was a bit rushed so It got me 64.4% .

For the video, I used kdenlive to put together a quick overview of the findings of experimenting with some of the tools in Maya:

http://youtu.be/YOuWO8My84c

That got me 85 % .

The paper and the video focus on the work that is done in the animation package rather than the game engine. I have in the past done character modelling, rigging and animation for Unity 3d. That first experience was a bit of a trial and error - the animation data needed to fit with how the character actor is scripted.It's something that I will keep fo a future post, until there is time to put together a demo of that game.

D4i-term1 - Car safety game for Himex

One of the final year modules of the University of Bradford is to work in a team (of 4-6 students) to deliver a product to a real client (with a deadline, for free).

The team that I joined is made of 6 people:
- 2 programmers.
- 3 environment artist/modellers/generalists.
- 1 animator/illustrator- me.

In this blog I have decided to (selfishly) write only about my own contributions to our projects.
This is to avoid any unconvenience on the other member's side - maybe they dont want me to say this or that. Also there is a lot to write and it's best to pick my battles when it comes to this blog. Posts are LONG as it is.Other team members have their own blogs and time to write.

We all did a BELBIN test before having permission to form a team.
My Belbin results (strengths that are also my weaknesses according to the test) gave out the impression that I am good at:

The Belbin team report had this to say for my role in the team:
"should do most of the problem solving or be responsible for coming up with any new
ideas and suggesting solutions to the rest of the team."

My technical role in the team is Illustrator,Animator, Character modelling.

As a start, my job was to design a T-shirt picture to be used to present our team.The idea of the shirt and branding is by the whole team :

I did this with inkscape, as usual. There was a limitation of the number of colours for printing

Produced a number of variations for the rest of the team to vote on. The catch phrases and the name (like a sir) were some of the other team member's ideas. We tend to end most of our presentations with a bad pun joke involving cheese. it's important to leave a smile there.

.
I was team leader during Term one, but I asked to step down from that position and focus on animation for term two. Leading a team can become stressful - I dont have the time and energy to do a great job at it, while also contributing so much to development. It doesnt really give you any power if thats what you think - a good team leader shouldn't force ideas but rather keep people on topic during the meetings, keep everyone heard and make sure that everyone is on track and knows what they're doing.


What the experience taught me is that a group leader is someone who is passionate about and good at organising other people. Someone who constantly keeps motivating others and reminds them where they should be at a given moment with their work.
So it was a tough job ,especially when there is no office place and everyone is just juggling with uni work.
In industry that person who organises things would be the producer. He or she would elect who should be in charge of what and keep everyone in line, keep communication between the people and so on.
Not a job for the ideas person.
The group leader should not be personally biased by ideas, but should make decisions based on what's best for the project and sometimes what would keep everyone happy.


There is also a lot of infrastructure organisation  that I really am not good at and other team members did instead of me.

So each term has one project. The project in term one was to deliver a game pitch to HIMEX - a car insurance company- for a game that brings awareness about car accidents. The target audience is young drivers. Teens. This is the client's brief.

Everyone in the team proposed a game idea. This is what I proposed initially - two ideas.
They were fed into a team discussion and everyone from the team added some really great ideas to make it more fun.
We decided that an IOS game will need simpler contros. I pitched for a pacman like design where the car moves indefinetelly by default and you turn left and right by timing your tap at the turns.

This is the second presentation we made...
Everyone had a say what goes on each slide, but we divided who does and presents each slide in the 15 minute slot.
The slides that are in GREY are the ones that I mostly worked on.They are half arsed because of me.

For the final presentation, we used Prezi.
I didnt do a lot on it, but gather images.Some things were changed for the game pitch, based on the team's decisions, a public questionaire of the target audience (over 80 people) and the client's feedback from the last presentation.A number of new devices were added to the game idea and some designs were removed.I presented the game pitch slide only.

The presentation was a success. The client just gave us a lot of praise and no critical feedback(alas).
It's in no way a complete design document and does have it's quirks, but what went in there as a pitch really left Himex impressed and "inspired" to make a game.

However, we are not going to be developing this game for Himex, because we already have Team 17 as a client for term2's design for industry project. But let's leave that for other posts when the subject has matured enough..:)

Summer ends and project Piggy bank

Well, I worked all summer. No, it wasnt for a studio or anything like it. So I couldnt get more good stuff to put in my portfolio. So there is a lot of catching up for me to do now.


My 2d and 3d animation (malfunction and Stoneage) were shown at a couple of festivals, one of which the Moscow festival of Contemporary Animation . Unfortunately their website is in flash, so in order to see my entry, you need to go to English>Participant2010> and I am under number 44



EDIT: Just received a honorary letter from the general Producer of the festival.




And while being at it, here is a screenshot of the finalists page of CG coach awards, where you will find me listed. I am putting it on a screenshot, just in case they take the website down.


Second year of university started and I've been busy doing all sorts of class assignments. Somehow inbetween the whole chaos, there is still time for me to have fun with new software.

Let me first start with whats my homework for this semester. A 30 second (tops!) 3d animated film featuring a girl lifting a heavy object. I already had two storyboards which I was eager to do, but then a certain someone decided that students should have less choice. So the tutor gave me a list of types of characters and things they can possibly do.
This was the one that:
a) everyone else was not doing
b) tolerable (one of them "auditioning for x factor" urgh and they expect me to do it without any voice/sound)

So I picked the girl scenario and quickly scribbled this storyboard literally a couple of hours before the deadline:
https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B4WmGlTeh8z8ZTJhOTg1N2ItYjBmMi00MzRlLTgyM2EtNWQ1ZmY3NGE2ZTE3
I still feel that the ending is weak. Maybe I can change it somehow.

And here is the concept art that I made:


Made with my favorite open source painting app- Mypaint

And then I modeled the girl with zbrush, fixed her topology on the hands and added detail in Maya. The retopology tool in zbrush 3 would create holes in the area of the hands. So the easiest approach there is to just do the tricky parts in Maya or blender.

Next on is UV mapping and texturing. Since the character is with a cartoony design, I decided to avoid putting much realistic details. With 3d its very easy and tempting to make the model pointlessly detailed, but less can be more in this case. UV mapping and texturing was done in Blender 2.54 and took a couple of hours.



I decided to give the new Blender a try, because it has some tools that are better than Maya's at the moment. Uv unwrapping and sculpting mode are especially nice in blender. My hope to see a better sculpting mode in Maya is almost nonexistent since Autodesk also owns Mudbox and likes it when people keep buying it.:P So yeah, its also 0$. Of course it has some annoyances and quirks, but the more I use it the easier it gets. Texturing mode in blender lacks symetry, or at least I couldnt find it. Also pressure sensitivity for my tablet model didnt work, so I made the simplest most basic texture possible.



Her shape still needs some tuning. I will use belnder's sculpting mode to fix the hips/legs and head. I noticed that when I import it and soften the edge normals in Maya, her proportions look kind of different to the eye. That might need some adjusting too.

My goals with this animation are:
-learn Blender 2.5 and integrate it in the pipeline (70% done- I need to learn more)
-use maya dynamics - Maya hair or Maya cloth, but keep it very cheap on CPU/render time. Do that after the animation is complete.
Deadline is till the end of semester one. This new knowledge will help me create the next project- a storyboard that I've been working on for a while now.

Look back at the past few months and plans for the summer

What, no shiny pictures this time? I decided to take a step back and look at the achievements this year. I will also look at the things that need some more work.

University first year is over, and while I didn't complete everything I wanted to complete, it was a fairly successful year for me.

The "Malfunction" aka "Toast!" flash animation:
I taught myself the new rigging capabilities of flash. I also met all the bugs that cs4 had to offer.
Time to complete: 1 week storyboard + 1 week for the drawings(character libraries) +1 week to animate= 3 weeks.

Then after it was completed I had to cut it down from 90 to 30 seconds. Cutting it down brought me to my first encounter with Adobe after effects. That was a valuable lesson, which helped me do the next project- Stoneage.

"Malfunction" was sent to one festival this far.

Things I can improve in it- some of the shots need refinement. The continuity of action is not perfect. I think of adding some shots in the beginning.

Stoneage - 3d animation short
Stoneage took about a month + 1 week to complete.

here is an improved render:

stoneage - 2010 from todor imreorov on Vimeo.

It was submitted to a CG contest. And It qualified me as a finalist in excellence in rigging category!! Now I am competing with final year students and people who have graduated (twice even). People with enormous amount of experience behind them. Just look at the list:
http://www.cgcoach.com/beta/cgsa/finalists/category/excellence-in-riggingtd.html
I am the guy with the robot avatar. My character set ups has to be the simplest of the lot. What I believe makes them good is exactly how simple and clear, but effective they are. The characters did everything that I needed for the 1 minute short.
The first and second prizes for this contest are both Internships at big studios in London! I can only hope now.

On the other hand, I couldn't qualify at the animation category and I don't blame them for that. The animation in stoneage is far from good.

I kind of ruined some of the shots in the last minute before rendering.
Some of my tutors told me to speed it up and make some changes. It was in the last moment, so the hasty changes to the old shots were bad. I scaled and snapped some keyframes, causing choppiness in the run cycle. Also messed up some of the key poses. The splines are hardly tuned or refined. Stoneage needs some work before I feel safe to send it to the festivals this year. Before making the refinements, I decided to spend some time looking into more professional ways of working on animation in Maya. For that purpose I chose the best tutorials that one could possibly find in the library- the book "How to cheat in Maya 2010 - tools and techniques for the Maya animator- by Eric Luhta.


By the time I was making these short animations, I got invitations from a bunch of festivals:

* Halifax,uk- "fundada artists film festival 2010" - deadline 31 may

* Moscow - "International Fest of Contemporary animation & media-art LINOLEUM" - deadline 1st of september

* Uk - Flip animation festival (email from Mark Goodliff)- deadline - july 9th

* animation festival "Anifest 2010" based in Canterbury (email from Mark again) - deadline 17th september

* Project twenty1- USA. This one is actually pay to get in event, and involves traveling to the states, so I will skip it for now.

Whats next for the summer?
One in my list is refining Stoneage before sending it to the festivals. If I win the cgcoach award, it will be one interesting summer for me.

Finding a job is high in my priority list, since I need it badly in order to stay in the UK- pay for rent and food next year. I dont want to rely on my dad and bursaries. I will stand on my own two feet.
Refining some of the skills that I need is the second priority:
Get faster at the modelling and texturing pipeline. Learn maya hair, cloth and how to add some automated secondary motion that is fairly clean , controllable and not too expensive as cpu power goes. I have already started research on those topics months ago. My tutor prohibited me from using any dynamics or overly complicated things in my rigs for the animation assignment. Now that the animation assignment is over, I can experiment with those features freely.

I am also planning my second year animation from now on. There is already a story for it, and there are some weird things that I need to make maya do in order to achieve the quirky shots. Before looking into those, I will take my time to build the set and the characters. Having that plus the animatic will earn me some interest and support for the project in the future.

Cave dude - the set up

I finished the cave man's set up completely a couple of days ago, but forgot to rant about it. There is still more to desire in regards to the skinning, but meh..

Here are some of the controls that I have set up. I know its pretty basic but it's my first rigging/skinning work ever. Took less than a week...










And while being at it, I guess I will also show you my progress on the other character. Just to experiment,I decided to use a mel script to generate a rig for me this time. It's called the setup machine2...But of course what I got out of it was overcomplicated and had some joint orientation issues.,so I deleted half of the rig (legs) and redid them myself. That also took care of the skinning issue it gave me.



blend shapes are prepared for applying after i get the weights right...

Mammoth mesh

Yesterday I created a mesh for the second character of my upcomming animation short for Bradford University. The mammoth is a low-poly mesh that consists of 820 quads, 4 textures and uv maps. I did the whole thing from scratch in 5 hours, using mainly Maya, but also Z-brush for the UV mapping and Photoshop for the texturing and transparency maps.



You can see a better quality render at my flickr gallery, which is previewed in a small window on the left side of this blog.

I found out how to embed 3d in flash content, so from now on, I will be able to post actual 3d viewers instead of static pictures :P

Exporting the animation to video file, compression settings and colors

The last part of the job was of course getting a video file out of flash.



FPS---
The first problem I had was with the fps in the video file. Since the animation of Toast!/malfunction had movie clips with applied effects on them (some of the backgrounds) that really slowed it down. To get over that problem, I exported the background as jpg and imported it back to my libraries and replaced the movie clips with jpg files. Don't use too many effects on your movie clip symbols, that will slow it down. The ending result still had some slight slow downs on some of the shots. The slow downs didn't occur in the swf file, which leads me to believe that it had something to do with the way flash renders the animation to video files. I could still play with the settings there.

Encoding--
The second problem was getting a small file size with a relatively good quality. The defaut settings of exporting a mov file will give you a huge file,that is not internet-friendly. I had to set up three things (quicktime settings):

>settings: compression type:mpeg4 video,quality:best
>filter: you can play with the color settings ,but this will slow down the rendering time,so I didnt use any filters.
>size: 720x576 PAL , 4x3 , keep aspect ration with letterbox

>sound> I didnt touch the sound settings

Colour--
I had to go and upload the file at Bradford university's horton labs. One thing those computers are useful for is downloading and uploading. After seeing the animation again, I found out that the colours look awful there. The boy's shirt was over saturated red, the robot's head is too purple. The lesson to be learned here was monitor calibration. While drawing my character's , I should have thought more about how they are going to look like on other people's screens. I have to find out- is the monitor at the labs set up badly or is it my own monitor. I tend to set mine in a way that doesnt strain my eyes. Changing the default settings to lower saturation, I also lower my brightness and contrast slightly. The weird thing was that it also had a slightly different hue (the robot's purple head). All and all, after I fix all the annoyances of the animation, I will export it properly as a big file and edit and encode it with Adobe after effects.

Adding sound to Toast! animation

The name of Toast! was changed to "Malfunction". Decided that I don't want to give away the ending too much with the title.


Adding sound to the animation

The sound in Toast! is really low on quality standards. After seeing it for the first time with sound, I thought that it was horrible.

Some of the sound effects were recorded by myself. For the robot , I used the creaking door of the kitchen at the halls. The title screen sound was made by a real empty tin can (from mexican beans) and a pencil.




The bucket sounds, electricity and so on were taken from the internet, after carefully examining their license.

The Music in the end is made by me, with my Nintendo ds. I used "Jam sessions" imitation of guitar. You might notice that the rhythm is the same as the title sceen sound.



The voices were recorded and edited with Audacity. My brother did his goofy/mickey mouse rip-off voice, as my voice is too deep to imitate a boy's.

All and all, I hate the sound in "Malfunction". It's messy and badly edited.You can even hear some static sounds in the background. Flash has a real nice way of setting the volume ease out and ease in and I played with that too alot.

Toast! storyboard ver1

Today I got some valuable feedback for the storyboard from my animation tutor at uni, who also has a blog here . He liked my storyboard. I am really glad that there is someone like him to show it to, because he's a guy with experience and his feedback is valuable..

Here is what I got this far:
First of all, the rules of my assignment do not allow me to make the animation longer than 30 seconds. But I have too many shots put in that small time window.And the duration of some of the shots is too short. So 10 seconds must go. For that I must cut out some of the first shots. Some other scenes need a slight change in the camera and the composition (more space between and around characters).


after thinking about it, I decided to make a short version of my animation (for the module assignment) and later a longer one which will be as much as at least 2 minutes!

Before editing my storyboard , I would like to post it in the name of good documentation and progress evaluation. So here it is, no revisions- purely as it came out of my mind:

Toast! storyboard ver1 01.02.2010



I used software called Toonboom storyboard to do it. You can download a trial version, but you should export your work as a video/pdf before you close the app, because if it has over 30 panels, you are not going to be able to open it again.

It's a really awesome application for storyboards- simple and powerful. This storyboard took about 2 hours to make with it.