Joe Rule

Well, the first semester of my junior year is over. This is my final project for my 3D modeling and animation class. Character animation and rigging was a subject that we did not cover in depth in class, but I decided to extend the curriculum on my own and dive into it.

I started off by sketching character design and drawing. Cinema 4D has issues when it comes to symmetry modeling, so I decided to go the open-source route and fired up Blender for that portion of the project. After exporting the model to Cinema 4D I spent about a week scouring the internet for training on rigging and weight painting. For those that aren’t familiar with 3D character animation techniques, a character must have a skeleton of digital bones that define how the limbs move and where the joints are. Each bone can be attached to vertices on the mesh based on a weight value of 0-100%. Cinema 4D is probably the worst possible program to use for weighting next to Microsoft Word. Each vertex on the character must have a weight value of exactly 100% otherwise the mesh will shift and blob when moving the character long distances. Unfortunately this meant that I had to go through a table of numbers that contained the weight value for each vertex for each of the 13 bones in the character and make sure that each row added up to 100%. One would think that Cinema 4D would have tools to do this automatically, but I couldn’t find any.

So, after cursing the rigging tools for about 1.5 weeks of the 3 weeks I had to work on the project, I finally was able to get into the animation. It actually went fairly well. The training I found online helped a lot because it told me how to set up convenient inverse kinematics chains for the legs and nice animation controls for all the bones. In my case using an IK chain meant that I could grab the ankle of my character, move it around and the entire leg would follow it with the hip and knee bending realistically. Forward kinematics would have required manually rotating the hip and knee to achieve the same result.

I finished up the last bits of animation over this past weekend and moved on to studying other subjects, planning to work on sound a day or 2 before the project was due (Thursday). Unfortunately the other subjects took up more time than I thought and I found myself still working on other subjects Wednesday afternoon. I was writing the statement for my Self-Gaze project when an email came in from my professor: “Joe – 334 final Wed at 10…did something happen?” All the blood drained from my face. The class website specifies explicitly, “Failure to attend the final results in failure of the course.” In a couple seconds the blood returned to my face accompanied by a string of profanity that would have made a marine sergeant blush. I immediately ran to Larson’s office and explained that I thought the final critique was on Thursday morning as the university exam schedule specified—9am Monday classes have an exam at 8am Thursday. He explained that because the class is 1 hour 40 minutes long instead of 50 min, the exam could be held at either the 9am or 10am Monday time. Fortunately he allowed me to finish the project in time for the exam time I was expecting.

As they say, every cloud has a silver lining. The whole situation gave me the motivation to fix some little problems in the animation that I was originally going to let go. I figured if I was getting an extra day to work on it, it had better be the best I can possibly make it. Also, no one was using the render farm so I was able to re-render the entire animation.

EDIT:
Here's what my professor had to say about my project.

"Simply put, your animation is insanely good for the scope of the class project. Taking on articulated character animation is a pretty significant task and you not only created articulated character animation, you created a lively character animation (he falls, jumps, flips over, and has relatively emotional expressions). Technically, there are very few issues and the issues that are present are relatively small (a bit of squash when he falls would help, the force of him coming to a stand seems off - slow, there is some sliding in the last scene as he looks around). The lighting is solid and the textures are appropriate, though consider more gloss (specular or reflection) to on eyeballs to give them a wet shine. In terms of concept, the ending does not seem like a complete conclusion, we understand the ending (absolutely) but it could be refined further. Perhaps he jumps once or twice in an attempt to get back to the ball?"