BoBlog:

awww he’s so effing cute!!!

forgot ears, built out horns, tweaked hooves

goatrilla WIP 2 from Bob Piscopo on Vimeo.

Terrible with keeping this blog up to date… here is goatrilla before sculpting:

OK, so with SIGGRAPH happening, it was hard for me to do more than brainstorm, so I’m combining last week’s post with this week’s.

After considering the feedback I received from Bob, Roman, and Adrienne, I decided that it would be best if my three mini projects had some way to combine into a single piece. I went back and watched the first one, “Bicycle,” and examined the last frame of that animation. It looked like this:

So from here, I went back and began blocking out an environment that would not only make sense based on the positioning of the characters, but allow me to easily transition into the next animation segment.

Now before explaining the transition to the next animation, you should probably know what I’m going to do for it.

carArgument2

This is an argument I recorded between my parents while driving in the car.  I toyed with the idea of animating it as if they were NOT in a car, but I couldn’t come up with any ideas that I liked.  It’s OK though, because it will be easy to transition to from the first animation.   See below:

If you can ignore the fact that the perspective is completely off in my sketches, you may get the idea that I will be zooming past the character from “Bicycle,” as the car with my parents in it drives by.  I am most likely going to remove the jailbars, but I want to see what it looks like if i leave them in and zoom past them.  The camera will settle into place outside of the car, directly in front of them.  I haven’t played with switching the camera angle up yet, so for now, I have it locked off in this spot.

I will be using a different rig for this animation.  This rig is called the “Stan Rig.”  It works nicely with this second animation because it allows me to easily swap out pre-made geometry that is attached to the rig and make male and female characters:

This week I built upon my blocked out version and animated all of the shots.  Below is a playblast of it all together.  For next week it will be rendered with lighting and an environment.

project1: animated from Bob Piscopo on Vimeo.

Week 3:

This Week I modeled the bicycle, incorporated it into the rig, and blocked out the animation based on my storyboards.

project1: blocking from Bob Piscopo on Vimeo.

This week I chose the audio clip I will be using and storyboarded out an animation.  The audio clip I am using is this:  ricky

This term for New Media Project I am going a slightly different direction. Last term, I focused on driving animation with audio. It was a lot of fun, but admittedly a little too technical for my liking. This term, I want to take an opposite approach. I will be animating to audio recorded from real life conversations. The main focus of this project will be taking these real life situations (audio recordings) and seeing how the story holds up or changes when it is accompanied with a reenactment of the scenario with an animated.

My inspiration for this idea comes from two sources. The first is 11secondclub.com.  This site provides animators with an 11 second audio clip each month to which they must animate to.  The winner is awarded an online critique by a mentor from animationmentor.com.  Competitors are allowed to use stock characters and rigs as the focus is solely on animation.

My second inspiration comes from “Drunk History,” which is a series of online videos in which professional actors reenact historical events that are narrated by drunken people.  As the historians become more inebriated, the narrations become less accurate, and the actors account for it in their performances.  http://www.funnyordie.com/drunkhistory

I will be using a digital voice recorder to record interesting, natural conversations.  After selecting and editing the appropriate audio clip, I will storyboard out the animation.  I will then use stock characters and rigs to animate to the audio.  In all, I plan on producing three short animations.  My focus is purely on character animation, so I will not spend time developing a look.  I will model any props and basic environments necessary for storytelling, but beyond that, this is purely an animation study.  My tentative timeline is below:

Week 01:  Create Timeline, Choose rig, acquire audio recorder

Week 02:  Record audio/Storyboard Animation 1

Week 03:  Animate/Record Audio

Week 04:  Animate/Record Audio

Week 05:  Storyboard 2/Record Audio

Week 06:  Animate/Record Audio

Week 07:  Animate/Record Audio

Week 08:  Storyboard 3

Week 09:  Animate

Week 10:  Animate

Week 1:

This week I acquired a Sony ICD-PX820 Digital Voice Recorder.  I spent the past three days testing out its capabilities and I am satisfied with the quality of audio, and microphone range.  Below are some samples:

moveOut

greg

evan1

channForeigners

ricky

I also decided on the rig I will use (at least for the first animation.)  That is the MooM rig:

I tested out four different rigs, and I found this one to offer the greatest range of motion versus complexity of the rig.  In other words, the rig isn’t overly complicated, and it allows for a great deal of control.  I will evaluate the effectiveness of this rig after the first animation is completed, and decide whether or not I will continue to use it or not.

This is a long one… I’m a slacker when it comes to updating this blog, so this is my progress for the entire term in New Media Project II class.

For New Media Project this term, I set out to create a music driven animation. I was curious to see what I could produce by manipulating music data and using that information to drive animation curves. My inspiration came from videos such as the these:

chops test from Ronan McMeel on Vimeo.

I started out by following a very simple tutorial. It basically took two poses of a model and blended between the two based on the volume of the bass to achieve a pulsating effect. I started with something basic in order to learn Houdini’s interface, and begin thinking about what design challenges I would face. See the example below:

Untitled from Bob Piscopo on Vimeo.

Also, at this time, I didn’t know what I wanted my final product to be. I knew That I was interested in character work, but I didn’t know enough to be able to even guess what would be possible to accomplish by the end of the term. I spent the next two weeks experimenting with two smaller scale projects. The first was more of a music visualizer:

Untitled from Bob Piscopo on Vimeo.

The purpose of this animation was to focus on what data I could extract from the music and how I could use it. The height of the cubes are driven by the volume. The row of cubes that rises is driven by the pitch. The colors are also driven by the pitch. The pulsating movement of the cubes are driven by the bass. The rotating cubes and the center sphere above the main cubes are driven by isolated frequencies from the music. All of these were more or less arbitrarily assigned.

The second project was on the opposite end of the spectrum:

Mini Project 2: Lip Synch from Bob Piscopo on Vimeo.

I wanted to see how effectively I could lipsynch a character to music. I attempted to build off of my previous work by using the same concept of blending from the first tutorial I followed. I took three different poses of a character’s face and blended between them to produce a moving mouth effect. I encountered several problems with this mini project. The first was that I found it near impossible to isolate just the vocals from a music track. The second, was that it was pretty boring to watch.

Based on the two mini projects that I created, I realized that if I wanted to create a character piece, it would have to be somewhere in the middle of the two projects I created. After thinking about it for a while, I came up with the idea of having a character swat at a swarm of flies to music:

Final1 from Bob Piscopo on Vimeo.

So let’s break this down into its separate components. The two main components are the character and the swarm. The character’s movement was supposed to be derived from three separate animation loops of him swatting at the swarm. One is a casual, “light” swat. One is a medium swat with a little more force behind it. The last in an angry swat:

Different Animations from Bob Piscopo on Vimeo.

Unfortunately, I was unable to figure out how to successfully blend between the three different swats in a way where it looks good. I kept running into issues where the character would get stuck in between poses, or never fully execute the entirety of one animation loop before transitioning to the next. That is why the final submission only has the character performing one type of swat.

The swatting is being triggered by filtering out the bass notes. Each time a bass note is detected, it triggers the animation loop. By shifting and cycling the animation data, I was able to set it up so that when the note is played, the character is in his “impact” pose (hand making contact with the swarm). In the above and below examples, it is clear that the detection isn’t 100% accurate. The parameters can be tweaked, however I found it difficult to get it to work only when it should. However, it still looks pretty interesting, and with some additional tweaking, I believe I can remove some of the more apparent mistakes.

The swarm is composed of a bunch of cubes. Their movement is based off of a combination of different factors. As the character swats, the swarm is set to move away from the character’s hand. As the hand passes through the swarm, the cubes return to their original positions. Aside from that, the cubes’ individual movement and movement as a whole are all driven by an isolated frequency range from the music. Originally, I had multiple ranges of frequency affecting the different characteristics of the swarm, but after experimentation, I decided that it was too visually distracting to have that many variables. It was much harder to decipher what elements from the music were affecting what aspects of the swarm.

For the color, I originally wanted to have the color temperature change based on the amplitude of the music. I wasn’t satisfied with the results from when I tried it out, so I stuck to having the pitch affect color brightness. I think that this worked pretty successfully.

In conclusion, the animations obviously suffer because they are lacking the variety that the other two swat animations would have given them. I am not content with how it is now, and I plan on figuring it out. That said, I think the project as a whole was a success. I think the limitations of audio driven animation are pretty clear, however as I watch my animations, I find myself excited at the potential they have. Over the break I will be cleaning them up and experimenting further. I can show them to the class next term if there is interest. With that, I will leave you with another render driven by a different song. Enjoy:

Final 2 from Bob Piscopo on Vimeo.

The results finally came back, and I came in third place for the 24 hour animation challenge!  I started out the term pretty set on never wanting to be an animator, but I have to say, I had a lot of fun with this challenge, and I really want to get better at animating.  It’s not as bad as I originally made it out to be.