Completing the animation

Once all of the seperate scenes had been successfully animated and recorded, I needed to comile them into a sequence. To do so, I collated all of the recordings into Windows Movie Maker, and positioned them in sequential order. Some clips had to be shortened in length to improve the flow - although I generally had recorded longer clips than I intended to use, to allow for editing.

Some scenes were joined directly - quick transitions between clips giving the impression of an instant camera change without the flow of the movement being disrupted - this can be seen such as when there is a close-up of his hoof as he walks over the remote control, and also when seeing his hands holding it.

I used a couple of fade transitions in places where a little time was supposed to have passed between the two clips - the Minotaur running away from the TV fades out, with him behind the sofa in the next clip. This allows for the viewer to accept the flow of the animation where a few details have been left out, to avoid unnecessary complications in animation.

The TV screen shot has been used the first time the character looks at the screen - however later I have edited shots directly into the sequence - this is because the first shot establishes that the video is on the television screen.

I decided to opt for a "silent movie" approach to the sound, as I dont have much experience in that area. The music I used was actually composed as a silent movie track, which was meant for the purpose of background music that completes the scene, without detracting from the visuals (the particular tune used was named "Olde Timey", which I chose from a website that hosted various tracks in the genre)

I am pleased with the end result of the project - although I had no real animation experience in the past, I feel that I have created a character with some personality, and succeeded in making a complete sequence. Whenever I found a problem, I managed to find a way around it - since the end result is the main importance, I found it was good to be able to look outside of the box and consider other ways of implying actions, or creating the effects that I wanted to portray.

Animation Pt 4

The final stages of animating my character was showing him watching the TV. To do so, I then used a complete biped once more, and positioned his torso and arms to give the impression of him relaxing on the back of the sofa. I then used keyframes to animate two slightly different scenes:

1) The first consists of him appearing to watch the screen, tilting his head as he observes the video with curiosity.

2) The second of him waving at the screen - this was initially meant to be him waving at the characters on-screen, although with the camera angle it gives the impression that maybe he is waving at the viewer. Either way works however, and gives a nice result.

I animated these scenes by keeping the biped positioned behind the sofa, using auto-key to manipulate parts of his arm and head to move along with the timeline.

After this had been done, I researched into how to apply a video to the TV. After a little searching, the method I found to work was to create a .tga (Targa) sequence. To do so, I took a few clips of a cartoon, and edited parts together within movie editing software.

Once this was created, I used a programme called VirtualDub to convert the file to a .tga sequence. I then applied the sequence to a plane that acted as the television screen, and recorded a few hundred frames of a still shot of the screen, showing the video playing on it. I did initially have some trouble with this - but this was due to my own error at unnecessarily altering a value I didnt need to, whilst working out how to use video within 3D max.

Animation Pt. 3

I wasnt sure how to implement video into my project at this point, so I decided to leave the TV sections until the end of animation - the actual animating would be fairly simple at these points. I next used the footsteps tool to create a short running clip which followed the first TV clip.

The next task I had was to create a scene of my character peeking out from beyond the sofa. To do so, I positioned a camera facing the front of the sofa, with the character model behind it.

Instead of animating the entire character to actually kneel behind the sofa and actually do the complete action, I only worked on the body parts that you can actually see - obviously there was no real need to work on complicated motions that would not be seen in the finished item, rather give the illusion that the character does these things.



So, to get the effect I was after, I animated the model's hands reaching over the sofa, keyframing the hands and fingers to curl around the top of the furniture. To give the illusion of the minotaur pulling himself up, I actually copied the head of the character, and animated this moving freely - since the actual body cant be seen, it gives the effect that the parts are moving in sync.

Animation Pt. 2

In order to keep things backed up and prevent causing problems on other parts of the animation, I saved each part of the animation as a new file - this allowed me to work with things on the current section without influencing anything other part of the timeline.

After using footsteps, I then had to manually manipulate the character to animate him. His first movement was to realise he was about to step on a TV remote, and pull his leg back whilst looking down towards his feet. To do this, I took the final frame of the walking animation, and manually used keyframes to rotate and pull the leg joints so that he would pull his leg back, and also set keyframes for his head to animate. I did find a few problems with enveloping at this stage - so I had to fix these when necessary, in the same way as I had done before.

He also reaches down with his arm, as if to bend to pick up the object.



Next, I wanted to have him pick up the remote. I saw this as quite a complicated motion - but however, I think in this kind of situation it can be advantageous to use cameras and cutting things to suggest actions without actually seeing them happen - in this instance you see him bending down, and then the next thing you see is him standing up with the remote now in his hand.

I then used keyframing to move his back, arms, and head - whilst keyframing the remote to move with his actions. I quite liked the use of camera work here as I felt I got some good angles on what was going on.



Next, I used more of a first person perspective - this was perhaps one of my favourite parts of the animation. Instead of watching the minotaur simply doing all the actions from one generic view, I decided to mix it up with various angles. In this way, you can see the Minotaur looking at the remote, and I then used keyframing to animate the hands and fingers, so that he appears to press the remote.

First animation

Once the Biped was applied properly, I could then begin animating. Before I did so, I made sure to apply the last changes to the scene, in order to make sure that all of the clips would be consistent when rendered, rather than adding to the scene later.



The first thing I needed to do was have the character do a walk animation. To do so, I used the footsteps tool. The way this worked was to select the biped, and in a dialogue box choose the amount of steps, and choose the stride/gait etc. 3D Max then generates the motion for the biped, and in turn animates the character. To start with, I simply had the character walk into the room, and using a second camera I did a clip of the character almost stepping on a TV remote. When edited together, they should flow into one scene well, simply appearing to zoom on the foot closer up.

Fixing Envelopes on the Biped

Applying the Biped to the polygons, although partly making the character ready for animation, was not the final step before I could use it, though. In some instances, when I moved a part of the biped, some of the vertices of the polygons did not move properly, and created very obvious problems for animation.


The reason for this was because when the biped was applied to the model, it used default settings to create envelopes - telling the program which vertices are "attached" to each part of the biped. Since the envelopes were not big enough, they missed some of the vertices further from the limb, and left them behind creating a stretching effect. However, if the envelopes are too big, they can also pull on vertices of other polygons you dont intend them to.

To fix this, I selected each part that was suffering from this problem, and then clicked on the modify panel, and clicked the "Physique" heading, then "Envelope". From here, I could modify the size of the envelopes to make sure they incorporated all of the vertices that should move with that limb.

Since I did not seperate the legs before applying the biped, the envelopes would sometimes interfere with the leg opposite, which did cause a bit of a problem. However, I managed to get around this by unlinking all of the vertices from the biped's legs, and then locking the vertices in the opposite leg as I manually applied the envelopes to them individually.



Once all of the envelopes were fixed, the Biped could be moved to manipulate my character properly.

Applying the Biped

Once the biped was correctly aligned with the character, I then proceeded to edit the structure to fit my character as well as possible. Using the scale tool I could widen the leg and arm joints to fit the structure more realistically - since the minotaur has fairly thick legs and large feet, they are quite different in scale to a human structure. The head also had to be scaled up quite a bit, seeing as the character has a large head for its body - partly due to its bull-like appearance, and partly due to its cartoon-like quality.

Once this was done, I then selected all of the polygons that make up the character, and applied them to the biped. Now this was done, I could then manipulate the biped to make the character move accordingly.