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3D Animation Project Report

The document is a project report for a 3D animation of a friendly robot collecting forgotten USB sticks on a university computer. The robot climbs on a chair to reach the computer, collects the USB stick, and jumps down. The animation was improved by adding more random movement and exaggerating poses. Rendering techniques like depth of field were used to focus attention. Inverse kinematics made linking parts of the robot rig to the environment easier but caused some technical challenges. The report concludes by reflecting on what was learned and aspects left to improve.

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246 views2 pages

3D Animation Project Report

The document is a project report for a 3D animation of a friendly robot collecting forgotten USB sticks on a university computer. The robot climbs on a chair to reach the computer, collects the USB stick, and jumps down. The animation was improved by adding more random movement and exaggerating poses. Rendering techniques like depth of field were used to focus attention. Inverse kinematics made linking parts of the robot rig to the environment easier but caused some technical challenges. The report concludes by reflecting on what was learned and aspects left to improve.

Uploaded by

Redzuan nur akman
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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17.12.

2015 Johannes Schirm (25040946)

3D Animation Project Report


My idea for the 3D animation project is a friendly robot which collects forgotten
USB sticks automatically and brings them back to their owners when they log
onto a university computer the next time. With this story in mind, an appropriate
scenario to implement for this task was the robot collecting an USB stick. This
action might include climbing on a chair to reach the computer, interacting with
the USB stick by collecting it and then jumping down to the floor again.

After using the same rig in a task for M. Ternan's Visual Effects module, the biggest
problem wasn't creating the rig or getting all technical aspects right. Interestingly, the first
version of my animation turned out to be good in its idea and structure but quite dry in its
overall movement. This was probably related to my attempt to do the animation with a
structured workflow, as well: There was far too less random behaviour in the way the robot
was moving. At this point, the Key Mode Toggle turned out to be very useful: It allows the
user to only step between key frames and
Image 1: The robot's feet,
leave any interpolated frames out. However,
not perfectly aligned.
I followed Reuben's recommendation to
apply some interesting offsets in all key
poses. For example, this could consist of
slightly increasing the space between the
robot's feet during its jump down or delaying
the leg moving forward during a weight shift,
so the foot doesn't move in parallel with the
pelvis. Small details, but after I spent some
time on integrating those, the animation
looked much more dynamic. Another quite
important point seems to be a little bit of exaggeration - a piece of animation isn't meant to
represent the reality. Only this way, the character gets a much sharper, own identity.

I tried to modify the rig a little bit, but even for this assessment, I couldn't do a complete
new model. But one of my successes in this module was probably the use of V-Ray as a
renderer. It was not only very easy to
apply differently reflective materials to
pelvis, arms and legs, but also to use
the camera for telling a short story.
Since the environment is kept very
simple, the USB stick needs to be
pointed out at the beginning. I also
was glad to have a little USB symbol
on the stick to show its relevance.

Image 2: Projecting a
bitmap on the USB stick.
17.12.2015 Johannes Schirm (25040946)

One of the most conspicuous things in


my animation is probably the depth of
field, which I always tried to use for
pointing out important bits in the scenes.
For this, the target of the physical V-Ray
camera was very helpful! Hopefully, it's
not too much but I like the look of this
effect, why I decided to integrate it here.
Sadly, I wasn't informed about some Image 3: Depth of field, but
render parameters of V-Ray regarding only in pre-renderings…
the camera: If you want depth of field to
be visible in the final render, you first have to configure it in the render settings! Great. And
of course, I only noticed that after rendering out everything over three hours… But this still
wasn't the solution. It seems that the V-Ray render engine gets some camera settings at
the beginning and doesn't ask for changes during the render. As a result, my animated
field of view wasn't animated in the final output because it is one of those 'constants'.
Another great vexation: If you render only one frame, V-Ray will get the correct field of
view value but if you want to render several frames successively, changes will be lost…

From the animation point of view, I


Image 4: IK is fully activated,
but there is still a FK limb!
was really appreciating the use of
inverse kinematics controllers and link
constraints. They make it easy to link
parts of the rig to the environment or
the other way around. A tricky part is
probably to get an understanding for
those two modes: When you're using
inverse kinematics (IK), the forward
kinematics 'version' (FK) of the limb
can still move around and produce
problems later, since you can't directly see an effect on the actual movement! This is only
important if you're in full IK, but that's normally the case. It's easier to solve a problem with
IK/FK by just activating 'Display FK Limb in IK', which shows the FK limb, as well.

During this module, I've learned so much - not only about 3dsMax. It surely would've
been very interesting to improve the model of my little robot or spend some time with
designing the environment by adding more detail in it. But it's been hard to give the best
for every module, so I had to give preference to the animation and save the work on
details for later. Nevertheless, I think it has developed to an entertaining
animation. Three months ago, I hadn't done anything in 3dsMax before!
And there is still much to learn. But I'm motivated to continue working on
some character animations in 3dsMax because it has (mostly) been fun.
And: From now on, I'll try to be as creative as possible with applying
random behaviour on my characters to create an identity for them!

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