To pencil test or not to pencil test?

I haven't been showing much of my planning work yet on this blog, so here's an effort to share a bit of that side of things. Maybe in part because it's a rather more chaotic process, maybe in part due to the natural tendency of any artist to want to show only finished work.
This is the first blocking pass on my second shot of Class 4. We are using the famous AM Bishop rig for the first time this week. It's nicely integrated with the former rigs, with control names and methods remaining consistent to minimize confusion. He's still got a massively big head and awfully narrow shoulders. Dealing with his big hands is also a challenge in its own right. Unlike Stewie, there may not be a practical or straightforward way to shrink his head.  Ya just gotta run with it.
Prior to this was a process of simply selecting an appropriate audio clip (which I mulled over through the course of a few weeks: good to look ahead and get an early start on this, something that my mentor, Wayne, also encouraged the class to do). This was followed by the filming of video reference (I filmed about an hour's worth, then narrowed it down to 10 seconds for each of four finalist ideas). Of these, with feedback from Wayne and the class I selected one and ran with it. So there's a lot of work prior to this stage in this particular shot. In a studio environment it may be that a lot of this would be "served up" for the animator. But this is where, as a student, you are still in many ways both director and animator.

After finalizing video reference, I then did a pencil test study pass of this, followed by the in-Maya blocking. So the 3D animation you see here is blocking, in splines. In this case, about 32 starting key poses in a 240 frame timespan.
Based on this week's critique, a lot of things will need to be changed already. I planned for a clothing tug gesture, which is just going to have to be ditched I think because there's no practical way of going there at this stage and in this context. The background I chose led me to use  a wide angle lens, about 20 mm; this needs to be revised up to perhaps 70 mm instead. A lot of what needs revision is simple pragmatism. 
One thing that has surprised me about Wayne is that he doesn't seem to show interest in pencil testing. This contrasts with Pete, my previous mentor, who considered it a valuable step in the planning process. I included a pencil test planning step in my last 3 assignments, and I feel it does yield stronger results. At the same time, I notice that opinions are divided regarding the value of doing this pass. It seems that the majority of students don't pencil test at all, and that many of the mentors don't pencil test either; though many also do.
The matter was brought up explicitly again in a school-wide Q&A last night, when a student asked Drew if he used pencil test and rotoscoping in his workflow. The answer was no. However, he emphasized pushing poses when blocking, and distributing motion through many joints: being very careful to avoid making changes between poses that are isolated to just one joint (particularly in the spine, which will quickly produce lifeless and robotic results, as well as broken unorganic poses). Essentially, a building of strong poses via a more sculptural way of thinking. 
I'm still trying to figure this out.
In many ways I think pencil testing will be more reasonably bypassed when next generation 3D input devices and 3D displays become common. The task of working in 3D still remains a bit of an abstraction as things are currently done, and a certain amount of planning is a matter of coping with this.
I put quite a lot of work into my pencil test this week, but I still ran into some problems in the figure with balance. I would attend to this, but I think that doing the pencil test actually put me a bit behind in my workflow.
This leads me to the lingering question of whether the industry supports the extra time taken by pencil testing. With the tight deadlines in the industry, our personal animation workflow, as aspiring professional animators, needs to become efficient while still producing good results.
Pencil testing is not explicit to the prescribed workflow at AM. You're free to do it, sometimes encouraged to do it, but not required to do it and special time is not allocated for it. Though I should point out that pencil planning IS required, and this is not too different in nature. A fundamental difference between pencil planning and pencil testing is that pencil testing also involves more precise timing and spacing consideration, being done directly within in a 2d animation environment. This has its own ups and downs. For example, I did 2d planning in perspective this week, which led to me wrongfully applying a wide angle perspective from my planning to my 3D scene. I also followed my spacing planning a bit too closely, in that I didn't balance the rig correctly within the 3D environment during this first blocking pass. Timing and spacing can be resolved a bit on either side of this fence, but once you're in the 3D environment, they certainly must be revisited exclusively for this "reality", (along with all the other principles of animation, all continuing iteratively through various passes until the eventual point of completion).

To help resolve the conundrum I think I need to back off of pencil testing a bit next time around in my own personal workflow, and see how well I can plan directly within the 3D environment. It may be that timing and spacing are better passed over to the 3D environment at an earlier stage. The pencil work, in turn, can still remain valuable for the broadest strokes of planning.

AM accommodates people from non-visual-artist backgrounds, and this is part of what I'm observing here. A visual artist and a non-visual-artist will likely approach their work differently. But it is interesting to see how both can achieve success in 3D animation. Would there be a noticeable style difference between the two? Probably. But it is interesting, and for many surely encouraging, that this area of creative work really is open for people of many sorts and from many types of backgrounds.

A Hero Book In The Making, 3D intro

I recently obtained permission from REPSSI to post the 3 minute introductory segment of "A Hero Book In The Making" on youtube. This is a short film I made for REPSSI (Regional Psycho Social Support Initiative) of South Africa. Based on the instructional book by Jonathan Morgan. Directed, originated, and animated by myself.

 
I finished work on this in 2010. The entire film is about 15 minutes long, which I completed in animatic form in 2008 (I also have permission to post this now, more on that at another time). 

This film would be my "before shot", the best of my  animation effort prior to Animation Mentor. It was very much a generalists' effort, with animation being one of many elements.
I'm very happy with the work I did on this project. I had a lot of creative freedom, and it was an amazing experience. I don't know if it ever will be given the chance to be completed. There was limited funding and this short segment took a lot of time to create. I'm glad, at least, that I got this much done.
It is wonderful to finally be focusing on animation in and of itself. There is a lot about animating that I "quickly skimmed over" in the past which I am now being led through at AM in thorough detail. I can make an informed comparison between self-taught and formally-taught now. If I were asked to draw a simple conclusion about it, I'd say that both are valuable, and that it is best to obtain both if possible. Each of the two has shortcomings, so putting the two together I do find myself in a well-rounded position.



I do enjoy working in Softimage. It is like smooth clay to the fingers: malleable, yielding, yet no less powerful. I look forward to the day when Maya provides the same ease of user control and breadth of functionality. After a year in Maya, it still does not yield to my creative wishes as readily as Softimage did. Sure, it can do (almost) all of that. And to be fair, Maya is improving. A year ago, an instructor told me I'd warm up to it. And I have, in many ways. However, I can compare. There aren't so many Maya users who have had the chance to really get to know Softimage, so it seems to me the assertion that Maya is the leader often comes of a lack of opportunity to explore, and pragmatic feasibility. It takes months at the very least to truly learn these applications, and demo versions are only available for 30 days, so few have the time or resources to make a thorough comparison.

I do hope all the hard work and innovation that was put into Softimage will not fall by the wayside. Nowadays, Softimage seems to be promoted more as a particle system, but it is strong for character animation, rigging, shaders & texturing, modeling, rendering, all these other pipeline stages as well. The built-in character development system was very useful for getting things rolling quickly with rigging on this job, and it was straightforward to transfer attributes and properties between the rigs. I also did all the compositing for these shots in Softimage, and the tools for this were more than sufficient. On top of all of that, the ease of customization is an added bonus.

Ah well, I follow suit. I really do appreciate being able to use a student copy of Maya via being a formal student right now. It is also good to know and understand the consensus. 

Awakening, blocking 01

This is the current version blocking of "Awakening", the shot I'm working on at AM right now.
Wayne, my current mentor, has requested a number of changes, so it'll look quite different when I submit it again.
Even though the shot is still in rough form, the majority of the creative decisions have already been made by this stage. If this version were accepted for finalization, I'd maybe be around 1/3 to 1/2 - way done here.

Spot the "cheat", Roger Rabbit

Can you spot the "cheat" in this clip?
Something to do with an arm...
(from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, 1988)

AM Class 3 Anim Jam

Here is my finished sequence for Class 3 at Animation Mentor.
Still a bit more polish work to be done on it, but it's essentially done.
Enjoy!

Spacing analysis: a calligraphic path of action

I recently took the time to purchase a copy of Cats Don't Dance online. It's a bit hard to come by, a lovely yet all-too-obscure work.
The animation in this movie is excellent and well worth studying. The storyline is fairly simple (though pleasant, with a nice soundtrack), but the animation artistry is great; it is easy to understand how it managed to win Best Animated Feature Annie in 1997.
So here's another spacing analysis, my third so far.
First the clip, a shot about 100 frames long:

Then my Photoshop magic, to study the spacing:

It's tricky to find a good clip to study this way, though it's definitely one of those "when you see it you know it" kinds of things. This one was quite interesting. I only managed to trace the head and the tail; the hips are doing their own thing inbetween and the feet are well worth a flipthrough to take a look at on their own. Each of these has its own path of action happening that, when traced out, is calligraphic in compexity, seemingly all over the place yet artistically unified. Indeed, the thing that happens at the top of the ladder could very well be taken as an easter egg, someone's initials; but that's pure speculation.
It's all highly syncopated timing-spacing-wise, which fits to the syncopated accompanying sound track, as well as to a general overall animation timing ideal that closely correlates with the same musical ideal. Perceptually, pleasing and interesting. In spacing, note the corners in path as well as the loops; similarly, in timing, there are offsets of holds and the opposite extreme of smear frames. As I said, calligraphic is an apt description. I've wondered about possibly setting animation to the path of a calligraphic pen before, copperpoint style; this is an excellent correlation to that concept, the best I've seen to-date.
This sort of thing is not easy to do.
I thought I'd also include an examination of some of the more interesting smear frames in the sequence:

The first, on the left, is an "impossible" step-up-the-ladder that, in a single step, gets Danny to the fifth rung up the ladder in as many frames, while facing backwards and looking nonchalant. A lovely bit of nonsense that somehow seems perfectly natural in the context of the shot.
The two most extreme, on the right, flip his body through a pretzel-path.
As befitting of a smooth operating-cat.
Smear frames remain one of the greatest points of contention for me with regards to 3D animation. A good rig will be able to handle a degree of the distortions served up by an extreme cartoon style by permitting some stretching or even bending of parts and extremities, but one still tends to run into a brick wall at some point, and I'm not sure whether rendered motion blur could even be capable of pulling off the pretzel example hilighted above (one would need presumably subframe sampling and subframe keys to do it: i.e. a lot of extra work combined with very slow rendering: not an efficient solution). A good smear frame will eliminate strobing and make extreme fast action seem plausible (explicable in part as the mimicking persistence of vision and in part as the emulation of camera motion blur).


If I can manage to identify the animator who did this shot, I'll be sure to update this posting to give the name. (If you happen know, please add a comment with a link for verification) Excellent work!

Target-Based Animation

(Discussing the integration of pencil testing in the 3D animation workflow)

I've been including pencil testing in my workflow for the first time during this class, and have been experimenting with it and thinking a lot about the utility of including such methods in an animation workflow.
Developing an efficient workflow is a big challenge in animation. Animation is arguably the least efficient artform (or, conversely, the most involved artform), so finding ways of accomplishing each step of the process in an efficient manner is an important aspect of making animation doable in the first place.
So it would seem that >adding< a step to the process is kind of like shooting yourself in the foot. There are only so many hours to the day already.
A revolutionary feat of 3d animation is that the computer does all the drawing for you. So you don't have to do any drawing yourself, right? Well, yes and no. The thing is, drawing still remains the >most efficient< way to develop and capture visual ideas, and it can also efficiently develop and capture many abstract and even literary ideas as well. So it's important to never be too far removed from drawing when developing ideas (of any sort). Throwing drawing out the window would be a very grave mistake.
I've been pondering a theme in this context: Target-Based Animation.
A lot of animation is "already" target-based in the sense of being built upon reference video that will be shot or sourced to guide the process. In this case, the "idea" is already well-into-play: you'd usually want to build from video of similar angle, similar timing, posing, overall feel and so forth.
One can most certainly work directly from this material. It can be a primary guide.
However, you see the effect of this. If no additional thought is put into the matter, you get an animation sequence that looks like reality. Which, for animation, is often problematic: because reality is "soft". When animating on the basis of real-world timing, spacing and posing the results tend to look slow and will also typically not be very interesting to watch.
So you want to push beyond reality to get better development and refinement of your visual and motion ideas.
We can push the ideas farther in our poses, this is true. But THIS is where it gets a bit fishy. Why? Well, "pushing your poses" amounts to >dabbling<. What you get into is iterating. You try this, you test it. You try something else, you test it. You iterate, and that's how you get somewhere with "pushing your poses" and "pushing your timing". There are a few concerns, three KEY problems that I can readily identify with this sort of a workflow:
1) it's time consuming.
2) you never know how or when you're going to arrive at your creative destination. This is an issue in terms of workflow
3) probably worst of all: you may >never< reach a meaningful destination.
Why not? Because you don't have a TARGET (whether clearly or even roughly) that you're working toward. The only clear target you have is your reference video. It's quite likely you'll end up having something that retains a strong tie to that reference. As for the "pushing" that you've added to that: that's a wildcard. So of course it may work (I'm not at all saying this can't work, I'm just saying that it can be problematic and is less than ideal), depending on your sensibilities. But it may also look distinctly like "ref video plus some aimless dabbling", especially if you're tired or having a bad day.
Right. So here's what I'm getting at: drawing >IS< the most efficient way to develop and capture creative ideas. So if you draw through your sequence, you'll be doing this. THIS is the TARGET that I'm referring to here. The ref video takes you halfway, and dabbling around can take you further, but if you have this drawn-out target, the in-cg work is less about "dabbling" and more about working toward something you have already established. This is significant.
So, in short: including pencil testing in your worflow introduces the >setting of visual targets< into the planning phases of the workflow. Planning is where all the most significant decisions are made, so targets are then set before anything starts getting "locked down" in the "actual" scene.
Pencil testing does take more time. It still may not be necessary for a lot of animation situations, particularly as one's experience builds. But certainly when working through any sort of difficult segment, it's a tool of first choice that I know I will continue to turn to.
So, here are some examples to illustrate my point:

Here is a segment of a body mechanics shot I'm working on, showing pencil test planning first, followed by a playblast of the work in progress.
It's worth pointing out that pencil testing can be done at ANY stage. It isn't at all limited to planning phases. Our AM mentor feedback often includes drawovers on our animation. Any half-decent 2d animation application will handle importing an existing playblast / sequence / ref video / whatever and allow drawover work to further develop ideas. So a pencil test can be brought into the loop at any time it's needed. In turn, you'd want to rotoscope the pencil test back into the cg environment, lining things up exactly with your existing camera angle. This is where the method has an obvious advantage over simply drawing on paper: in a pencil test you're developing >actual< timing and spacing for your shot - something you can't easily do on paper. You like to do your blocking first? Go right ahead. Block it out, THEN do a pencil test over that. That can also work. Though I would point out that this can potentially impede the pencil test process if you allow the less authoritative blocking to overly influence the potentially more authoritative drawing (the latter being nearer the realm of ideas and ideals, more immediate, more guestural, and unhampered by all the complicated limitations of what a rig is readily capable of doing.)

It's a challenging shot. The tennis player is to be sleek, quick, an expert at the game. If I were to film myself as ref for this kind of thing the shot obviously wouldn't be "headed" in that direction, so I have sourced a bunch of pro tennis reference to look at and work with: one typically does well to work from the best available authorities. But this material only goes so far. So resolving difficult spots via pencil testing was most certainly useful. I was able to nail down timing, path of action, and the extent to which I would be distorting the body in advance. You can see that I have STILL done things very differently in the actual shot. However, the pencil test has played a big role toward getting it right.
The side-by-side image is to also illustrate: if I were to have built my poses directly on reference video, without this kind of planning, I seriously doubt I would ever have arrived at such extremes of posing as you see here. I would rather have been likely to treat the rig realistically as per the realistic target in use.
It's also important to note that this kind of distortion is only relevant in certain situations, i.e. extreme action. I "went all rubbery" with this shot, and the shot I'm working on after it is a complete contrast - so I have to also be careful to give the upcoming "Nervous Beginnings" shot a completely different treatment, accordingly.