Arc Tracking, old school

 Tracking and re-tracking a wrist

 Tracking and re-tracking a heel

 Process reveals two pops / off-path frames with Hip

 Process reveals two pops / off-path frames with Head. Note the use of a constrained locator and the hiding of the head itself for a more accurate approach. (Incidentally, I had a camera pan happening, so the tracking was mostly done via a duplicate of this constrained in same position with the camera animation removed. This also made it possible to zoom in for more detail. I'm not sure there'd be any use tracking onscreen with a moving camera)

Here's a series of photos I took while doing polish work on my last Class 2 assignment, "Snatcha".
Raquel, my class 2 mentor, encouraged me to get down to trying this old arc tracking method out: the good old "draw on your monitor with a dry erase marker" method. With today's flat monitors, it would not seem advisable to actually draw directly on the monitor (that was fine for the days when monitors were made out of glass, but I'm not so confident the plastic surface of a flatscreen would be unharmed). But it was a simple matter to set up all the same: a visit to Staples, and I had a cuttable desk protector plastic sheet and a new pack of Expo markers, total cost around $15. I cut the sheet to size, a bit of sticky-out-rolled scotch tape (four corners and the center, like the five side of a die, worked nicely). And I was set to go. Easy to put up, easy to take off, as needed.
Now, I had resisted doing this for a very long time. I had of course known about the method for years, but it seemed silly. However, enough pro animators actually do this that it seemed worth at least trying out.
So what does it amount to?
 
I'll back off a bit and explain a more basic fundamental point, first, for those of you who are not animators:
A lot of people imagine the role of the computer&software in digital 3D animation to be some kind of magic. Perhaps thinking that, once a person has "braniacally" wrapped their head around the admittedly confounding matter of accustomizing his/her-self to the use of this most compex of art tools, they will then have the apparent advantage of the use of their own entire brain plus the full force of the computer brain to - boot in their work. Or, in other words, they'll be inclined to think that the computer does a lot of the work for ya, and it's some kind of smooth sailing from thereon in.
Ha!
Not exactly.
The machine, as I think of it, is a brute beast that simply follows instructions, and can barely even do that half the time. Perhaps comprable to Igor as a mad scientist's companion: eager to help out, but not yet intelligent enough to be useful in all the ways one would hope it to be; AND most certainly UNintelligent enough to bring quick destruction to any of our efforts if we do not maintain a watchful eye. We are, of course, getting the machine to do the one thing it is least skilled at: the creation of art. What this comes down to is that it simply doesn't cut it. It can do a whole lot of other stuff, even making really impressive images, but it can't really "do" the art itself. This is good news for us humans anyway, because at least we aren't in danger of being replaced by these things anytime soon. But getting to the matter of the work of animation: with regards to anything original, meaningful, and lifelike, the essence of those ideals still has to all come via the minds of the artists themselves, just as has always been.
Now, more specifically, looking at the animation workflow, the computer&software's helpfulness comes to the fore more in the "middle stages" of it. With the splining, for example, you do get some stuff "for free". That's the computer&software helping out. Yay. But: the planning takes grunt work, the blocking is best done by keeping the computer&software role to a minimum (to make sure we as the artists do not take the risk of shutting our minds down or deferring to it, so to speak). AND, in the context of this posting, when it comes to final polish work, as with the blocking it's also all about keeping your eyes on the viewport and once again forgetting about what's under the hood (at least to the extent that one can manage to do so). This counter animation is kept to the last and is to be avoided except where necessary. But it IS necessary and unavoidable in many cases.

So the long and short of this is that the immediacy of marking tool - to - surface is still often unrivalled by the computer. It's true when it comes to good planning, and it's true when it comes to arc tracking too, to a certain extent.

Was it useful to use the hands-on arc tracking method?
Absolutely.
It was very useful in three key respects:
1) you can track anything. Any part of the character's body can be drawn and its path seen.
Being unable to track any old thing, admittedly, isn't necessarily an inherent problem. When I was working in XSI I was able to ghost anything and everything without any difficulties. It seems that either the AM rigs or Maya itself places limits on what will ghost: some things ghost, some things won't. Don't know why, but it just isn't happening in this realm. STILL, even if any old thing could ghost herein, this method permits overdraw simplification and immediacy.
2) you can redraw.
I'd use one color to draw, then another to redraw (usually red). This is definitely not an option with other methods, yet it's obviously very useful to be able to do so. Once a new path is drawn, it's then a relatively simple matter to match the posing to the target locations. So this is an even more powerful thing. And generally speaking I do find that software tends to inhibit the ability to PLAN effectively. It's as if the planning facets of a workflow tend to be overlooked in the designing of all of this tech stuff. (OR, one's eyes tend to "glaze over" under a sort of hypnotic effect of all the techyness). After all, shouldn't there already be an application that emulates this dry erase at a top level of the screen? Something of a transparent drawing application that stays on top of all currently running applications. There isn't yet, not that I'm aware of, for the PC. But I think the mac has it, I'm not sure.
Now, the most interesting discovery, for me, was the third:
3) it makes you stop and think about it in a straightforward and uncomplicated manner.
I was most pleased to discover that doing this seemed to help me think more clearly about what I was trying to accomplish. And it's easy to understand why: it's 100% direct hands-on. So there's nothing distracting from the idea of the matter itself. And this also relates to the second point above.
In fact, in short, all three advantages are the very advantages of good old drawing itself. Which makes perfect sense: "all this is" is simply going right ahead and DRAWING on the monitor. 

Would I switch exclusively to this method?
No, not at all. It isn't efficient in many cases to plot out a whole ton of points or shapes on the screen, particularly where the paths are succeeding in being relatively smooth in the first place.
I found myself mixing this method and my generally preferred "locator" method. In a mixed approach, one (sensibly) gets the computer to do the plotting via ghosting, and then I (sensibly) use the dry erase to indicate the places for corrections. I switched fully to the hands-on approach in the places that I knew were problem areas.
However, alongside of the ghosting glitches already mentioned, the AM rig also appears to "defy" accurate ghosting even of a simple locator when parent constrained to certain body parts, e.g. wrists, a lot of geometry objects. A confounding annoyance that also gives benefit to having an alternate approach ready and available.

Variety of method is a good thing. Akin to the ergonomic advantages of using both a mouse and a tablet. And in problem solving, it's always good to have more than one way to do something, in case certain routes get blocked for some reason or another.


And THAT is an exhaustive look at straight-to-screen arc tracking!

An aimless walk down memory lane

Well, as promised in my first post, I've finally gotten around to taking video of these two early animations I did, the first time I've shared this work outside of my own family. The first book has about 180 sheets / frames, done in 1984, and the second about 300, done in 1985. I wasted some time trying to capture them frame-by-frame; when I did a test of this I found that the ideal frame rate is around 8 fps, and it ended up looking "off" (it was all done straight ahead, and timing was purely intuitive and obviously depends on how the flipper chooses the pace). But when I filmed it directly, it looked alright! The flipping seems to mask the rather slow frame rate through the blur of the moving sheets, an interesting little discovery. Smear frames of sorts, you could say, perhaps a subtle advantage of the well-established method.
The method being primitive naive, it's interesting to retrospectively observe how I didn't have any qualms about jamming stuff all together on the same page with my first try. Reminds me of the bush art that decorates the hills of Zimbabwe, where the ancient artists would just go right ahead and paint over the work that was there before. Perhaps also being the case with tagging and graffiti: not overly preoccupied, impulsive and unsentimental in nature. "In the moment".
Seven years after this I was investigating animation school options for the first time.
And then I ditched the whole idea for about another 15 years, not so much because I didn't think I could do it, but because it seemed entirely impracticable: far too expensive and inefficient. But then the computer changed all of that, and here I am at it again.
I actually did quite a lot of "messing around" with animation on our old Atari 1040ST back in the late 80's. I even did some 3d stuff back then. I remember using an early version of something like autoCAD. It was odd using 4 viewports with the orthographics + perspective for the first time (all stuffed into a VGA resolution monitor). I followed instructions with the promise of getting an animation as an end result. When I was done, "all" I had was a series of images. Then I thought "that's it?! What am I supposed to do with that?" Of course, that's all it is, animation: a series of images, played back in quick succession. But the software we had, at that point, lacked that crucial last step of being able to actually do just that. Or, more specifically, the computer itself probably wasn't powerful enough to do this in the first place.  It would probably have to have been shot onto film to be seen for what it was meant to be.
All those old files are un-revisitable. I had surfers on waves, dinosaurs eating green leaves, self-assembling polyhedra, all marvelously primitive in style (I mean: masterpieces now lost forever). If the floppies are still knocking around in my parents' place, they still would not be compatible with anything existing today. Let us hope the efforts of today's digital work are more enduring.
Well, that's enough of aimlessly wandering about on memory lane. Now back to the now.

Checkin' the ego at the door

http://youtu.be/-3Phk-78SWo
 Rick speaks a word of realistic advice regarding the good ol' creative ego.
Great stuff to take to heart when working on a shot.
It's already "not about me" as a student, and all the more so in production.
(Excerpt from AM on Facebook)
Had to chop "the best part" off my shot this week at my mentor's request. So this one's this week's theme for me.

Bobby has spoken!

I had the special treat this week of having a question I had asked (via the "ask" AM email) answered by Bobby Beck himself in the AM video news!

I was watching the news and thinking "wow. Bobby is actually talking to me!" Very cool.

My question was on "fluff", asking for advice on how to draw the line between nice visuals and pure animation content in the presentation of our work. Bobby's answer, in summary, was that in school it is vital and singularly important to focus on the animation. Playblast what you do, no need to render. Once we've graduated, all that work can be dressed up a bit to look nice in our demo reels. If you can do it, fine go ahead. But the people hiring in studios out there are looking for good animation, plain and simple. Nothing else matters. Good animation that has been playblasted (simplest manner of rendering in Maya) will get you a job. The recruiters don't care about the music, and they don't care about special rendering or effects. They want to see performances that are real, authentic, sincere. Particle effects? They have essentially no relevance. Nice lighting? It can be a nice touch, but it's window dressing. "But I wouldn't do it on my own work at all. Because that'll all be done by another department anyway." "Focus on the animation and make it look as great as it possibly can"

Simple arc tracking

I just put a note in my AM workspace that I thought I might share in this blog too.
A really simple arc tracking method. I know there are all sorts of tools for arc tracking out there, but I really don't see why anything complicated needs to be done. This method is simple and fast, and it just uses what is already built into the software (in this case Maya): 
- place the body in a separate layer and hide this (or put it in a set and hide it from there: either way you want to be able to easily turn it on and off)
- create a locator, give it a name like "LocatorGhostBody", scale it down to something tiny, maybe 0.2 or 0.1 in all scl axis.
- parent-constrain the locator to the ballie_ac_C_body triangle control. It's handy to leave that control visible to also be able to see rotations
- ghost just the locator, to 20 frames before and 20 frames after.
- because it's the simplest of primitives, the locator's ghosting updates fast and unlike ghosted geometry you don't need to be in High Quality Rendering mode for it to work nicely. If an animation change is made, you just need to re-scrub over that segment of animation to get it to update (doesn't update immediately as in SI unfortunately).
- when you're done, choose Animate > Unghost All.
- you can make as many locator constraints as needed to track arcs for any location. It's a good idea to point constrain to geometry with this in many cases. For example, to a heel. [edit: actually, just constraining with an offset is simple enough. Point-snap-match to the desired place on geometry, then just parent constrain to the object, with offset]
- the same thing can be done for knees, though in that case because they're small it's a lot more workable to just ghost them directly.

Pretty much got this tip from Jon Collins last class, it was his suggestion. Previously I had only really been ghosting geometry, which is often massively confusing.

Smoother playblast trick

I've got a nice trick to get a one-up antialiasing with a playblast. You playblast to 960x720, export frames, resize in Photoshop via batch to the 480 x 360 AM standard, then bring in to Quicktime again. Results are smoother. My video card isn't "pro", doesn't do RT antialiasing in Maya (though it does in Softimage). So that's a cheat workaround; I used it for the shots I didn't render in my recent progress reel. [2012 09 04 edit: resizing via Quicktime during an export & compression save does a fairly decent job and is far more convenient. There's normally no need for such precious treatment of playblasts. Save it for final output].

Balance theory

Here's a little exploration of thoughts I've been mulling over regarding balance. AM is doing just fine in terms of delivering content for general-purpose understanding with the idea of "line of balance". But I know very well that this simplification applies mainly to static postures. In dynamic situations, balance is a far more complex thing. Here is a little attempt at putting a formulation to it. In this train of thought, the character's kinesthetic mind would be seeking to zero out B. With static and slow motions, F can be thought of as being close to 1, if 1 represents the everyday force of gravity, the force the body is most familiar with. In such a case, A could be give a 1, in the sense of the scenario being fully anticipated, and similarly the unexpected can be given a 1 in the sense that it is also "under control". So then B zeroes out. B also zeroes out if there is no force: freefall, irrespective of A and U. But where it gets interesting is when you have dynamic motion. Balance must be accomplished in terms of the line of the sum-force-vector NOT gravity alone. I've seen a lot of students failing to realize this, trying to balance to gravity with a change of direction, for example, where the character must lean into the curve, or trying to balance over each foot in a walk where the body never goes that far to one side or another (though usually the problem lies in not moving sufficiently to one side or another).
Even more interesting is the entire process of taking into account what the character is aware of and already dealing with - the aniticipate - vis-a-vis what the character is not yet aware of and so is not yet balancing against - the unexpected. The delay from observation to reaction should be around 2 or 3 frames. Depending on the nature of the unexpected occurrence, this means that the character can deal with most situations but when change occurs very quickly (or is obscured from the character's perception for some reason or another) the character will not be able to comfortably deal with that. Well, then you have loss of balance and a fall / trip / plunge / what have you. But even then the character responds as best it can to catch itself and rebalance.

Stronger forces call for stronger counter-anticipation and motions. Smaller forces (that is, in play upon the character), oddly enough, leave a character more vulnerable to the unexpected. A character that is already in motion is in a safer situation with regards to the unexpected than a character that is at rest. The force at play can be converted to many actions, so this conversion potential makes any sort of motion useful even before a clear intent has yet been arrived upon. So jumping in response to danger, for example, will occur reflexively; then by the time the body has begun to return downwards, the mind will have been able to choose a course of action and can then apply that downwards force into a more powerful escape or action that it will now have arrived upon. It is interesting how the unexpected is factored into the motion and posturing. It is a sort of knowing of the potential nature of the unknown.
This makes sense when considering the animal world, where the natural response to perceived threat is escape; fright and flight. Any reaction is usually better than no reaction, potential embarrassment is better than potential injury, and this is built into the system. Even in a static posture, dynamic equilibrium can be at play in terms of potential motion resulting from the pose. So, a fighter's stance will have legs set apart and knees slightly bent. Although this pose is static, it anticipates motion, permitting potential motion in any direction at a moment's notice. As opposed to a vertical stance, which requires a side-step before directional motion is possible, a split-second delay that could be deadly in a battle situation. A small creature will hunch down for safety. Aside from benefits of concealment, this also accomplishes a similar wide-base stance that enables escape motion in any direction from that starting point. The A-frame stance simply needs one leg to be lifted for motion to initiate in that direction. The imbalance enables the creature to have greater equilibrium of security.
Yet in a fully benign context of walking, the A-frame stance is just as fundamental for the motion, and is reiterated in roughly the same manner whatever the current intentionality of motion is: beginning, continuing / perpetuating, ending, or reversing.


All of these processes are descriptions of dynamic equilibrium within an intelligent or thinking system.

I know that in the robotic sciences there are all sorts of formulas and feedback loops that are now fairly well established in proceduralizing these sorts of things. What I'm exploring here would be a layman's approximation of such things. But a simple device or mnemonic could be of some use. I wonder how similar or different this one is from what else is out there? Furthermore, with animation you are going to be layering personality and character into the whole process; and top all of that off with interesting timing and motion. If the character is balanced, the sense of balance will show itself in the motion as well, in terms of a sort of confidence about the situation. If the character is unbalanced, the motion will again be different to also reflect the character's emotion: nervous, unnerved, or perhaps sufficiently optimistic to still maintain confidence, as with an idiot savant, drunken walk, or goof-hero personality. But it is interesting that a thinking system is both inherently unbalanced and designed to operate through ongoing processes of imbalance. So a lot of motion is well within the familiar realm of human motion, and the body goes about accomplishing most of it with little need for attention from higher-level conscious thought.

I really look forward to exploring these sorts of things in greater depth through the art of animation. In terms of course content, it's still a bit farther down the road. But there are already places here and there in the assignments where it is possible to start taking these things into consideration.

I also really look forward to applying, overtop of the physics, the dream-realms, once a situation bears the freedom to explore that way as well. That is a whole other matter, yet for it to work well it is bound to call for very similar considerations all the same.

As with many artistic tasks, the trick is making conscious use of subconscious routines and, to some extent, gaining control over the subconscious.