6. The Stop-Motion Animation Process
6.4. Successful production of Stop-Motion animation in Maya
On my second attempt I approached the animation in accordance to traditional stop-motion where for instance each part of the figure is moved, the whole pose made and then finally the image frame is taken. The only complication with this procedure is that in traditional stop-motion animation the artist tends to see everything according to the eye perspective which is wide and freely operated but when using an animation software such as Maya our eyes tend to be restricted on accordance to the view-port through which the operator is using to view an object.
For this attempt I decided to scrub the dinosaur-robot slapstick comedy scene away and attempted to construct a damsel in distress scenario influenced by the early landmark stop-motion sequence found in Kingkong (1930). To achieve this I downloaded a woman rig (from creative crash) and animated her (not stop-motion) being chased by the carnivorous Dinosaur. The woman rig is called “Alice” and is created by “Joel Anderson”, I added the camouflage cap and the top for the woman to suite her for the jungle scenario .
The camera had to be moved around to identify which part of the Dinosaur model the control rig was moving. But due to these restrains if I had started posing all of the controls and keying it each frame it would have ended up being a very vigorous process. To overcome this I had to focus away from the Animation graph editor (because in traditional stop-motion it's about the poses along with "on the go" type animation) and concentrate on how each and every pose coincided properly with the next frame pose.
I then set about adding some key-frames for the foot controls of the Dinosaur. For example the right foot is at the rear on frame two, and then moves to the front at frame sixteen giving fourteen frames offset (accordance to traditional computer animation). Because this eases out the position where each foot is going to move, and as a result, becomes more manageable on where the whole body is going to end up for that end key-frame. Next I started keying each foot position in twos. Now the feet started to move. Since these controls are not parented to the torso control, the whole body (except the feet along with the knees) does not move. To counter this I started moving the torso control (which is the parent control for all the other controls except the global and feet controls) along the Z-axis and keying it along every “two” frames so that I end up at a position which relates according to the position of the feet.
Now that the whole body moves along with the feet, I started to animate the other controls. For example the head on every two, but still not tweaking the other attributes of the torso control (apart from z-axis movement). I found out it was best to animate this control (torso control) later, because when tweaked it contributed to the movement of the whole body (since it’s the parent control) thus becoming more excessive and confusing on animating the other controls.
It was better to animate the tail after the torso was done, as the torso contributed to the direction in which the tail rotated and swayed. Once the second attempt was done it gave a much better result and was looking akin to stop motion. At this point the animation was retaining the trademark jerky movement associated with traditional stop-motion. Therefore I wanted to add some fluid continuity (for, e.g. the head control) as it was showing more jerky characteristics. I also wanted to produce two versions of this animation, one showing a bit more smooth aesthetic while the other showing more jerky movements.
Even-though when I was done with the second attempt I still had some problems with certain controls. For instance, the head and tail were not showing the desired movement in certain frames. To overcome this I fixed some keyed frames to match up with the previous and later keyed frames.
After producing a better result in the movement to appear akin to stop-motion I then attempted to figure out how to incorporate more strobing (jerky) movements and feel to the animation. This was relatively simple as I randomly deleted some keyed frames of different controls in different places of the timeline as well as increased and decreased some of the attribute values of the controls to show some exceeded limit (this brought up the weird “popness” on certain parts of the body during the movement).
Later I rendered the models with Maya “physical sun and sky”, downloaded a jungle background concept art (as there wasn’t enough time to create one), added the ground onto the concept art image using Photo-shop and finally compositing it all along with the modified background using Nuke.
Now it's looking much better than the previous attempt (still not jerky enough), thou I think it's wrong to show a smooth tracking shot for the animation ( it doesn't feel stop-motion)---> The near successful attempt (still not enough jerky movements to the animation). Thought I believe it appears rather ungainly due to the addition of a smooth tracking shot for the animation as it is not normally associated with the look and feel of traditional Stop-Motion.
The same animation from previous footage, but composited on a painted background.
This is the more jerky version of the previous animation.-> This version incorporates more of the jittery movements when compared to the previous animation.
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| Graph showing more offset on amplitude thus giving more jerkiness. |
