Figure Animation Tips and Tricks
Superdog
Posts: 765
Based on a discussion in another thread I was encouraged to start a thread about how to animate more successfully in Cararra. One of the reasons I bought Carrara was it's advanced animation features but that's also why I've never managed to get into it because without learning how to use them they remain too difficult for me to work out on my own.
My main aim in animation is to create naturalistic figure movement. Even using Aniblocks and BVH files this goal has illuded me. Feet sliding, limb twitching and ugly transitons from one pose to another seems to plague these shortcut methods in DS and Carrara. Even when a couple of aniblocks or BVH files string together nicely there's always one that won't work properly even though it's ideal for the scene. If I'm going to animate from scratch what are the tips and tricks to create naturalistic figure movement?
I've bought and watched many interesting animation tutorials about DS/Carrara and they are often very good at explaining the tools and basic ways to apply them but none of them go further to discuss the mechanics of movement and how to emulate that in animation. It's a bit like someone explaing the lighting tools in DS/Carrara but not showing how to use them to light a scene naturalistically.
Feel free to discuss any element of animation that might contribute to our understanding.
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If you really want "tips and tricks to create naturalistic figure movement?", I would suggest that you start with this:
Get out a cheap video camera, and go out into the real world, and videotape people doing stuff. Walking, standing, just routine stuff.
Then watch those videos over and over again, taking note of what each body part is doing. The hips, the face, the shoulders. Notice the tiny details. Especially the hips, because the hips are the core of all body movement. And pay special attention to how the body is always balanced, and notice how it appears to have "weight". Notice WHY it appears that way.
Then try to associate those movements with expression. By that I mean you notice stuff like when a teenage girl is feeling "awkward" she often turns her toes inward, or buries her head in her cellphone.
Then you can slowly build a library of how people express their feelings with their body movements and facial expressions.
Realism is about detail. And those details are what REALLY will give you naturalistic movement.
And as I have repeated here 126,845 times, you will never learn "realistic" ANYTHING by studying how to use Carrara's tools.
And by the way...
Don't feel bad if you can't get the hang of "naturalistic figure movement". It takes a LOT of work and study and talent to be a good, or even decent animator. That's why professional studios hire specialists in all of these 3D animation areas. The tools in the different animation apps is the easy part. The "being a good animator" is the difficult part.
Personally, I think Carrara's animation tools are very/extremely basic and frustrating, and good for not much more than small tweaks, or drag-n-drop pre-made BVH files.
Carrara doesn't even have an expressions system where you can set up linked and automated movements, like automatically maintaining apparent balance by keeping the feet spaced apart correctly, etc. It has little in the way of advanced, or even standard, character animation tools. So don't feel bad.
I think maybe I'm hoping for Carrara to somehow offer solutions to problems that infuriate me in DS. For example, I've joined two aniblocks together in DS but the flow between them isn't exactly right despite adjusting the aniblock transition. So I bake them to edit in Keymate. All well and good. The problem occurs when I want to match the right foot position in keyframe 10 which is sliding all over the place to the one in keyframe 50. There is no way of knowing, as far as I'm aware, where either foot position is in relation to the whole scene. So it's a matter of guess work trying to match the foot in KF10 with KF50. Why is there no universal positioning in DS or probably Carrara for that matter? Surely there must be a way to know where the foot in KF50 is in relation to the whole scene compared to KF10? Things like this are either user ignorance or the shortcommings of the software. But it's impossible to find out which unless you're lucky enough to hit on a solution. Simple problems like this can take days to figure out (if at all) because there is no tutorial explaining how to solve them. So after a couple of vexing problems like this in Carrara and no available solution the sensible reaction is to stop using it and use something else.
Not sure I can address your specific problem with aniblocks, but by far the most common issue I see here in foot animation problems is due to the "tweeners" (I think that's the Carrara term) being non-linear instead of linear.
With nonlinear, Carrara interpolates between keyframes and might insert a curved, smoothing motion between keyframes. The result is the foot moves when you want it to stay fixed. You can see this in the graph editor in the sequencer. Instead of a flat line between position keyframes there's a curved line.
Also, the basics of IK involve adding a null object (aka, "target helper") to the scene, placing it at the ankle, and then going to the IK Terminator that comes with your content character (select the foot, then Modifiers/Inverse Kinematics), and under the "object to track" select the null object. The leg IK chain will then be anchored to that null object.
You're better off just fooling around with finishing work in Carrara, honestly. Focus on the face, hands, clothing, hair, etc. Trying to animate full figures in Carrara and make them look natural will make your soul ebb, wither and die.
Invest your time and/or money in mocap. You can do mocap in your home via and Xbox and a camera these days. Better to have a useable mocap and tweak it to perfection rather than put around from scratch in Carrara. There are just too many moving parts for Carrara's timeline to do an organic figure any justice.
That's just my advice on it, tho.
Thanks for the feedback so far. Concerning mocap isn't it very expensive to buy an xbox just for that? I'd love to try it but wonder what the cheapest way to get into it is?
I guess I'd tend to agree, but it depends on the individual. For those who are more interested in the journey than the destination, doing manual animation will provide endless hours of monkeying around with software, even if the end result is only, say, a 3 out of 10 on the awesomeness scale.
But for those who are just interested in getting to the end product as fast as possible, and they want to be sure it's at least an 8 out of 10, It's hard to recommend the somewhat antiquated and super tedious manual animation methods in Carrara. Yeah, it has NLA which is nice, but that's a far cry from what animation tools could be. And it's hard to compete with a mocap solution, or real actors against a green screen. Which is why manual animation is becoming, for the most part, somewhat obsolete in the real world.
I moved on from Daz studio to Carrara for exactly the reasons you are listing here. The animation tools in Daz studio just don't work very well, they're buggy, and they're seriously lacking in functionality to begin with. I could never get a smooth transition between blocks in Daz Studio either, and usually the more time I spent on it the worse it would get. It's not like that in Carrara, everything I was always wishing for in Daz Studio (And a lot more) is available in Carrara. I would recommend taking the time to learn Carrara, you'll be happier than you are with Daz Studio.
There is no easy answer, being a 3d animator is a skill that takes time and effort to learn.
The aniblock importer for Carrara works great. It converts aniblocks to keyframes in Carrara, from there Carrara offers infintely more control (in my opinion) than Daz Studio and you can get any kind of transition you want between motions, without any of the glitches that you're getting in Daz Studio.
Just to clarify
A "Tweener" is not a "carrara term",. It's an animation industry term,
In traditiional animation,(Hand drawn) a Master animator would create several "Key-Frame" poses of a character,. These are then handed to an Assistant animator to begins the posess of creating the transitional frames between each of these Key-frames... Assistant animators were referred to as "Tweeners"
Carrara's Default animation tweener is Linear, although that can be changed. either in the Sequencer between key-frames, or Globally in the Preferences
Tweeners are not the cause of foot slipping.....they can be the cure.
EG: The discreet tweener ..Holds the position static ...until the next key,.
Superdog
The issues you have with merging two different animations together seamlessly are not unusual,. the issue is normally in the Transition between the two main (key frames) The end of one clip and the start of the next,. you can create a more fluid transition by creating additional Tween poses, to correct where an aotomatic Tweener type, such as linear or bezier does not look "realistic" for the motion of the figure.
As for positional intormation in Carrara,.
In the Motion Panel,. you can see the X/Y/Z Position / Rotation data for any item or body part you select, on any frame.
In the sequencer, you can expand any body part to see the individual X/Y/Z tracks fo position / Rotation,.
In the Graph editor,. you can go further by adjusting either individual valiues or work on a selection of vallues, theres also a nice little expanding flexi-box which is new to C8 when you select a bunch of frame values in the Grraph editor, which allows you to scale flip invert stretch move etc
Superdog,
I have a suggestion. Maybe you could pick an "action" for us as a Carrara group to try and animate. Using a basic figure (ie:Genesis that comes with Carrara8.5) we try to create the most realistic animation we can in Carrara of the "action", solving the problems along the way. We could upload the file so everyone can tweak/change the animation until we get the best animation possible. I think the best way to learn is to actually try and create something. Sooooo.....
Here are some ideas we could try to animate.
Throwing a ball, doing a sit-up, doing a push-up, sitting down on a chair, opening a door, archer shooting an arrow , climbing stairs.
or we could do some facial animations as well (laugh,cry etc)
If just 3 or 4 carrara animator wanabees would participate this could be a great learning experience. Let me know what you guys think.
Mike
Mike,
Great suggestion.
I really enjoyed your occasional short animation challenges, even though I personally focus on unrealistic stills, and only participated in one or two. The title of this thread really lends itself to having people demonstrate brief figure animations in Carrara and discussing the tips, tricks, and techniques they used. Of course, tips and links to reference material for human and other figure motions would also be most welcome. In that spirit, I will start with a tip for findng reference material, including for the human body in motion. It is called "artist-reference" with a dot com extension. I don't think I can link to artist-reference directly because it naturally has some nudity, but folks should be able to find it easily.
artist-reference
So...yes? haha Easy answer. I would certainly get an X-Box One because you also wanted to play games and watch movies and all that on your X-Box One. Getting it solely for mocap...there may be a cheaper solution somewhere out there. I just know that that's a little added perk with the X-Box, so if you were into video games... ;) Mocap is usually pretty expensive to put together. For Aurora, Tim used Optitrack. I feel like the cheapest workable system would come in around $3,000+
Which seems like a lot...but when you consider that you're basically never having to animate anything organic again (sans all the finishing work), the price seems to shrink. haha
Out of my range, personally. I get mocaps as I need them (I largely do hand drawn animation or shoot live action, so what I use in terms of organic CGI animation is limited), but if you're wanting to do short CGI films using organic characters as a one person band, there's really no way around mocaps.
http://www.optitrack.com/
Here's Aurora if you haven't seen it --
Rosa (also done by a single animator) likewise used pretty much all mocaps --
Just don't kill yourself over it is all. Dynamic camera movements, interesting framing, meaningful cuts, STORY, etc -- that's what's going to give you a compelling experience. Case in point, count the seconds between every cut in Rosa. Then cancel out the bits where it's in slow motion. People will disagree, but I think *all* organic CGI animation benfits from quick cutting because it forces our brain to constantly fill in the blanks. Our *brains* continue the organic movements without any effort on the part of the animator.
If your goal is to be a professional animator, I would strongly urge you to jump over to Blender as a free option. Carrara will teach you some things about animating, but it's a much more clunky experience. To me (and again, some might disagree) DAZ and Carrara are really for folks who are just trying to put out product. It's not for folks to learn professional modeling or character animation. I need a shot of fighter planes zipping across the sky? DAZ store, Carrara, video footage, After Effects. Done. That's the strength of these products. I say use them for what they're made for and best at -- pushing out high quality renders fast and easily. If you crush yourself into the tiny, limiting space that is manually animating organic characters in Carrara, that's going to be a really stressful and disappointing experience, if your end goal is to just push out high quality renders fast and easily.
It's like Joe said, it's all about what sort of journey you want to take, what your destination is. For a lot of Carrara users and even more DAZ users, the objective is usually high quality renders fast and easily. Just figure out what your objective is and then work towards that. The absolute best you'll ever get out of Carrara will come from inorganic charactes. Robots, armor, cars, planes, bullets, etc. You can get Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within level organic character renderings, but you're going to have to fork over a few thousand bucks to get them moving organically. Which, considering that movie cost like a hundred and forty million dollars to make fifteen years ago, it's not bad if you can even come into close proximity on a short film.
This was a metal test I did a few months back --
Just figure out your destination, basically. If you can't afford a mocap system or mocaps and you want to get something up on the screen, then I'd say move away from organics and start with animating inorganic characters -- the sort that people will forgive being less organic in their movements. If your old, beaten up robot characters move a little stiff, hey, no big, ya know?
Good post, BC Rice, it gives a lot of food for thought.
When I see amazing animations such as this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxtbleedPu4 I am just left in wonder.
I'm aware that a lot of generous advice has been provided on the forums on compositing and rendering but I would love to know what goes into such a video.
The obvious ones are:
Fully modelled, rigged and textured characters;
lots of asset creation (ferns, rocks, weapons, etc.);
Plenty of attention to lighting, camera angles;
Careful use of depth of field, sharp and soft focus;
Textures that have a consistent 'look and feel' about them.
There are places where it seems clear to me that the action takes place against a pre-rendered background - maybe its done that way pretty much through most of the piece and is cleverly disguised. But there are many shots where it looks like the characters are running right into the the whole scene and are surrounded by individual 'assets'.
@ Rampart: In the earlier thread where animation was discussed, you linked to a youtube tutorial on the subject of animating in Iclone. Thanks, it was very useful for me. I love both Iclone and Carrara. Strangely, in the course of writing this post, I've identified for myself a niggling doubt about Iclone and how Carrara seems stronger. It is in what I saw in the video I've linked to. Carrara can give a consistent 'look and feel', I believe, much more readily than Iclone. Another strength of Carrara is the ability to build, completely from scratch, the characters and other assets needed. Not for the faint-hearted, of course, but Carrara is well-equipped for doing that.
Any thoughts from users of both programs?
I'm not sure about the specific video you posted, I assume it's from a game. And I'm not a games kinda guy...
But if it is a professional theatrical production I can give you a general idea of how it was done.
Compositing.
Professional productions are mainly interested in high quality, done as quickly and efficiently as possible, and allowing maximum freedom to make changes/improvements along the way. It took a lot of work by a lot of people to do that production, and it also took a lot of resources. And the last thing you want to do, when you're fighting a tight budget and tight production schedule, is to have to re-do from scratch something that took days or weeks to render.
So as I discussed in my compositing thread, you isolate each element on work on it individually. So I think it's safe to say that, even where you're sure that the images were a straight 3D render, it was heavily composited. Even in those areas you're certain it wasn't composited. And there could be hundreds of individually composited layers/elements in any given shot. Or much more. And many thousands of operations (color correction, blur, transforms, etc.) in just about everything you see on screen.
As far as assets, typically large production facilities have libraries of assets/images/photos/etc. that they've built up and saved, including compositing tools, backgrounds, animations, etc. And if they can use something they've saved in the library they will. Again, it's about quick and efficient and least cost.
So they've likely got some "stock" run cycles and walk cycles, etc., for the animation. Otherwise, they probably used mocap for the animation. Although a quick look at the running, for example, doesn't look all that mocap-y, more like a quick, manual, run cycle.
Oh, and one other element that might be the reason why some are impressed with the video:
Talent.
It takes many people with specialized, individual talents to do something like this. It takes 3D lighting people, compositors, animators, mocap people, writers, and on and on.
So don't feel bad if it seems like an impossible feat for one person to duplicate something like this. In general, it is EXTREMELY difficult.
I believe there was a thread a couple months ago about doing a Jump cycle. maybe we could try something simular.
I don't allways have time especially in the summer for this and would need to a lot of research but think it would be a wonderful thing to do.
Thanks, Joe for your reply.
When I linked to the video it wasn't because I'm a great fan of fighting, chasing and all the other game-related stuff. But I did particularly like the lighting in the forest glades, the overall colour scheme as well as the textures and the characters' expressions in this video.
Your insight into how it was done answered my question. If it's mostly composited throughout then they've done a really nice job of it.
I remember when DAZ Studio first appeared. The scene for beginners to assemble consisted of a fairy (V1?), a tree-stump or toad-stool and some ground vegetation. There was a large curved background with a forest image as a texture.
I guess that's the level I'm destined to remain on!
In case anyone is interested in manual figure animation techniques, I'll mention what I believe to be the one area that is most important, yet least discussed.
And that is "physics".
Every motion that you or I make is affected by physics. When we walk up a flight of stairs, it takes energy. Therefore we have to step forward and PUSH our bodies up the clear the first step. And that takes a little time and effort. And we have to lean into it so we have the forward energy to help us up the stairs. And we have to maintain BALANCE.
One of the most useful tools, IMO, when trying to figure out realistic human animation is to think about weight and balance and energy. Those are the basic animation principles that have existed forever, even back when the original hand animators were doing Disney animations using principles like "squash" and "stretch" and so on. It's all an exaggeration of basic physics.
Bodies that are leaping off a wall take time to fall, or else they look fake.
s=0.5*g*t^2 that's how far an object falls under gravity each second. And those details tells your viewers if it's real or fake.
So the first part of doing character animation is to think about weight, balance, energy, and timing.
I like the idea of jointly working on an animation cycle to see how it can be improved. I'm working on one that's about 3 minutes long but it's made up of commercial aniblocks (that I've bought) so I don't know whether it's ok to share that to test with? It's a G2M movement cycle that I've endlessly been trying to get right. So far I must've re-edited the whole thing in DS about 50 times. Most of it is flowing a lot better now but there are certain parts - the transitions between aniblocks - that are still not convincing.
My process atm is to bake the aniblocks to keyframes and edit them in keyMate viewing the animation in the DS viewport set to the Texture Shaded setting. This is a lot quicker and easier than working in iRAY or Octane Render but it can't show shadows so it's very difficult to see whether the feet are always in contact with the floor. Especially when certain aniblocks I've used seem to raise the figure slightly higher off the floor than others. To deal with this I've used graphMate to slightly lower or raise the figures Transform/yTranslate level where necessary. I assume a similar proceedure to this would be necessary in Carrara? I didn't raise or lower the placement of the figure's hip in case this messed with their movement.
Once I've got the keyframes about right I turn that section into an aniblock, save it, delete the keyframes and then load that aniblock back in. I can then load another aniblock and build the cycle that way. I have no problems facing long, labourious editing processes like this but it would be great to learn tips and tricks that might make it slightly easier rather than floundering around in the dark a lot of the time.
BTW, often beginning animators tend to think "oh, I know what a walk cycle is...you move forward and your left leg moves then your right leg moves, and BAM, you have a walk cycle".
In fact, human motion is very complex. It's based around the hips, and there's a lot of up and down motion as your legs move. And there's a lot of other motion just to maintain balance. Which is why I keep suggesting that people study how people actually move first, rather than assuming we just know intuitively since we do it every day.
Superdog, I guess I'm a bit confused.
You started the thread saying "If I'm going to animate from scratch what are the tips and tricks to create naturalistic figure movement?"
But now it looks like you're proceeding to use aniblocks rather than pursuing animating from scratch and achieving naturalistic figure movement.
I'll step aside if you're gonna discuss aniblocks since I have no clue about them.
I'm using aniblocks and DS atm because I don't really know how to animate from scratch in Carrara in a realistic way. That's why I'd like to learn. I also don't mind combining both keyframing with blocks/BVH's if this works out well. Some aniblocks were originally mocaps so on that basis they can be pretty accurate. I want to combine the best tools available when I learn animation in Carrara so I'm trying not to rule out anything if it gives me an advantage. As you point out, human motion is very complex so keyframing from scratch is a daunting task, especially for a novice like me. Are there tools in Carrara that simulate physics when animating a figure because trying to observe and replicate those effects by hand is probably not possible otherwise?
Also it was suggested that we work on an action and I have one motherload of an animation cycle. But maybe it's best to work on something less complex. Perhaps a short action combined with a facial emotion and bodily functions like breathing, blinking and swallowing? A full body animation with the emphasis being on realism.
Superdog,
I agree about working on a simple short action with a facial emotion as well, we could share the work using Carrara's NLA clips . If we use the base Genesis figure that comes in Carrara 8.5 to create the action , everyone should be able to work on the NLA clip without any copyright restrictions. All we have to do is choose an action to work on and start posting .Superdog, do you want to start with a walk cycle or a specific type of action? Maybe choose from one of the actions I posted earlier . "Throwing a ball, doing a sit-up, doing a push-up, sitting down on a chair, opening a door, archer shooting an arrow , climbing stairs."
Let us know which one you want to do so we can get started or you can choose one of your own.
Here is a good site for reference stuff and it is free as far as I can tell.
http://referencereference.com/index.html
and a youtube channel with different figure actions.
https://www.youtube.com/user/endlessreference/videos
How about trying a sitting animation. That seems suitably complex. Not sure what emotion to suggest. Maybe sitting and concerned? Perhaps the emotion could be left up to each person?
Okay , here is a bunch of links for reference. I think to start maybe we could do just the stand to sit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8EbzE30bA0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyuLp07h8Rk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqAd8Q0-DXg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVxa1fs2vng
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxTRvT6RrNU
First off, I'm going to disagree with the naysayers about figure animation in Carrara. It can be done, and it doesn't have to take a huge amount of time, but it will take time and thought.
I'm no Disney, and I don't pretend to be, but I have done some animations that I am pretty happy with. Some I have put up on youtube and some I haven't.
These aren't listed here because I'm trolling for compliments, but rather to show that figure animations can be done in Carrara, despite what others say. Are they perfect? No. Are they great? That depends on personal opinion. Some are better than others in my opinion.
They all have the same things in common: They were all hand animated in Carrara and used IK tracking and target helpers. Some also used NLA tracks that were generated from custom animations.
I am more than willing to share how I do things, as time allows.
Joe's point about watching reference footage of people walking and doing other tasks is extremely useful. I disagree with some of his other assessments about Carrara's animation capabilities, but that isn't what this thread is about, from what I gather. Perhaps editorial comments about Carrara can be left at the door, since this is a thread about how to animate in Carrara, and not a review thread.
You're right. If you read the OP's original post in this thread, it's about how to animate figures "naturalistically". He specificially mentions: "....If I'm going to animate from scratch what are the tips and tricks to create naturalistic figure movement?", and ".....to discuss the mechanics of movement and how to emulate that in animation"
Which makes me wonder why you decided to drift off topic and focus on only a few side comments which were made. With all due respect you posted a group of videos which show very little in the way of "naturalistic figure movement".
Perhaps you might want to review the thread and note all of the on-topic posts that were made and provide your contributions to the topic.
After reviewing your videos, I think it's a good opportunity to stay on-topic and discuss your examples. For instance, you might want to focus on what I describe above as the physics of natural figure motion, as well as other motion, to achieve realism and believability. For example the cat falling down the stairs. In real life, that happens under simple physics motion. Not only the cat itself falls under gravity, but it's body responds to try to maintain balance during the fall and protect itself. You might want to look at some animations on TV showing how the animator exaggerates the physics-based motion for comedic effect, but maintains an underlying core of physics-based motion.
Also, you might want to consider putting a photo sequence in your background behind your Aiko animation and compare the two, especially in the leg motion.
BTW, you did a nice job with the upper body part of the Aiko animation.
By the way, one thing I love about the internet. You can find just about anything you can imagine. Even videos showing cats falling down stairs. Go figure...
Note there's a lot of clawing to hug the floor to save itself, and a lot of sliding, and trying to right itself. All motions have a purpose, it's not just a random sequence