Animation: Professional Article Review

Intro:

     Rise of The Guardians is about a group of characters coming together to fight against the dark forces known as the boogeyman. The group consists of the Tooth Fairy, Santa, Easter Bunny, and the new guardian, Jack Frost. This article will cover how each of the guardians' effects were made through animation.

Sandman:

      Sandman is the dream maker of all the children and people around the world. His effects of golden sand flying through the air is made by the effects department. The effects made include airplanes, unicorns, and even dinosaurs. The sand shapes were made through conceptualizing(Form a concept or idea of something) the shapes. The modeling of the sand is completed with using sub-division surfaces that would phase volumetrically. These faces would soon be filled in with points inside Side Effects Houdini. It was said there were complications with shapes holding form, the real challenge proved to be when attempting to create a nice fluid simulation of the sands.

     To make the fluid effect of sand, a few techniques were used. Binding points to different objects were required. For example, when making a sand unicorn move around, the effects team bound different parts of the unicorn and also unbound them throughout the animation. Finally, the last step was achieved through Houdini. Messing with the operating performance tasks, achieved a fluid and smooth animation. The final format of the rendered animation was OpenVDB.

Boogeyman:

     The movie's antagonist is known as Pitch, the Boogeyman. A similar technique was used to create the "dark sand." However, instead of creating a nice, smooth, fluid motions, a new view was made. Taking the same concepts and ideas, the angles and points of the sand were made to be more dark and creepy. Extrusion was also used to create a dark aftereffect of the sands. Vertices of the horses' legs were taken and extruded to create a dark and spooky trail. Finally, changing the transparency of the legs and replacing it with particle hits made the horses look as if they were running and fading off the more they ran.

Jack Frost:

     The main character of the film is known as Jack Frost. As we all know, Jack Frost is known as the spirit of winter. Jack Frost's ability to turn everything cold required multiple teams to work together to create a slow taking over of ice. The effects team sought out a very naturalistic approach. The developers would take a model, and then run a cellular automata simulation on it. The cellular automata simulation is a process if you cover a surface in particles, and turn one particle on, the rest will react and turn on as well. The effect is said to be "kind of like at a sporting event where they have The Wave." Even though the animation of slow taking over an object is complete, the frost effect is still to be done. The frost cold effect is made by tracing millions of line over the surface of the cellular automata simulation.

Santa's Portal:

    Santa's magical portals to travel through space in the movie were made through adding snow elements and bursts. The portal effect required a little outside help. The effects team wanted to make it look like the portals would have depth to it if thrown. For example, if the snow globe were to be through 20 ft in front of you, or on a wall, the effects team wanted to make it look as if it is going back 20 ft or on a wall. To achieve this effect, they worked with a Nuke artist and they rendered a depth map of a portal. The depth is achieved through altering the offsets of the project.

Review:

    The article talks about how some effects to Rise of The Guardians were created. The effects team used different programs to create different effects. One of the more used ones is the Houdini program. I think this article was very appealing and also informational due to its explanations of the effects.

Source: https://www.fxguide.com/featured/rise-of-the-effects/

Animation: Personal Project Review Animation Story

      My animation story is made with adobe photoshop and adobe after effects. My end product was a human going through the change of turning into a werewolf. This would be an example of man vs self. The beginning of the story doesn't start with a creepy forest under the moonlight, but rather with a storyboard.

    After mapping out a storyboard, I decided on which scenes I wanted to use and which ones I wouldn't use. Upon deciding on which ones to and not to use, I redrew my storyboard with more detail and description. I then drew all the pictures needed to recreate the scenes. Next, I scanned in the drawings then colored and altered them in Photoshop.

       After drawing out all the scenes and coloring them, the project was close to an end. I then imported the files into AfterEffects and started to create the scenes. The end result of the timing and editing looked a little like this.

    Even with the editing and timing done there were a few tweaks made along the way. The werewolf change was made with using pre-made effects. The specific one I used was called "CC force blur." This is the same exact effect that is used to make the Flash's speedy run possible. I simply messed with the direction, shading, and how much blur to apply and the effect was complete. The end product is finished.

Animation: Technical Tutorial

   The purpose of this animation was to get a simple understanding of how multi-plane animation works and how to animate it properly. This skill is very important to animators because in the field of animation you need to know a little bit of everything to be successful. Animation is all about telling the story and all stories go to an end. Using multi-plane animation is just one simple way to tell a story in a quick and elegant fashion.

        Tutorial:

1. The first step to creating an animation is to first create the images. Using photoshop, start by creating a 5000 x 480px canvas.
   
2. On your photoshop canvas, start by creating multiple layers by duplicating the background. To duplicate this layer, select the background layer, right click and select duplicate layer.
   
3. Now for the fun part. Painting the multi-plane canvas is tricky. While painting, keep a few things in mind. The objects closest to you, will move the fastest. The layers further back will move less and less. Make sure you paint on the correct layer and to label them. Labeling them will make them easier to identify in Adobe AfterEffects.
4. After completing the painting process of the canvas, save your .psd file.
5. Open your canvas file (.psd) in Adobe AfterEffects. 
6. If opened correctly, you should see different layers in your Adobe AfferEffects. Click and drag them into the time bar.
   
   
   
   
7. Organize the layers appropriately
8. Select the desired layer to animate and press "P"
• You will notice that a drop down menu appears. This is the positioning panel.
9. Start by moving the layers/ objects to desired start  location.
10. Create a starting keyframe by clicking on the stopwatch.
11. Move the layers across the screen while keeping a straight line by holding shift while dragging.
12. Do this with all the layers

• Keep in mind that the further layers move less and the closer layers move more

   13.You have now created your animation. Preview the animation by pressing spacebar. When your animation is at the point where you want it, export it.

• To export, Goto File
• Export
• Add to Render Que
• Change to desired settings
• Click Render

Animation Personal Project Review

     The scope of the project involved using photoshop and adobe aftereffects. It required pre-knowledge about photoshop. The process of the project included the idea, creating it and then exporting it. The idea was making a ball bounce across the screen. The ball however, would look realistic and circular with shading/ lighting. The bounce process would include adding a realistic bounce motion and adding a squash and stretch effect. After the editing was complete, we rendered out our bounce animation and made it into a video. Along the way, I learned how to better animate objects and how to create a project so it can be animated. If I were to do this project over again, I would change my grass color. My grass color wasn't as green as I would've liked it to be at the end. I would keep my ball color and motions the same. My experiences during this project will better prepare me for my future ones because I now know how to better create objects and how to make it more realistic. I thought that this project was overall very helpful because it gave us a chance to incorporate and use different programs to create a pretty neat animation.