IT82: Multimedia Animation Master Practical

Transcription

1 IT82: Multimedia Animation Master Practical The aims and objectives of this practical are two-fold: To reinforce the basic principles of animation from lectures. To use Hash s Animation Master to have some fun! For this practical sheet, it is assumed that you are familiar with the material from the animation lecture. Today you may end up creating some large files. Before you begin, please go and have a look to see if there s any large files lying around in your directory that you don t need any more. When looking at a directory in Windows NT, the menu option View fi Details will show you file sizes. Take a particular look at graphics files, especially bitmaps (BMP) or Photoshop (PSD) files they can get very big, so if you don t need them... thank you. Load up Animation Master (Start fi Programs fi Hash Inc fi AM2000 v8.5). It might take a little while to load up, but in the meantime some kind of troll should appear on the screen for you to look at. Animation Master is a powerful animation tool that can do 3D animations. We will be looking at the sort of scenes you might set up for an animation, with vector-based objects/characters, and then having set up the scene, we ll try out some simple animation. 1

2 Setting the Scene When Animation Master loads up, you possibly have a project loaded in already. If not, From the File menu, select File fi Open. Choose the Welcome.prj project (It s in C:\Program Files\Hash Inc\v8.5\Projects if it doesn t take you there directly). Have a look around. You should see a Project Workspace on your left, which contains the list of objects, cameras, lighting and other information. On your right you should see a wireframe representation of various objects, including some giant text in the shape of the word Welcome. This is the Choreography window, and it shows the vector-based view of the objects. 2

3 You may also have a further window nearer the bottom of the screen that shows a static view of the text objects. Animation Master uses a Choreography window to do the animating, and separate windows to show views of the objects being used. We re starting off with some simple (i.e. speedy-to-render) objects first, to get the idea of what is available as far as scene setting goes, without it taking too long. Let s have a look at how this scene can be rendered, at final quality. Select Tools fi Options. On the Rendering tab, make sure the following are selected: Anti-aliasing and Shadows in Final Options, and in Final Options 2, set Reflections, with the max level set to 1 for Reflections. (The more reflections the renderer has to cope with, the longer it ll take. 1 is quite enough!) Now press the Render Mode button on the toolbar at the top. You are now in render mode, whenever you are over the choreography window. Click anywhere in the choreography window. After a few moments (the status bar at the bottom of the screen indicates progress) you should get the results of converting from vector-based to bitmapped format. Very tasteful in greys, but a little bland. Let s look at the sort of state information that can be adjusted. 3

4 Right-click on Shortcut to Welcome in the Project Workspace, then select Jump to Model You should now have a little Properties window that looks something like this: (If you don t, then choose View fi Properties from the main menus.) Select the Color tab, then click on the Diffuse color chip to bring up a selection of colours. Choose whichever you like. Now try doing the same sort of thing to change the cylinder s colour to blue. Let s try something a bit more interesting with the ball. Select the ball and get the properties box for it, as before. Now change the ball colour to red, with a specular size of 20 and an intensity of 100. This changes the nature of the highlight reflection on the ball. On the Reflectivity tab, set the reflectivity to 40. Now try another render again, to see what that looks like. Note the differences between the matt rendering of the Welcome text and the glossy red ball. Finally, let s try adjusting the lighting. Right-click on the Shortcut to Light2 in the Project Workspace, and select Jump to Light Data. On the Attributes tab, select the Lens flare option. Try rendering the scene again. We ve now finished with this project, so... Close the current project (Project fi Close), without saving it. 4

5 Animating a Character There is a woodpecker character already created for you, and there s a project file to go with it, including camera set up, lighting etc. Copy the wp folder over from Groups on Wide\IT82\HashAM into your own filestore. The files that you need are in the directory. In Animation Master, Choose Projects fi Open, and load the woodpecker project, file woody.prj in your wp directory. Do a render, just to see what the woodpecker looks like! The project is already set up looking at the woodpecker from one particular angle, but it is useful to be able to view a scene at different angles, as well as from the view of the camera. Right-click on the choreography window, and select View fi Left to get a view from the side. You should be able to see the woodpecker from the side, also the camera, with a field of view given by the purple lines, and a light, with the woodpecker in the pool of light given by the white lines. (By the way, if any of these colours you find awkward to see, you can always choose colours to your own preferences by selecting Tools Customize and then changing the Appearance settings.) Try also View fi Top and other selections, to see other views. There is also a quick way to get a rough idea of how changes will look without going through a whole rendering request. Right-click on the choreography window, and select Draw Mode fi Shaded to get a roughly rendered view. The disadvantage is that it s quicker to use the wireframes for creating the animation. If you haven t already, select the camera viewing angle, with View fi Shortcut to Camera1 Now let s make the woodpecker s head nod. First of all, let s check we re ready to make keyframes: Choose Tools fi Options from the main menus, and on the Units tab, select Frames Elapsed (0) under the Show Time As section. The current position that the woodpecker is in will be our first keyframe, frame 0. Make this a keyframe by pressing the Make Keyframe bottom toolbar. button, on the 5

6 Now set the frame number (at the bottom of the screen) to 7. Seven frames will be enough to give us the simulation of motion without the rendering taking too long. Now we need to make the woodpecker s head nod. Select the woodpecker by clicking on him in the choreography window. A yellow bounding box should appear. Now we need to enter skeletal mode, where we can do inverse kinematics. This is when we can pull on one of the bones, and the rest of that piece of the character comes with it, and the computer figures out exactly what we meant by that action, to position the other bones correctly. Click on the skeletal mode button on the main toolbar. You should now be able to see all the woodpecker s bones. (If not, try clicking on the woodpecker again until you strike a bone and they appear.) Try clicking on the bones on and around the head (BUT avoid the big one sticking out of its beak!), moving them about. Experiment. Keep experimenting until you have got the woodpecker in the position you want for its head pecking forward. Make this a keyframe too. 6

7 Bring up the Project Workspace, if you haven t already (View fi Project Workspace) On the right hand side of the workspace, you should be able to see frames 0 and 7 noted as keyframes. Now let s have a look at how the software does the tweening. On the frame toolbar at the bottom, click on the Next Frame and Previous Frame buttons to inspect one by one the frames in between 0 and 7. Happy with that? Now that we ve created some motion for the woodpecker, let s save it as a little movie file (actually not so little, at 3Mb!!) Click on the Render to a File button. Lots of tab settings to change. On the Quality tab, set it to Final quality. On the Output tab, choose a filename for the output file (the... button will let you browse). Select a Quicktime format, so that you can (hopefully) see your animation being played when it s finished rendering. On the Range tab, select 0 as the start and 7 as the end of the range of frames to be rendered. On the Image tab, make sure low resolution is selected. Then click Start to start the rendering. You get given visual feedback on the frames being rendered, status information, and then when it s finished, a player pops up to show you the finished result! Examine your resulting animation. Is it smooth, or jerky? Add some more keyframes in so that your woodpecker lifts his head up again, ready to have another peck. 7

8 Experiment further with keyframes and see how the tweening happens between each keyframe. Look also at the Project Workspace window. If you enlarge its width a bit, you should be able to see something like the above. Here you can see that Animation Master isn t just using keyframe animation, but it s also using track-based animation. Opposite each of the various bones listed for the woodpecker is a corresponding track. Only for components that move are listed keyframes. There s a lot more you can do with Animation Master. Animation Master can cope with very sophisticated textures, and different ways of doing animation, including particle systems, for example, and pre-recorded tweening, where a particular motion (e.g. walking, or the Can Can) can be applied to any model capable of the motion (bi-pedal models in this case). There are further models and projects in the Groups on Wide\IT82\HashAM folder for you to experiment with. 8