Evaluation

I am quite happy with my idents. I have not done any chracter animation for over a year so that was a good excercise before I start working on my short animation movie which I hope I will be able to show next year.
I have chosen the Cartoon Network channel because it gave me the ability to do sth different and funny (if we can say that these idents are funny). I never animated funny stuff so that was a good begining for me and I gained some new experience.
I tried to use very simple techniques to achieve what I had planned. I think I could do some animations better, like the third ident. I am not happy with the legs and head animation in this one, I aslo could add some sparks to create better visual effect. If I had to do this again I would change some things, but I am quite satisfied anyway.
The only thing I do not really like are the sound effects. I could not find really good sounds, and I have never really done editing with sound.
I hope that some of you like my idents.
I see you next year;)

third ident

This one was probably the hardest one from all of them. It was a great fun to make it. I wanted this time to make a short ident with action sequence. The idea was to do sth different. Cartoon Network is showing very popular Clone Wars series. Like every commercial channel they advertise their programs and in the same time advertise the channel. I decided to do sth like that. I have chosen the “Clone Wars” series because I thought this would suit to the Dino character.

I started from droids. I have chosen the very famous Star Wars droid (which also appears in Clone Wars). The droid that I produced had to be similar to the oryginal one. It would take me a lot of time to design exactly the same droid. So in very short piece of time I designed a similar one.


I started my animation from the droids. Firstly I animated walking. Because in this job animation was quite basic, I decided to use IK solver again. Then I animated my Dino character (to make the lightsaber I used cylinder with glow option).
I used another trick here which is worth to be mentioned. I wanted one of the droids to be sliced into two parts. I used a very old but good trick to do that. Problem was I could not simply cut the same model that was animated and devide it into two parts. In frame 27 (because in this frame the droids are just to be cut off) I selected one droid and made a copy of it. The copy vesrsion of the droid was later converted into Edit Mesh. After that I devided the model into two parts. Later I removed that model of the camera range. In frame 27 I simply replaced the animated droid with the cloned one. Of course, the clone was later animated (these two parts were animated to fall down) . The switch takes only 1 frame (from frame 26 to 27) so it is imposible to see difference even in slow motion

frame26 frame27

Here is my final ident with sound.

Second ident

I started my work exactly the same way as with the previous one. After I planned everything including time lengh of animation and so on, I started working on animating of character and sceneAccording to the storyboard I knew that my character would stay in the same place from the beginning to the end. So this time I could put camera to the scene


For this ident I just animated the main dummy object, arms and all head. As previously I tried to keep realistic speed. But at the end I decided to slow it down a little bit. This time I used IK solver for the arms (I did not use IK solver for the arms in the first and third idents) Actually I always try to avoid using IK solver becuase I am never satisfied with the final results. However, this time IK solver was the tool that could help me to finish this ident faster and easier. The baseball stick was linked to the left hand. The right arm was animated seperately by IK solver as well.

There is one trick I have done for this ident. I wanted to create an illusion that the ball really hits the camera. So I decided to render one totaly black frame in 3ds max. I did not see any reason for editing the ident later with different software (like Ulead Studio) if this could be done quite easy in 3ds max. I created a plane in front of the camera, and I set the plane to be invisible. In frame 120 the ball hits th camera, so the plane in frame 120 is visible and one frame later (121) is invisible again. Thanks to this I created illusion that the ball really strikes the camera. After that the camera is falling down where the CA logo appears.

At the end I added (as last time) some light, shadow and the rest of the scene elements. The dress was animated the same way as last time.I also tried to put interesting sounds effects. I am not satisfied with the sound effects, but again it was hard to find any interesting sounds.

First ident

Before I started animating I analysed my storyboard for this ident. I needed to know what exactly I had to do, how much long this ident should be and so on. It is important to do this before you start animating. With the plan I could finish my work faster and more precisely.

I started my work from character animation. Usually, in the first place, you need to built the scene, but this time it was better to start from animation. Thanks to it, later I could add camera and “computer” everywhere I wanted. I started from “walking” animation

These green boxes are the “dummy” objects. I used them to manipulate Dino’s body. Firstly I started my animation from legs. Then I was working on Dino’s feet. I paid special attention to the speed. Dino is taking 5 steps in less than 3 seconds, which is the right speed as for walking.
After finishing the animation above, I animated arms, head and tail. The last thing to work on were eyes. Antennaes were animated by using the “flex” modiffier

After that I added the rest of the elements to the scene (camera and computer). I knew exactly where Dino would stop walking so I could suit the camera and computer perfectly.
When I added the computer I started animating Dino. Here he pulls the knurl, and after a short time looks up.

(this is a try animation with full walking)

After that I added some light with shadow, background, Dino’s dress and CA logo. The dress was animated by the use of “cloth” modiffier tools. I used “blend” modiffier to animate the cartoon network logo.

And here is my final ident with sound. I am not satisfied with the sound effects but it was hard to find really intersting and cartoonish sounds. So I decided to use only those sounds which suit to the animation (I could not find a good sound of walking for this ident so I decided not to use any)

Storyboard

Storyboard 1

Storyboard 2

Storyboard 3

Rigging bones and skin

After modelling my Dino character, the next step was to rig the bones to Dino. This is a really difficult thing to do. Before you even start doing this you need to know how many bones you will need to animate your character. For axample I knew I wouldn’t need to animate fingers so I didn’t put any bones there.

When I connected bones to Dino skin, I started thinking what kind of technique I should use for animation. Very helpful, at this stage, was storyboard (which I will show you later). I decided to do facial animation with “morpher” tool. At the beginning I wanted to use (as always in this kind of projects) very advances techniques like “biped” and “psyhique” to animate the rest of Dino body. As this would take me more time to make it ( my character animation for this 3 idents are not complicated) so I decided to use an easier way of animation
The animation of legs are done by using “IK solver”. Personally I don’t recommend to use “IK solver”. IK solver is mostly used in game animation. With IK solver you cannot really control the animation. With legs it works pretty well but it doesn’t really work for arms and backbones. So, the rest of the body I animated by moving and rotating each bone, only legs were animated with IK solver.

I also wanted to animate eyes. Eyes really give expressions and bring character to life. So it is important to take some time to animate them. I used the easiest way to do that. I created a “dummy” object, that eyes looked at.

To animate antennaes I used “flex” modiffier.

"Dino"

My main idea about the idents was to keep them very same simple design eg: background, light etc.
I will create character named “Dino” who will appear in every ident.
I want him to be funny, clumsy and interesting. In each ident Dino does something funny which finally leads to Cartoon network text and logo.

In the bottom there are some pictures of “Dino” character.