The Frog and the Fly: Tests and A Whole Lotta Research

 So, I knew I wanted to do a mega page for the final project, but I didn't think I'd have the amount of stuff to use as I do. So, there is a lot more I can put into this (especially as I was working on this project for much longer than the other ones during the module).

I had been spending a good bit of time trying to come up with ideas for my final project (I think this was during the second week of our module) and I decided on a quadruped that isn't exactly the kind you'd expect to be used: in this case I had a small list of ideas.

One idea involved a dog chasing away a flock of pigeons (which would've worked if I didn't come up with an idea I felt would be more attainable in the time given to us), and other involved an axolotl swimming around in a tank and then stopping to wave at the camera or eat a worm (which couldn't be done due to the lack of an available axolotl rig).

So, with a bit of disappointment because of not being able to find a rigged axolotl model that wasn't a Minecraft fan model, I decided to animate a frog hopping around and catching a fly.

Reference Hunting

Frog References

So, the first thing I did was hunt for references of my frog - however as I tend to share things with my friends, I thought it'd be a good idea to find out what breed of frog the rig I'd found closely resembled. Thanks to my frog-obsessed friend, I found out that it was closest to an American Bullfrog:

Here's the rig I'd found

And here's an image of an American Bullfrog

While the two don't look exaclty alike (the rig is more brown than green, and the Bullfrog's eyes aren't a simple line as well as the real frog being a lot more chubby), the similarity was close enough for me to go on a hunt for references of not just frogs hopping and moving, but also specifically of American Bullfrogs hopping.

I found.... quite a lot: (instead of all of the videos being embedded here, I'm going to share links to the rest that aren't shown here at the bottom of this page)

Footage of a Bullfrog Leaping, unfortunately in slow-motion

Footage of how the frog's legs bend to achieve the leap, and good footage of them hopping off of something.

Footage of a bullfrog eating, and a general reference for a selection of prey.

Really good footage of a frog eating a fly, in particular a frog that's an ambush predator like the American Bullfrog.

There are a lot more references I used to make this animation, but as the references I found were captured at a lot of different angles, I couldn't really use any of them directly in my Maya scene - which was a bit unfortunate but I have enough confidence in my ability to observe how creatures move to try and work from the reference in the way we did with our tutor.

Now, one of the most frustrating things an animator can find for references is slow-motion footage. It prevents us from getting the correct timings for our animation, meaning that we're left to improvise the speed of a creature's movement. So, I took the time to try and test run a hop cycle for our little amphibian friend.

This meant taking reference from even more sources than before - the landing speed was an issue in particular. So, I once again ventured out to the YouTube search engine to find even more videos of frogs.

I personally love this one, just because there are so many different types of landings on display:

A big compilation of frogs landing on a stone wall, which showcases all sorts of corrections done with the feet.

Fly References

To my suprise, it was a lot easier to find footage of a fly than it was to find footage of a frog. It seems vey strange to me, but then again you find a lot more flies than frogs. The fly rig I found I was a lot less specific with, mostly because the motion of a fruit fly or a green bottle would work well for this kind of insect.

Much like my frog references though, I found that the varying angles that were captured weren't going to be very useful when used in Maya - but in the end the speed of the fly's legs were going to be less important than the overall motion of the fly (especially when in flight).

Footage of flies, though they get very up-close and personal with the insects - watch with caution!

A good reference for a fly's flight patterns - and a detailed look at how a fly's wings move.

So, with all of my references gathered, I began working on the hop cycle:

The sad, and kinda underwhelming test hop cycle

This was only difficult because I was attempting to recreate a kind of motion that we'd never had broken down for us in class, and I'm extremely grateful for the fact that I did this. I took this as an opportunity to get familiar with not just the rig I had downloaded, but also as an opportunity to get to know the kind of locomotion I'm dealing with.

The cycle goes by fast, but so does a frog's hop! I see this as a good sign.

So, I began with the storyboard for my animation:

The Storyboard and Blockout

This worked as a great practice for storyboarding for me - I'm not great at drawing a plan for an animation, but it definitely works for the sake of this project. I was a little worried that this would be too short, but there was no comment from my tutor about length - more concern over animating a frog convincingly and also animating a fly.

However, knowing that there might be some concern from my tutor over what I want to do for my project, I made sure to do some research into the American Bullfrog to make sure I had some other options for alternative prey.

Through this bit of research (via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bullfrog#Feeding) I found out that American Bullfrogs will eat anything as long as its small enough to fit in its mouth - even smaller bullfrogs aren't safe! So, if all else fails, I could simply duplicate the frog and shrink it down to create alternative prey if my idea of using a fly got shot down.

So, now that my storyboard was ok'd by my tutor, I began working on a blockout of the final animation.

This saga has already been featured in my posts, but I can go back over this in more detail - mostly to explain why I don't want my old blockout back.

So, after spending time in class working on the set and the general motion of the creatures, I came up with this blockout on the following Thursday:

After working on this the whole day, I took it home in hopes that I can start animating the frog over the weekend. Then I quickly discovered that Maya wouldn't open the file once I got home, so I connected to a university workstation remotely to try and open it: no result, only a crashed Maya. Only then did I notice that my Maya scene was 1.22GB large! So, too big for Maya to even comprehend, let alone open!

I remade my blockout over the next less, it went by a lot faster - but that's mostly because I was copying my previous work. As I remade the blockout, I also quickly realised how much more the general motion had improved between them.

This was a great learning experience for me - and being forced to rebuild my blockout from scratch also got me to make corrections to my set. I found that the high poly count of the set was causing the majority of the issues, meaning that I had to spend time re-creating the set so that it wasn't so heavy.

I also took the opportunity to create more believable water in the blockout phase as to reduce the amount of work I had to do later down the line. Which was actually quite successful - I've enjoyed making procedural textures in Blender in the past, so this was not only something familiar but also a good opportunity for me to learn how to create similar effects in Maya.

The Frog: Animation

So, to begin with, I started out with the frog's main cycle - the hop. Thanks to my earlier experiments with frog locomotion, I was able to get started by not just using y references, but also my previous work as a frame of reference for what I'm doing. The hop cycle went by quite quickly, and now that I was working on the main piece, I began using the manipulators that adjusted the flexibility of the feet to further push the amount the frog has pushed. It worked well for conveying the amount of force put into one hop!

I don't have many screenshots of my earlier animations on this file, let alone playblasts - but I do have a "fun" little saga that became a roadblock for my whole animation.

So, here's the issue. In my blockout, the frog turns around - but I have no clue what that'd look like at all. So, searching for references began - and returned barely anything. What I did end up finding was mostly nursery rhyme videos to do with frogs (very helpful indeed) - not actual frogs just spinning on the spot. I eventually sourced a couple of videos to use as reference:

This was all pretty difficult to get the hang of, and it took several attempts to ge this right. But eventually, I got a better understanding of how a frog turns around thanks to these videos, along with how they crawl and climb as well!

Eventually, I got to the end of animating the frog, which was really and truly the bulk of the animation work - it was great being able to watch my lil frog hop from rock to rock and to see him make small adjustments to how he lands.

The Fly: Animation

Probably one of the faster pieces of animation I've made for this project, I wanted to make the fly's legs actually move when it walks. So, by using the reference footage I had already gathered, I went to work creating a convincing fly walk cycle.... well, I think scuttle might be a better description.

Quick side note: In order to be able to see what I'd done to make the legs move, I had to stretch the length of each leg's cycle. Yes, the cycle is significantly faster, and yes it is 3 frames for each leg.

There isn't really much else to say other than the fly has a flight cycle too - but the fly's size means that its not really that visible. That's fine - it isn't the main part of the animation after all!

The short sequence after working on the main animation elements.

Making Corrections: Sliding Feet and the Baking Saga

So, now I had my main animation done, I needed to make some corrections to the movement of the frog - specifically making sure to keep the frog's feet on the ground when it moves and that the feet are actually touching a surface and aren't just floating above it. This was.... kinda long? But it took only a bit of work for the feet - most of which involved baking the animation to and from the controllers on the rig.

Now, for the sake of this, I will explain how this works. The idea is that you create a locator for every controller that will make the rig lift from its root control (including poles for safety). These locators then have the animation from the controllers baked onto them - which is then baked back onto the controllers after the original animation is deleted from them.

This method works because of locators working purely on global co-ordinates, meaning that the curve for the Z (for example) will look more like a straight line going up (or down) instead of it being a wavy line that oscillates.

So, I had two ways of doing this: the long way or the fast way. The fast way didn't work (which involves a plugin that does all of the locator stuff for you), so the long way is the one I ended up choosing.

The frog was simple, however, but the fly was definitely not.

Oh this? This is me trying to keep the fly on the rock properly on each and every frame it moved on! I couldn't just bake out the foot controls and fix it that way, I had to go in and manually stick the feet to the ground. It wasn't too long, but it was very tedious work. 

Rendering: The Many Mistakes

The day came for panic rendering a test - just to see how long it was going to take to render out. The initial render was going to take 1 minute per frame, totaling around 6 hours of just rendering. However, I decided to increase the sample amounts - which changed the total time to 30 hours.

I managed to worry myself when 30 minutes kept going by, mostly because I misread my own maths. But, by the time I'd caught my mistake, I knew I had enough time to get the final result fully rendered out.

So, for the last Tuesday of this module, I've spent my time updating this blog with playblasts and pages related to class activities we were doing. Not exactly a terrible use of my time, but if I hadn't have made that mistake I wouldn't have been so concerned.

Eventually, the render completed itself and fully converted from an image sequence to an mp4:

Here's the final render!

Sorry about the length of this whole thing, it was a fun albeit challenging project to complete! I will probably give creature animation another shot at some point, but for now I can work on my written assignment and on other, smaller projects to keep my hand in this kind of skill.