Research into animation industries

While working on my bird animation, I had a brief look into what industries I could use the skills learned during this project to get a job and what types of industries use 3D animations of birds and why.

The obvious choice is the animation industry itself, countless animated films and cartoons feature animals as starring characters or as background characters to make a scene look more alive or realistic. One example of an animation that uses birds extensively is For the Birds, a short film produced by Pixar in 2000.

An image from For the Birds (2000). A short clip of the film can be seen here

For the Birds is a short animation about a group of birds sitting on a telephone wire as a larger bird appears and begins to annoy them. While the film is very much animated in a cartoon style, it is still somewhat based in reality. While the birds move about in an exaggerated humorous way, they still move similarly to how real birds would move.

An image of one of the flying creatures featured in Avatar (2009)

3D animation also plays a large part in the special effects industry. If it isn’t possible for an animal to perform how you want it to in a live action film (Or if it is a made up creature entirely) you can use 3D animation to create a CG creature to be in the scene along with human characters. For example, both the Lord of Rings series and Avatar feature flying creatures similar to dragons. Since these creatures don’t exist in the real world, they were created through 3D animation and it is more likely than not that birds were used as inspiration, if not reference, for how they should move. While the films are based in fantasy and science fiction, the creatures move about how you would expect them to move about if they really existed, so my work on realistic bird animation could be used as a starting point for similar industry work to these.

An example of a TV advertisement for The Famous Grouse

While the previous industries are both routed in entertainment, animations of birds could also be used in the advertisement industry. The Famous Grouse is a brand of whisky that uses a red grouse as its mascot and the character is featured heavily in their advertising. The bird in these adverts moves really similar to how a real bird moves and, unlike the previous examples used, the character also looks like a realistic bird. My work on bird animation for this project could easily be adapted to work in the advertising industry since my project was a 30 second long video and that is a similar length to an average TV advertisement.

Another non-entertainment based industry my type of animation could be used in  is education. Walking with Dinosaurs was a documentary series produced by the BBC in 1999. Its purpose was to educate about various dinosaurs and how they lived through the use of computer graphics and animatronics. One episode of the series in particular was about a flying dinosaur called the Ornithocheirus. In order to recreate how a dinosaur moves, you need to study the bone structure  of the dinosaur and see if it compares to current animals. Flying dinosaurs are similar in form to birds, so studying them can give an insight into how they might have moved. Throughout this project I have spent a great deal of time studying how birds move, so if I were to continue with this work I could perhaps adapt my work for documentaries like Walking with Dinosaurs or other educational videos like those that are used in schools.

 

Research into realistic movement

To make sure my animated bird would move as accurately as a real bird, I did a lot of research into how birds move. I mainly looked at videos, since they can give me more information than images could, particularly looking for slow motion videos so I could see all the subtle movements that I might not have seen if I just looked at a normal speed video.

Here are some of the videos I used as research and some comments about them:

The above video of a starling taking flight in slow motion proved very useful to my animation and was the main inspiration for the start of the video. Birds move very quickly when they are taking off, so getting a slow motion video of this quality really helped me understand how a bird moves when going from a standing position to flying. All the subtle movements that the bird makes, from crouching down and springing up to how its body, legs and wings stretch at the moment of take off  are captured in such high quality that I feel I was able to recreate them very well in 3D. The end of the video also includes the first few seconds of flight which helped me out when animating the first wing movements after take off.

While the starling video helped me start my animation a lot, the above video was also very useful to me because it captured a bird doing the same movement from the side instead of the back. Something I had learnt through animating in the past is that recreating a movement from just one angle can lead to the animation looking weird from other angles.

Although the above video didn’t really factor into my animation because the birds take off in a different way than I wanted my bird to, it still served as good reference material because it includes birds flying around in lots of different directions which helped me to understand how birds use their wings to move about in the air.

The above two videos served as good reference material for the first few seconds after the bird takes off. Through my research, I saw that there is a great difference between how a bird moves when it just takes off compared with how it moves when it is already flying in the air. These videos helped me understand how the bird in my animation would need to flap its wings a lot stronger right after take off to get enough thrust to lift it into the air.

After getting enough research of birds taking off, I moved on to researching birds flying through the air. The above video shows a flight cycle of a pigeon from the front, which I used as reference material when it came to the bird moving its wings while flying. All of the other reference videos I found of birds flying were shot from different angles, so this video helped me see what my animation should look like from the front.

Around half way in my animation I wanted my bird to glide for a bit after flapping to build up speed, so I also researched this and found the above video. When I first had the idea of having my bird glide I thought that, aside from having the bird continue to move forward, it would remain relatively still since it would no longer be flapping its wings but by doing this research I discovered that this was wrong and would have resulted in a very wooden looking animation. By watching this video, I saw that when gliding, birds still sway from side to side on the wind currents, their legs still move about and they do occasionally flap their wings to lift themselves upwards. I’m very glad I did research into what birds look like when they are gliding, because if I just animated on how I thought they glide my animation wouldn’t have looked good at all.

Bald Eagle gliding over hills

Bald Eagle flying past trees

After having the bird glide for a bit, I decided that it would be good to have the bird turn while flying and change direction since, more often than not, birds don’t fly in perfectly straight lines. Like with gliding, I felt I had a good idea of how a bird rotates while turning but I did some research into it to make sure I didn’t miss out any subtle or secondary movements. Through watching the above two videos, I learned that birds often keep their wings straight and glide while turning, but start flapping their wings while finishing the turn in order to push themselves forward. I also saw that birds tend to keep their heads parallel with the ground while turning instead of rotating it with the rest of their body while turning. Both of these movements I kept in mind and incorporated into my animation.

My animation ends with the bird landing on a platform and eating some bird food that is scattered there, so research into how a bird lands from flight was vital to my project. The above video shows a bird flying around for a bit before landing on top of a lamp post and was the main reference footage that I used for my landing animation. This video helped me to see that, before coming to a stop, a bird will flap its wings to lift slow itself down and lift itself upwards to land. I also saw that birds stretch their legs out quite far to reach and touch the ground before using their wings to push themselves forward and on to the ground.

However, it is important to know that since there are many different types of birds, they all move about in different ways. The above video shows a bird landing in a completely different way to the previous video. Instead of landing from above, this bird flies up from below to land, and it also retracts its wings before it even touches the ground, only flapping once to slow itself down. When it came to finding contrasting research videos like these two landing videos, I thought about what type of movement I would like in my animation to know which to use as reference. In the landing case, I decided on using the previous video as I felt it better suited all of the other types of movement I decided on using earlier.

While these videos made up the bulk of the reference videos I used for my animation, I also found the following videos while doing my research and felt that they were also good examples of bird movement that I could perhaps use in future if I revisit this animation or do another bird animation.

Stock footage of a bird looking around

 

Bird skeleton research

Since my Animation Practice project is going to be an animation of an animal that doesn’t share the same bone structure as a human, I’m either going to have to create a bone system for the bird from scratch or heavily edit a biped into the shape of a bird. In order to create a realistic animation, it is vital that whatever type of rig I create matches what a bird’s skeleton looks like so it animates in the same way a bird actually moves.

To make sure my rig matches a bird’s skeleton, I looked at the following images I found on the internet of various types of bird skeletons:

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To get a better idea of the rig I would create, I drew my own version of the pigeon skeleton diagram and inside the diagram, I drew darker lines representing the bones I would create for the rig.

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From this I created a rough rig out of bones and animated a simple walk cycle to see what it would look like.

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After making and animating the bone system, I decided that it was a bit basic to create my animation with, so I tried using the new CAT rig system in 3Ds Max to create the bird rig, but I had a lot of trouble getting it to work properly and move correctly.

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After having trouble with the CAT rig system, I then tried creating the rig by taking the standard biped and adding limbs and editing it to match a bird’s skeleton.

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After doing all of these tests, I decided that the edited biped looked and worked best, so this is the rig I will be using for the rest of the project.

 

Bird animation storyboard

For my Animation Practice assignment at University, I have to recreate a type of realistic motion in the form of an animation. Instead of just trying to recreate human motion, I decided to try something new so I’m going to try and recreate how a bird moves. To start off the project, I came up with a storyboard for the animation so I can get a good idea of what I would have to research to create the animation, which you can see below:

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