TMNT Animation Diary 03 - Learning to walk (literally)

It's been a while since my last update to my big ninja turtles project. A lot has happened in the meantime and I haven't really had the chance to properly work on this project for a while. Thankfully, things are looking up and I can't wait to continue working on it!

This time, the whole entry will not revolve around the ninja turtles at all. I knew that from the beginning, the whole project would be a huge undertaking. And for someone like me, who has barely any experience with 3D animation, it was clear that there would be a lot of obstacles in the way. So I figured that I should learn the basics by working on some smaller animations to figure things out and not get overwhelmed.

For this reason I decided to recreate a little animation of Tony the tiger, that I made back in 2021:

Since I had already made the Tony 3D model, I had my work cut out for me. The basic goal for this was to try out the addon AutoRig Pro, to help me create a proper animation rig for the model. An animation rig is basically like attaching strings to a puppet to make it move around. Without an animation rig, you can technically animate a character, but it would be like trying to make a Barbie doll move realistically.

This was my biggest concern going in, because I had already made an animation rig, for the model of my good friend Cirez:

So I knew all the challenges involved and all the steps necessary. I knew that I could create an animation rig from scratch if needed, but if this was to be done for all the characters involved in the turtles animation? It would be a huge amount of work. So, I started to look into AutoRig Pro, (Link can be found HERE) and got started. Thankfully the addon proved very easy to use and after some experimenting, I managed to slowly put together a rig that was perfectly suited for my needs. Not only was I able to deform all the body parts I needed, but I also managed to add my own facial rig on top of it, along with some additional elements like... well:

This is what I ended up with:

It looks complicated, but all those different shapes, rectangles, circles and so forth are only there so the animator can grab the according bodypart and move it easier.

On top of that, I made my very own interface for animating the facial expressions and the mouth, to spell out visemes or give a character a quick expression, should I need one.

When the rig proved viable, I was so extremely relieved, because I now felt ready to do the same for the characters in the turtle animation. Whenever you learn a new skill in Blender, it really feels like leveling up in a role playing game.

After the rigging process was done, I had to get started with the animation itself. That process was surprisingly straightforward as I already knew what I wanted the animation to look like. Nontheless, I felt incredibly happy when Tony had learned to walk:

This walk cycle marked a huge milestone for me and I felt motivated that now the sky was the limit. I learned how to use Blender tools for animation, like the Non-Linear-Animation editor or NLA for short, where I could layer different animation segments on top of each other, to alter facial expressions, arms and legs on the fly without touching the underlying movement.

In the end the animating process proved to be a lot of fun, albeit not without its challenges as I still had to learn how to use all the tools. When the animation part was finished, the rest was surprisingly easy.

For the background, I once again used Blender addons: The City Generator (Linked HERE) & Procedural Crowds (Linked HERE) provided me with all I needed. Adding the rest like the confetti was easy thanks to some tutorials.

The last part was probably the most challenging: The rendering. I opted for the Cycles render engine, which is capable of producing some wonderful realistic looking scenes, but it of course is very resource heavy and so each time I rendered the full animation it took about 3-4 hours where I could basically not use my PC at all. It was very frustrating to end up with a finished animation, only to notice minor mistakes here and there and then have to go back and rerender the whole thing yet again.

That bit of frustration aside, I learned so very much during this little project and am now emboldened and feel ready to take on more animation projects and definitely know that I can tackle and finish the ninja turtles animation!

I hope the next time I do one of these posts, I can show off some bouncing turtle booty!