Micro-Animation and 3D Illustration | Assignment

Below is the submission for the micro-animation assignment made in VR using the tool Quill.

Output

Micro-Animation made in VR using Oculus Quill

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Reflection

Trial and error

This 3D illustration and animation using Quill involved quite a bit of of trial and error since there are very few resources to learn the application of the tools.

Limitations of the tool

I had to understand the limitations of the tools, brushes and plan the layout and animation in a way that would work best within these limitations. For example, the animation timeline in Quill does not have an option to copy key frames. I had to plan the action/motion in advance, especially the ones that needed to be looped (needs the same position for the first and last key frame) because of the lack of this feature.

Hardware constraints

I went through a few Quill tutorials, which made me realise that the brush strokes I made from the Oculus Quest were not as smooth as the ones made using Oculus Rift S. Quill is designed to work best with the Rift S and I experienced the shortcomings of using the Quest in this project. The jagged edges are especially noticeable on the geometry of the frog.

Animation timeline

The Quill animation timeline can be described as a low fidelity version of an Adobe After Effects or Premiere timeline. It includes features like layers, layer groups, layer sequences, interpolation between two keyframes etc. which are similar to the aforementioned softwares. Since I am comfortable working with these features on other softwares, adapting to the in Quill was fairly easy for me.

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Animation layers

Helpful animation tools

Animated Brush Stroke

I found the animated brush stroke: one of the early techniques to create animation in Quill, which I believe was used to create Dear Angelica short-film, very handy in this project. I used it to paint the stink flies first, and went on to discover more uses such as for painting the semi-transparent steam waves.

Nudge Tool

The nudge tool lets you move the geometry, but when used on an object in a timeline playing on loop, this can create subtle movement. This technique helped me bring to life a lot of static elements in the scene, such as the sticks, the big leaves, the water etc.

Grab Tool

Similar to the the nudge tool, I used this tool on a looped timeline to create the breathing of the frog’s belly.

Keyframes

I used keyframes to create the head movement of the frog by keying the extreme positions and interpolating the in-between frames using the interpolation tool in the timeline.

Glimpse of the process described above

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