Calling it DONE

And I am pretty pleased with the results. Did some minor tweaks to the animation, did some major tweaks to lighting and had a shot at rendering with Motion Blur.  ANIMATING IS FUN. Did a walk and a run cycle with Lars (that's this guy) as well that I will get posted here soon.

Mind the gap Final

This is the final version. Crappy lighting and everything.... I need to play around with mental ray in Maya some more. I did quite a few test renders and thought I had everything working well. Oh well, live and learn.

All in all I am pretty pleased with how this turned out. My second [real] animation in 3d. Certainly not perfect, but quite a leap from the first. Next thing to tackle in my animation is to get the character to loosen up a bit. Mechanically I am feeling confident. Technique-wise I am much more confident (building poses in 3d is not like drawing out a pose-test in 2d. It requires a more deft touch at times). Acting still needs great improvement, but that's part of the process. SO! Get some more life into the character!

Also, I am thinking I need to gussy up this blog. It's pretty bland. If I am going to continue updating like I have it needs to be more "me."

Further refining "the gap"

I am going to get one final round of crit's then it's ready to render.

Mind the Gap planning

Some process work.

 Character Analysis

 Animation Ideas

More idea exploring

 First pass at planning the animation

 Really didn't know where to go with this, so after some class input and help from my instuctor I did a 2d animation pass in flash with the new, more concrete idea

First (real) 3d animation and then some other stuff

This is some of the process gone through for the animation. Bits of Idea, staging, character and video reference analysis. The real meat of the planning was a quick walk I animated (pose test) traditionally. I have to find those pages and scan them....Also not shown is the actual video reference.

This is the first stage of the animation. Basically a pose test blocking out only the major keys of the walk (contact, down, passing position and up). Felt like I had a good sense of weight, arcs, timing, overlap/ follow-through and all that in this phase....

This is after some changes have been made. Refining some poses, adding breakdowns I was still working mostly in step tangents here... Then I went to auto- tangents to start diving into the curve editor. What a mess

Guh. What the fuck!? It was hard for me to work past this point. Really, I hated this thing. So much broken, I had a hard time to know where to start in fixing it. Beyond just getting it technically to work it was decided that the bit of acting (with the hand) was unnecessary/ distracting/ poorly executed and it would be best to eliminate it. Among a small handful of other fixes. The mechanics were there. That is really nice. In all the struggling with the animation, at least I wasn't fumbling with the animating itself, just the acting.

and here is the final(ish) version. At least, the final one for class. This can probably be taken to a real finish, polished up and put in my portfolio... perhaps. What I was really struggling with in this whole process was some seriously screwed up poses. Working in step tangents I felt like I was able to just work from pose to pose with relative ease. Turns out there is some posing etiquette that needs to be adhered to to keep the computer interpolation from going bonkers.

What do I want to fix? Those arms are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too stiff. I need to get them thangs more dangly. The timing/ spacing overall needs to be cleaned up. The general feel is there, but there's not much texture (on top of some popping going on). That trip needs to be refined, as well as make the object he is tripping on more obvious.

All in all I learned a ton. Next animation is Mind the Gap. Fun fun fun.


Here's some drawings from other stuff:

 Open figure drawing. Need to do this more.

 Cafe sketching. Starting to feel this a bit more.

Pencil test

This is the current state of my animation for sophomore projects. I am working with a partner on this who is animating a separate character. Unfortunately we have not recently shot the two together. More updates as this goes through it's phases to completion.



And this is the background painting I did for it. The final animation will be vectorized in toon boom and then colored. The original drawing for the painting was mine as well.

My partner did her own painting and they both turned out good enough that we don't know who's we want to use yet.... we'll have to duke it out I guess.

Pencil test

This was an animation project assigned to help us get to know the characters we are working with for our sophomore projects class. The assignment was a take followed by a run in perspective.