YPGTTO - Commuter Walk Cycles #1

I've been working on the YPGTTO, I've got a lot of different animations to work on and will be posting my progress here and on the One is more blog. Here are the walk cycles I've done so far for the commuters!

Personal Work - Shaolin Granny

I've been smoothing this out a bit and changed up the ending slightly as I wanted a stronger pose.

Personal Work - Animation Practice #1

I've been working on some little animations as often as I can to help make me quicker and better as an animator and to fill any knowledge gaps that I think I have. The first one is a little bit of voice acting, using a rig from Long Winter Studios.

Next up I wanted to work on bringing some character to a basic dog rig, I tried to capture some behavioural traits that I enjoy from dogs.

Lastly I am currently working on a shaolin granny, I wanted it to be funny and to give me a chance to work on something with a bit more action. This is how the blocking currently looks, any feedback for any of these is appreciated!

Personal Work - Crushed Soul Lip Sync #1

I decided that (as well as working on and improving my film) I would practice some lip syncing as it is something I haven't done a lot of. I'm currently working on the blocking out of the body and once that is starting to get a bit more refined I will then add in the lip sync. 

This one is a bit of a warm up as I plan on completing the 11 seconds club June competition, which is a lovely clip from Guardians of the Galaxy. This character is from Long Winter Studios, It has lots of wonderful features and the rig is really great to work with. Looking forward to getting this scene nailed and starting on the 11 seconds club animation!

Bedtime Story - New Shot & Water FX

Part of my feedback from hand in involves me changing one of the earlier scenes to better reflect the wording of the poem. The poem reads "would wind up with him dead" so to illustrate this I have thumbnailed some of my ideas. It will be a 2D shot and at the moment I quite like 4 and 8, any opinions or feedback is of course welcomed.

I've been working on adding some 2D animations to help sell the water shots,I also tracked the particles in the underwater shots to create the feel of depth. I will be adding some kelp to further the z depth of the shot and to hopefully make the underwater scenes feel more underwater.

Major Project - Hand Scene #2

I adjusted the timing and flow of the hand scene and I think it is working much better now, when it comes to lighting these scenes I will add red rim lights to link the 2d and 3d world together.

Major Project - Hand Scene #1

Took the night off lighting and moved onto a missing 2D animated scene. It was a nice break from the challenges of lighting and I'm pretty happy with how it has turned out. I am looking forward to bringing everything together and having a nice mixture of 2d and 3d animated elements!

Major Project - Lighting & Mist Test #1

Today was spent trying to get some lighting set up in my scene, I spoke to Alan in the morning and he suggested trying to get the broadest stroke of colour in first using ambient occulsion. This is how it is looking so far, I quickly realised that it is tricky to light a night time scene, but I will carry on adding lights and finessing.

I also did a quick test of the mist in flash to see if it would work with my animation. there will need to be multiple layers of mist however I believe it will work quite successfully in the final film!

Major Project - Bedroom Modelling #2

I spent some time getting the assests ready to be implemented into each shot, I want to try to also create a "default lighting" that I can import with the room and adjust per scene. I'm a bit out of touch with lighting and rendering in general so that is something I will need to discuss with Alan.

There's still loads to do and some stuff to still figure out but I am ready to drag this film over the finish line!

Major Project - Animation Progress #3

I've finished smoothing out all of the animation and now I need to start finessing, I also started working on some of the 2d animated elements. The whole thing is starting to get there however there is obviously a lot of work left to get it over the finish line!

Major Project - Animation Progress #2

I've continued to smooth out and adjust the animation of each shot, here is how far I currently am. I will soon be able to move onto the polishing pass and after that I will focus on getting a couple of scenes as perfect as I can to use for my future reel. 

I tried adding some 2D flash animation to the spider beds roar scene to get a better idea of how it can all work together. I want to add loads of little 2D accent animations throughout and then use flash to also add the fog/mist into my scene, like the example below.

Major Project - Shots 12 - 25 Progress

I'm working through every shot smoothing out animation and tweaking poses where necessary, I had a lot of issues with the jump poses and after talking to Alan I reworked the whole shot and it is working much better now. I want to add smear frames for some of the movements to exaggerate things and add more of a cartoony feel to things, this will be added after the animation is polished!

Major Project - Shots 4 - 12 Progress

I've been smoothing out some of the animation, tweaking poses and adding inbetweens. Had a lot of fun really exaggerating the room transformation scene, lots of squash and stretch! 

Major Project - Shot 04 Animation Progress #1

Today i've spent some time adding in extra poses and smoothing segments of the animation that I felt needed smoothing. I wanted some of the actions to be quite snappy and others to ease in a bit. I used Jelly Jamm as a reference as it is the overall animation style I want to achieve! I tried to make sure I gave poses some time to breath in the animation and so far I think it is looking pretty cool, any feedback would be appreciated!

I always find putting breakdown poses in Maya a bit tricky so to aid with this I used a plug-in called bhGhost (image above), this gave me basically the equivalent of onion skin from Flash which is super useful for me when visualizing the pose.

Major Project - Previs/Animation Progress # 1

I added the new blanket hand into the previs and ran into some problems along the way, the rig I made didn't work completely but i figured out solutions while implementing it.

I also started to refine the blocking in the first segment of the animation, here is how it is currently looking.

Major Project - Blanket Hand #1

I've got the creepy blanket hand finished and ready to go into the animation, here is how it looks and a test of how it moves. It uses a spline IK and a curve to translate the model and then the hand has its own rig. Next I will get it into the previs and start figuring out its movement!

Major Project - Shark Bed Animation Test

I did a rough test animation of the shark swimming, I noticed while watching some reference videos that sharks have a lot of subtly to their movements. It will be a challenge to get that right however I think this is a good starting point.

I still need to figure out the underwater fog which I will carry on experimenting with, next up I will get the additional rooms blocked out and start working on my previs!

Major Project - Bed Animation Test #1

Today I worked on getting the teeth made and attached to the rig, I did this using the rivet script and parenting the teeth to the locators (I had to scale constrain the rivets to the global move group to get it all scaling correctly). I then moved on to creating a glowing effect for the eyes, this was done using after effects, this is something that I will touch up on and adjust to create something more interesting, however for a first attempt I think it works quite well. I just need to add rim highlights to the model which Alan suggested creating on the texture.

Major Project - Bed Rigging Test #1

Following Alan's advice, I have put together a rough test rig for the bed. For the legs I used a IKSpringSolver, which has a handy little graph that can be used to dictate the weight it has on joints. I decided to use the flexiPlane that I've used throughout my project as the spine of the rig, that may be changed to a ribbon spine but at the moment it is doing the job required of it.

To test the rig out I put together a really quick animation, I wanted to see if the legs would bend correctly and the overall functionality of the rig. I noticed that the control that moves the leg joints for additional sculpting may need to be orient constrained to the leg joint as well as point constrained. This is because at the moment having only the point constraint limits the ability to sculpt as the geometry remains oriented to the leg.

Adaptation B - Pop Princess Combo Attack #1

She is a lot of fun to animate so far, really enjoying getting these moves done!