Gota love photoshop

Here is my Interior Backgrounds assignment and the reference material I used

Creeeepppyyy

Here is my final external background piece and a screen shot of all the reference I used

These are the only images I used to make it

Draw

Here are some of my favourite drawings I have made during the last year it is a mixture of assignments, personal work and life drawings

Give me a sec, or 11

This is my latest animation, it is another 11sec club audio clip this one is from may, im am happy with the feet and hands animation although i can still see alot to be improved on especially the timing of the character shaking the other, i also think that the character being shaken is far too rigid.

 

Anvil

This one of my first attempts at making a character interact with an object, i believe it was fairly successful although it is clear that the objects isn’t set in his arms as it moves around and through his arms.

They see me walking

Here is a new hopefully better walk cycle, I feel this one is a lot more natural looking although it’s still far away from a professional level. I think I have the main timing down and need to focus on the small tweaks and details as that is what really makes it come to life. When I had my self recorded for the reference footage I had a slight limp from a knee injury and I decided to keep it in.

I also have a walk cycle of me using reference footage of me doing a bad robot walk, it may look really bad but that’s because I can’t walk like a robot.

Experimental Final

This is my final experimental piece, it was done using a technique called pyrography. I learned pyrography when I was very young during my work experience, I bought my own machine soon after although I never kept practicing it and never thought about making an animation using it. It is an extremely unforgiving medium as any mistake will take forever to sand away and is better to just incorporate in the animation and in fact I believe that some of the best parts of the animation stemmed from mistakes.

Experimental

Here are my experimental animations, I made three tester animations using different methods and then one final one. My first tester was this short stop motion animation using a ball of blue tak and a lamp this is the first and only time I have tried to make one without a tripod and I won’t be trying it again, I thought if I was able to get the camera roughly in the same position it wouldn’t make too much of a difference, but I was wrong.

 

This is my second and my favourite tester, I started when I found a Perspex sheet, I then used a hair dryer to cover it evenly with Vaseline and spray painted it red. I used Vaseline because it doesn’t dry and is easy to scrape off, I then used stop motion animation to make a rose appear in the centre of the sheet.

 

My third and final tester was a sand animation, I found this to be my least favourite method, it is extremely time consuming which isn’t a problem if I had a rostrum at home as I would have to worry about other people ruining it by accident. I also found it too restrictive as it monochromatic and relies on shadow alone to make the image visible.

 

Struting?

This is my first real walk cycle using morphy, he seems to have a real aggressive stance with clenched fists and leaning forward although I wasn’t trying to achieve this look it has helped dramatically as I now know what to and what not to do when trying to get a specific look.

Throw It!

This is my attempt at making morphy throw a heavy object, I tried to make it seem as if the ball was light when it was on the table but as soon as it fell off it was really heavy, I don’t think this was clearly portrayed and was probably just perceived as bad animating, I think I should have exaggerated how light the ball was whilst on the table.

Real Beefcake

This is another version of morphy, as you can see he is far larger than the previous versions I have used this one because he is going to be trying to move a large heavy object. This was the first time I have really used IKFK, this is great for rigging legs and can also be useful for hand as you simply put them in place and the body will move around without moving the hands. I made the character put his hands onto the box faster than usually for two reasons the first was that it meant I didn’t have to blend the IKFK and most importantly it was because I wanted the character to seem very energetic hence he also moves his arms around stretching before anticipating a strenuous activity. The way I animated him stretching his arms at the start I think looks better when he is standing still, this is because I animated his arms first then his legs and it doesn’t really work well together.

Bank Balance!

This is another 11 sec club animation using the morphy rig, I really wanted to play around with this one and spent allot of time figuring how to change the hair colour and retexture the face, I also spent a lot of time building and environment and Tuk Tuk which is the little bike/car that has crashed on the side, I haven’t yet batch rendered the final thing as there was some tweaks I wanted to do first but I’ve been so busy I doubt I will get the time but it looks a lot better rendered as the images of the crops also have transparency maps on them and I spent a long time on lighting and shadows. I think the fact that I spent so much time modelling, texturing and lighting on this project I think my animation has suffered, it could be improved by making the movement smoother.

Them be fighting words

This is my first ever attempt at lip syncing on any software or animation, this video was made using flash, I first went online and found a couple photos and combined then to make the two cow boys standing in a bar, I also got rid of their mouths so I could draw my own on. I am not a fan of flash, I have used it before in college and really dislike the interface. I first had to draw out my own set of mouths for the characters and made them into symbols, I kept them black and white apart from a red tongue to match the rest of the image and I think the red helps attract the eye.

Stop! Motion

This is the test footage from my induction class on stop motion animation, although I have already made a stop motion animation before that was using our own made armatures and characters so I thought it would be smart to learn about a real professional rig. I animated the centre character. Another benefit of doing this workshop was that it allows us to use stop motion animation for our projects in 2^nd year. I dont have a copy of this video but my friend Likem done his induction at the same time (His is on the left) so we have the same video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Zn9qJM-PzvE

Morphy, you so clumsy

This is the morphy rig, I have used this character for all of my Maya animation so far, I find it great for a starting point as he is an average size and look so wont restrict me with what animations I can use him in. This was one of my first animations using him and I found it fairly easy just time consuming. We where allowed to do anything with this assignment the only rules were that we had to make him start on one side and finish on the other. I first attempted to animate him doing back flips and spins across the pedestals but found out it was incredibly difficult and struggled to make him do one back flip smoothly whether this was the rig or just because I was just a beginner I’m not sure. I am fairly pleased with how it came out, this was my first real animating assignment and I think the movement was smooth. I could have improved this though by adding in more anticipation at the start and made him study the course a bit more, I noticed his eyes weren’t always pointing in the right direction.

Burt!

This is my first attempt at a walk cycle in Maya with although I already have experience with the software I haven’t really done any real animating apart from a very basic skeleton and swimming cycle I made for my beaver seal (as seen at the beginning of my blog). I found animating very rewarding, I noticed that you get results very quick to begin with but I takes allot of polishing to get any decent animation from it. I think mine can be improved by sorting out the swaying as each step he takes, he stand over the top of that leg a little to much and leans his head over to the side

This is burt once again, I tried somthing a little more challanging with him this time and tried to make him seem as if he sliped over on the ice.

Bouncy Balls

This is the final edit of my attempt to make to two identical balls in Maya appear to have different weights just from the way I animated them. The one on the right is supposed to be the heavy one and I believe this is clearly represented.