week quatro

above is my final animation with the lip sync, i managed to get most of the basic mouth shapes down easy enough it was putting the inbetween mouth shapes and for the key letters in, that was the tricky bit which took me a few days to nail. i had to step back quite a lot as i was going gaga looking at the screen, but i got the lip sync looking good and finalised a few body movements. the eyes and eyebrow which i actually did before the lip sync i really enjoyed as this was when i felt my character first felt he came alive, lucklyy as my character was a madman on whipcream who was incecently staring around. All in all i was happy with my animation and i got it done in good time, i just need to remember to continue to be methodical in my aproach to each pass and the parts of the body im animating. one small problem as i wanted to improve my animation more and more i ended up leaving it till the last day to render, the improvements which took to much time, i should have handed in the earlier version. in future i will make sure once im certain its all in good order i render in advance to make sure there are no delays. other than screwing up majorly on this account im actually really happy with my animation and would like to think it looked good.

experimental testing.

here is my test for the first 5 seconds of animation with the sound to give an idea of the timing im aiming for with the movement to the music. bearing in mind this is my first time doing cutout and its very different from the 3d work im used to, and a lot harder in my opinion as you really have to take each movement very slow and doubling up photos was a pain to start as i didnt do it so i had to rename the copys on the computer.

11secondclub week tres

This is where i am up to currently, ive put in all the inbetweens and animated all the parts that needed to be animated. I took some time to get the folding of the arms looking right and the hands going down the back of the head, but i found the easiest way was to put in extra keyframes so the program knows what path you want it to follow when animating and then i just deleted the unnecessary inbetweens in the graph editor later. The timing of the rocking back and forth i edited in the timeline for the feet and waist and the timing for the back and arms i edited in the dope sheet for the part where he's rocking back and forth with his hands in front of his face at end because i had more keyframes towards the end so needed to be able to select and move more keyframes at once so it looked right. i still want to speed up and make snappier, the aniamtion of the arms folding at the start and make the finger wrap round arm better. I also want to have the character hold the pose where the hand are on the head and then quickly come down around the neck and then hold and then go into the nine cans pose with hands and fingers out, i will probably do this in the dope sheet as i will be able to move many points at once and see the effect easily, but this i think will be the hardest thing to do for me as im not great at moving many points in the dope sheet at once.

11secondclub week dos

in the second week i blocked out the keyposes of the aniamtion using the aniamtic and live action footage i took and also dope sheeting the sound file for lip syncing later in the animation but also to be able to write down at what frame roughly the key poses occure which was very helpful. Th ough as i had to do this using premier the frame rate wasnt exact but i was able to tweek it to how i thought it looked right quite well. and i also took into concideration that the live action footage wasnt gospel it was there as a guide for the timing of the animation of the keyposes which it work as quite well. below is the first pass (blocking of key poses) that i did with a few inbetweens technically as it would have looked very wierd without so technically the second pass.

more week uno

from this acting video i then drew out the keyposes into a animatic taking most of the poses i would need to concider for the block through in the following week.

I also used this to put the character into a few key poses i would be using. I found in doing these key poses and making a n animating it gave me a better understanding of the timing that would be required for each keypose. I then went on to pull the character into a few key poses which was a bit wierd as he wasrigged different from what i could see to the dee rig i had been previously using and i had forgotten about fk rigs and ik rigs which we had done in class but i missioned on with the new setup and got him into a few poses.


After this i then went on to add the scene layout which isnt much at the moment but then i dont need much more than a bed and a pillow and a tight room with some cans but thats not the focus at the moment the animation is what im being judged on, i will update and change this later if i get time and make a better looking bed and scene but for now this is what my scene layout looks like.

11secondclub_week_uno

Ive been really busy working hard on my aniamtion and have had many ups and downs with stuff going wrong left right and centre but have finally got on top of the issuses i need to address and have now found the time to blog my progress on the project so far. ive been so busy i havent even had time to go surf this week bar one hr on sunday morning before animating again which george knows i find very hard, but so far despite the many hick ups its been fun animating this character, and hopefully when i get less hrs at work in the future i wont have my evening broken up with dominos work so will be able to do some character aniamtion on the side as it is fun. Anyways enough jabber, for the first week i we had to do a scene layout, acting the scene out in live action and character poses. I started by acting out many many different variations of what actions i could possibly act out while letting the sound file play on repeat this helped me get into the mood and get a feel for the character i was going to act and animate out. The main difficulty was overdramatising the actions which was kinda funny but felt a little wierd as i would never do that in real life, but in the end as you see i thought this concept up which was a crazed whipcream addicted house pototo rocking back and forth on his bed telling of his drama and i decided that would be ideal.

experimental animation

For my experimental, i started off by choosing my sound which was the ruta d sound clip as i like native music and in particular american tribes of all varieties they are very nice to stylize and easily recognisable. I decided to theme my animation around a totum pole and fireplace with a few characters. I collected a few research images to do drawings of to give me ideas for my character which are below. I then did a rough storyboard to plan out the timing of the animation with a roughly formed dope sheet. i made my characters so only the key body parts that needed to be animated where. they didnt have any colour as i decided i wanted to have a basic look to them with shadow using the light i had and drawing a slight shadow on them.

for the above character the drummer his legs are attached to the drums and cant move his top half of his body can move slightly and the head has full rotation and the arms can move up and down in the motion of tapping allowing the character to play the drums with out his arms wandering while im animating him.

for the above character the piper, his top half of his body ive allowed for rocking back and forth movement to the music, the lower half of his body is all one connected to the log he is sitting on as i felt it wasnt necessary to have any of the bottom half of him animated. his arms are in 2 parts allowing for retraction and extention of the arms holding the flute out to the totum pole and bring back to his lips to play and the head moves with the top part of the body as he has long hair which i didnt want to seperate from the body.
For the hand parts i literally drew round mine and placed them in a position so that i could pull the leaves back like it was my hands doing it with the thumb between the leave as they go back maybe.These are some of the parts for the totum pole pre cutting out and rigging.

To rig my characters i took dereks advice and used cotton string and masking tape to hold the moveable parts to each other and the non moveable parts. I did this for all 3 of my characters the 2 indian men and the totum pole but the hands and the leaves i moved independantly. Below is a few images of the way i made the rig for the totum pole which is the same way as for the other two characters.

additional thoughts on reading

From the 2 videos below you can see from the acting to the animation there is quite a bit of difference and exageration in the animating. I now realise that i probably needed more exageration in my acting to make things easier in animation. And from the seminar today im able to see this and take note for future reference

more videos

videos

dee_readingnews

When I got a brief for task 3, I decided I was going to take a much more planned route in animating the dee rig character. Firstly I spent the entire evening acting out different emotional scenes of different changes in emotion and mood. The first one I went for was a guy lifting a liquid container and getting frustrated over not being able to lift it and then getting angry.I did not like this so I tried a guy screaming for joy after standing round in anticipation, I did not like this either so I tried someone waiting around and then going insane and I still didn't feel like i had captured two emotions. Then sitting on the side I saw my payslip from work, which when I had received I was majorly disappointed with an angry and so I thought this could make a good scene. So acted out me opening a letter and shaking it and screaming for joy and then realising that it's bad news and then suddenly freaking out. The second thing I did was to draw all the major keyframes by hand so I could get an understanding of the line of action I would need to use. And on some of these drawings i drew the main line of action and made sure that they were balanced poses. Thirdly when I first went to maya I took the key poses and every 10 frames put the character into these key poses and move them around accordingly to get the timing roughly right and also to make sure I had strong key poses, which I think I achieved quite well. I then went on to fill out the inbetweens and correct any translations and rotations that were odd. All this took quite a lot of time and I got quite frustrated with yet again making too many key frames, so i went back and sift out the unnecessary key frames. I had a bit of trouble getting their arms to independently yet in the right place at the right time when he first holds the paper up but I got a hang of it in the end. Even so the arms did look like they were glued together on the piece of paper, so i varied the timing of each arm slightly but i dont think it was enough. The anticipated pause of him reading the note in shock i believe was the right amount of time, but i had to fiddle around with the timing quite a bit first. Overall the stamping I felt very robotic matter how much I try to tweak the movements of each leg individually and the arms also a bit of a challenge to not have them looking robotic.Despite this i think the timing was okay the balance in the leg moving back and the stamping and as a result I think I achieved by most fluid animation so far with good lines of action and a good silhouette and I think it is believable as most people are able to tell what he's thinking and I think I've learned from this. I now just need to practice applying these principles some more. Lastly the shrug of the shoulders at the end I only put in to try and finish the piece nicely but I can see now that with this there is a little too much going on and for it to work there would need to be a greater pause on the shrugging and staring at the audience and acknowledging that they've been watching and that he thinks "so what" to the judgement of the audience, but as this would be a key moment in itself it would require anticipation also which i have not put in.

weightlift

dee_weightlifting

I quite enjoyed getting Dee to lift my big atlas ball, i was going for the whole sumo man pose when preparing to lift the weight, but didnt put enough enthasis on this. I did think the initial anticipation and the initial lifting of the weight were good of the character feeling the weight, but i think my lift tended to go down hill from there i started over keyframing parts again so i couldnt fix them very easily and i think this shows in the animation, which is something i will address when i get the character set working next time. I do however think the initial lift was quite good and the characters reactions were good in the back and the head and the eyes showing his strain lifting the atlas ball. Though from this point his waist and balance are not in alignment and you can clearly see that he is off balance for the size of the Atlas ball. I tried to correct this but due to over key framing of the arms and hands and also fingers so that they did not go into the ball I ended up having to fidget his hands in relation to the ball as it was. I realise now that a lot of my errors in this are due to not planning out the main keyframes for each body part at the particular keyframe. The second lift I couldn't get right due to the same problem as above with too many body rotations in the back and legs and arms. Also to note for future referene, I need to keep an eye all individual body parts us not moving key joints can make body appear as though it is nailed to the wall. E.g. The legs, the waist, head and back. When the character comes to dropping the ball, I think the speed of the ball was right but the character feels lifeless from this point on as he slowly lifts his arms in celebration. I think the timing of the arms lifting in celebration was right but they are too close together and give him a robotic feel and therefore could do with being a few frames apart to give that individual feel for each arm. These are things I'll try and take note of the future reference when animating with the rig or any other rig that matter.

walk hard

my walking animation this term i was quite happy with. After blocking it out and then getting the basic timing of my swanking head bopping walk i added in some hand jestures to make it more fluid which i was happy with. Though i feel i could have put much more of a emphasis on the swank and the head bopping. I tried to get the animation looping but i couldnt get him to return to the initial pose as i had key framed way to much stuff in the process. This is something im going to try watch out for when key framing in the future. I think the timing on the wink is good however and if you were to silhouet the walk you would still be able to see him with a little swanking along walk and a pointing at someone in echnoledgement.

big Z modelling

here are some images during the making of my big Z model

the dawn of a new age...the second year !!!!

over the summer ive done some drawings while travelling abroad and about the place in my sketch book and at work drawing the odd customer. Ive taken a whole string of photos capturing the summer and some beautiful scenes home and away abroad making for great settings. Ive also finally started the maya foundation book for 2008.
Ive done the first project of making a house for big z from surfs up, which was easy but good for me to recap on my basic animating and modelling and texturing.




I then went on to model big Z from a cube to his full body shape below are some photos of the process which ive now completed with hair and all i next have to texture him. I think the model went well though the overall shape could be improved a bit more and smoothed out, also the hair is a bit wierd but for my first attempt at hair i think i did ok. Im looking forward to seeing what he will look like textured on my model.
Though with the current tasks of modelling my own face and getting back into the swing of doing a animated walk and starting a sketchbook of conversations and interaction project i will probably wont get round to texturing bigz for some time now.

final animation

i think our final animation was quite successful though would be nice to tweek it a little more and go into a little more detail with the models and things and get closer and definately see it in colour would be good.

testing

i then went on to test out some explosions as i had never done any before on maya and was not particulary amazing with particles on maya(no pun intended) so i did a tutorial that emma found for me on exploding a sphere which worked easily enough. i them tried it on a cube and below was the resault which i was reasonably satisfied with.



i then moved onto trying it on the buildings in my scene, the particles of flames show up as only circle clouds until you maya software render them.



so in the video they show up as that but this photo below shows the current look of the explosion rendered at that stage. I later went into detail further with the particles making ramps to alllow for different colours and ramps for transparentcy but all this and the fact to many particles where coliding meant that the whole scene was slowed down and a major clean up was in order which M.L and george helped me out with but on the whole the explosion was a success concidering i have never made one before. i will put some more photos up later of the explosion and the laters which M.L rendered it in to show the smoke and flames.

Back to the works

When i returned back to the gas works to make the explosion and model the town using M.Ls buildings as the template houses, i had no problem making up the streets and plonking out houses of different sizes, though i feel i spent a little to much time modelling and scaling the houses as most probably wouldn't have been in the final shot but needed to be there for environment purposes. The real challenge would come when i had to make the gas works explodable which turned out to be a lot harder than i thought, concidering the amount of buildings i had in the gas works. below is what the town looked like with M.Ls buildings before i tore the gas works appart.

Bomb, bomb, bomb ba bomb

Next in order was the ol bomb for the explosion and bomb drop shot of the plane releasing the bomb and the bomb then blowing up the gas works. I just modelled the bomb from your standard plane bomb shape that is so often dypicted in cartoons and illistrations a like. i put a little bit of hand writen writing on the side which was common in those days to write messages to your enermys on bombs or shells ect. the message was good night tommy writen in german which you most likely wont be able to see but i wanted to put that suttle touch to this simple thing for a laugh so there you have it our awesome german bomb, see below.

Drive by, fly bye

I was then asked to model the environment and animate the fly by shot were the planes go under the aa guns, i started with the landscape where i got to use a few different tools which took a little getting used to for me to make a valley that looked believable and wide enough for the planes to get through, but i got the rough shape in the end and sorted the planes out and animated to movement of the aa guns and the planes, as M.L had the textures for the trees and was better with lighting than me due to my incapability in that area (note i need to work on lighting and texturing) i let him put the same trees from his scene into mine and get the lighting looking good and texturing the sandbags and as M.L had the re-rig claude(our character) he put him in position also on the aa gun . i just modelled the aa guns and landscape and some sandbags around the guns and changed claudes apearance so he looked like a soldier just by tweeking M.Ls model and also animated the fly by so you could see the guns as they face each other and the repeating action of them also.

mechanics

while i was in the process of modelling the gas works, we decided to keep the style of the houses throughout the same and we decided to go with the style of matt.l's (M.L) houses, so i stopped the gas works for a while and modelled a car for M.Ls scene as we were working on getting all the aniamtion and modelling done scene by scene at this point. M.Ls scene that the car was needed for was with the bus being shot by the plane, so i mad a car to go in M.Ls scene which was quite fun to make despite a series of silly problems with edge loops and duplicating the 2 sides of the model. I chose to make the car the same way i modelled my fish in the ident project as its easy to correct things for both sides as a car should be symetrical from the middle so this made things easier. i put on a few details that probably wernt necessary but i still think i could have done a lot better, but as M.L said because the car will be so far away you wont notice it, but i wanted to give it a bit of character just with colour and shape but i think this will be one of the models i would quite like to make into something visual to use close up in a future scene possibly so when i get back to my computer i think i would like to improve on this model and also that of my AA gun model.





As i said the detail could have more work done to it but as yu can see from the bottom one you cant see much detail at all of what i have done as the car is so far away as the distance the camera is in this bottom shot is the distance the car will roughly be from the camera.

modelling ;)

back to modelling after the animatic and i went straight into roughing out the rest of st ives around where the gas works which was not to much difficulty and added some rough colours in to give a feel for the scene before i started texturing.

2d_personal_character

Even though i never got round to doing a 2d turnaround i did a few ideas for my personal character in rough, but i havent had the time to do it in colour as of yet, so my character is pritty self explanitory im a fishboy that surfs which is prity much what i am lol spend all my time by the sea or in it and have been called fishboy back at school many a times and on holiday when ive been surfing so i thought the idea was quite fitting. though the character is taken from a real factual species of fish called a mexican walking fish so that kinda let me play with the idea which i enjoyed.

pre pro

i did a few pre production shots of my own for the fly bys when we were first conceptualising to help out with forming our storyboard, see below.

Animatic.....

This was our animatic for which i had made the anti aircraft gun(aa gun) and the gas works, as we were having a little group organisation of who is doing what and what camera shots for the animatic, which resulted in matt.l doing more work than me for it, i would have been more than happy to do more but i didnt know what kind of shots we were looking for. But the animatic i guess was just a case of roughing out the work so i have no problem with matt.l doing that just made me feel like i wasnt putting any effort in dispite there only being a little work to do as its a short animation, so it all worked out in the end.

initial ideas_maya

this draft of fore street was just a rough idea of how to do the street shots on maya just popping up some planes and a polygon for the church tower, just to keep the initial concepts simple and as low poly as possible even though we didnt use this shot.

Then for the animatic i started work on rough model of the anti aircraft gun and the gas works just to help with the block through. i tried to get the aa gun as acurate as possible but we later found that rigging the character to it with so many polygons was difficult so i took away some of the handles and general polygons that you couldnt see. I enjoyed making the aa gun though and if i had some more time would like to give it some nice textures but as the shot is short and close up you wouldnt have time to see them. For the gas works i just blocked it out for the animatic with polygons for all the buildings as you wouldnt be getting hugely close up.

group project team hoorah! or summin

yea back now second week in after easter feels like first but time flys which is why me and my quickly assembled group of emma producer and tom i think without knowing it is now director and matt l me and newly aquired today jonny g. emma is in charge of pre production with the rest helping it along, me matt.l and jonny on the production and dowler on the post with me emma and matt helpin out there lil bit to. anyways today me tom and matt.l and emma all went to hayle for a lil research trip and got some pointless photos and some prity good ones of the main street and old buildings from before and around that time to help us out a bit and have been conceptualising and talking about our ideas a lot together which i think is good. but will have to wait and see what concept art is produced so that me and mattl can start modelling stuff up rough which in all honesty we have allready started. but yea animatic out in to weeks time so will have to wait and see. for now some of our photos are on facebook the rest and owww textures, of metal and brick and stone are all filed away for posible use

final animation movie

:)

thanks wankers, still pissed that craig raped your facebook ay jonnie yu gay boys deserve each other

i was quite happy with my final animation though if i had more time i would have liked to have my animation a little longer and put some more background elements into the scene and funky lighting when i get maya i might work on this in my own time and see what i can do. also would have spent way more time to texture the 2 bigger fish which would have been good if i could have done that. anyways as soon as the blogger will let me upload my video i will gurrr

renders from my final animation

maya hell maya heaven?

ive been working from sideviews of my concept art to get a rough shape for the three fish ive designed, its the main reason i havent blogged in a while as ive been trying to perfect the shape of my fish and the hardest bit is giving them some character. as i wanted to make them cartoon like even though done in maya i gave them big characterised eyes like as if they were done in 2d. anyways these 2 images are a working progress of the first 2 fish the big monstermuncher and the middlemuncher who now are rendered in bold colours how i want and have awesome teeth but i forgot to take a screen print of them finished yesterday so gummyfish images will have to do for now.

initial ideas

idea 1)

i thought of the food chain idea in relation to three fish eating each other in a line so the first being eaten by the second which then gets gobbled up by a third fish which then swims on for a bit chewing and then stops and burps out the chew tv logo. i thought this idea was maybe a little to litteral on the whole chew thing so i thought a bit more about some other possible ideas.

idea 2)

thinking about animals chewing i thought about curious cow that i had seen at the bradford animation festival and his crazy antics and consequences of things he shouldnt do which he does and then something funny happens to him. firstly with this i was worried that my cow would be to similar to curious cow. but the idea i thought of was the cow is stroling along the field and see's a sign with dont eat writen on it and a massive sunflower next to it. a thought bubble then pops up in his head with chew tv writen in it then he goes "mooo" and a bite mark is suddenly made in the logo and camera zooms to the logo and then scene ends. this i thought would end up to much like the concept of the curious cow despite how much i liked it.

idea 3)

i thought of all the e4 adds where eggs are being layed and logo popping out ect, i thought about chickens in a line in a hut like in chicken run or barn yard all laying eggs with the camera following along from a side view as each chicken lays an egg then one randomally lays the chew tv logo and the camera continues along as each chicken continues to lay its egg then all the chickens look back at that chicken who shrugs her wings and then looks down at the logo and camera zooms to the logo. alternately it could lay an egg and then it cracks open and logo comes out that way and then camera goes back and focuses on it then. i liked this idea a lot because it was simple and fun.

Summary. i liked all three of my main ideas but the chicken one and the fish ones i liked the most because i felt they were the most original, i decided to go with the fish one because i could potentially do more with that. i sketched up a story board, and some concept art to show the producers from chew tv who seemed happy with my idea and ive been at it the last 2 weeks since.

chew chew fish food

so long time no blog well thats because ive been berring my head in this new chew tv ident project we got given about 2 weeks ago now, we had to come up with a ident for chew tv which was in tone with thier flyers, having a space like feel with glowing blues, white and black background with a slick look about it.

my first thoughts were animals chewing things but then i thought they probably wouldnt want the obvious, so i looked at other youth aged tv stations idents for inspiration mainly e4 as i have always enjoyed watching thier idents anyways. i noticed thier idents had lots of little charactertured animals and creatures that were eating things then becoming the logo or burping out the logo or laying the logo like an egg or an egg cracking open to reveal a egg. bearing in mind e4 logo had no relation to all these ident ideas they were all totally random but seem to be a popular theme when it comes to idents, burping, farting, laying eggs funny ways to make the logo apear as i think humour is the key factor in a youth age directed ident.

Anyway with this in mind i thought out possible routes i could go. not being able to help myself my first thoughts were cheese/toast/food chain/teeth/sheep and cows chewing the logo maybe like grass/ blob made up creatures from play dow morphing into the logo.

3d inspirations

I was browsing through net at cgi animated videos and i came across this video which i really liked reminded me of varmints and Les Processus. I like the idea that it shows a mass of canon and war torn city and ww1 uniformed germans and blood dribbling along the street to represent the soldiers and the tophat man resembling the general or "the man" in charge who thinks that its all fun and games and a ball dancing everywhere and when the last soldier dies at end it starts over as if to suggest all the death is just a cycle. if anyone else has any further thoughts on this i would appriciate it as i really like this film which is a student film btw. would love to make something like this for mine.

environment project

When i got round to my environments project after my essay and finishing my backgrounds i took inspiration from the games medal of honour and oblivion to create a creepy room of my own, which even though i had many little problems along the way i actually enjoyed doing more and more and it progressed. i started off with creating the polygons for the different objects i was making thinking about compersition and textures for the objects and the effect i wanted them to have on the room. i decided to go for a corridor with stone arch ways over the top which was the easiest to construct but the hardest to texture as i had to texture the faces of each stone and try get the render quality up, which i believe i did ok, but some of the stones look a little pixelated. i think i saved myself on that note by bump mapping all the stone on the arch and walls and floor but at the same time it was all a little to much, i feel i should have tuned down the bump mapping on the walls n floor. Also i was happy with the bump mapping on the barrels and the textures used for the wood tables as well, though the legs on the tables where difficult to get the correct pixelation on them, so they look like they are rotted which doesnt fit in with the table top. And the barrel i couldnt get the inside to follow contours of outside but i will look to learn this in time. other than that im quite happy with my corridor. i like the lighting and its positioning over the tables and how the mustard yellow i gave the light gave it just the right look of a candle lit corridor that i wanted.