Project Quadroped - Breakdown

Quadroped Animation by me,
Model/Rig and compositing by my CG buddy Camilla Cording,

we both worked on the early design...

The torso had some rotation-issues that there weren't any time to fix, so I didn't exactly end up with what I had originally intended and our lovely CatFrog is still wobbly on her arcs because of this near the end. She is still very lovely and I'm proud of the beginning. The feet-rigging is amazing, so props to her! :D

Somehow the sound doesn't work in this file I got...

Pantomime shot (now fully rendered)

Finally figured out how to properly batch-render that pantomime shot.

Acting/Dialogue - At the diner

2-week assignment with teacher Mark Oftedal.
Choose an audio-track and create characters and background story, including possible subtext to the acting. I won't bother you with the details, rather I'll let the video try to speak for itself...

I decided to challenge myself and came up with a scene that required animating several constraints and some cheeky switching between object-duplicates.
Good scene-planning really helped speed up my process and I largely avoided technical issues this time. Glad I'm getting over my fear of constraints and making the most of them instead.

This is the scene as I presented it for final dailies, only a few minor details left to tweak, which I will do over the winter-break.



And here's the (very helpful) video reference I shot of myself. I found a way to play both roles, thus being able to take as makes times as I needed to get the timing and the beats just the way I wanted them.

Acting Pantomime

Kevin finally got an internship at the big city news-station, but forgets to bring the right notes to his first anchor-job.




I ended up not being able to decide which ending-pose I wanted, so I tried to fit them both in there, and instead it just mushes the action up. Hm. I should learn to kill my darlings by now...

Anyway, this was fun and Michael Berenstein's method was really helpful to me here.

And while I'm no master at rendering, here's a frame showing the Lighting-rig I set up.

Midway Test: Sneak, Notice, Take

Despite some scary skinning-glitch on the jaw, I managed to copy my process so I didn't have to re-do everything up until the moment I discovered the error. That'll teach me to test the rig fully through before blocking anything out.

The story I made up for this test is as follows:  
Character backstory: Charles is a married man in his late twenties. He is very neat and easily agitated and sensitive. He had a strict mother and an emotionally absent father, which has left him a rather quiet fellow. Even though he is shy Charles enjoys the company of others. He prefers to keep his mouth shut, lest he offend someone.  
Story of the shot: Charles has forgotten his coat at his mother-in-law’s apartment. He is a bit afraid of disturbing her and not wanting to be of any trouble he sneaks back in to fetch the coat on a cupboard. He hears the floorboards creak and turns to see his scary mother-in-law in her underwear (because she was about to go to bed).

Trailer Project: Kwaidan

The final look of our half-year long Trailer Project: a re-imagining of a Japanese, expressionist ghost-story anthology from '64, Kwaidan. With a very interesting cast-choice. Really impressed with the CG Artists of our group, they worked very hard on this and I think it really shows!


I animated four of the shots, as you'll see here at the end of my Midway Showreel, showing everything I've been doing since September.


I feel I've almost gotten comfortable with Maya by now...

Parkour escape (2-shot)

First assignment using the Norman rig. He's alright... The assignment required the implementation of a referenced parkour movement, along with some acting constistent with the back-story of the chase-scene...
This young man has been wrongly accused of theft and is now running from the police. The police in his town is notoriously brutal and so he fears for his life...




I'm very happy with how the two shots hook up. Needs few more frames and less exaggeration on the stopping-recoil; it looks a bit silly right now.

Seven faces and a lift

6 faces showing basic emotions, plus an seventh of any choice... Please enjoy my flirty DreamWorks-face...
This was my first test with the Morpheus rig, who, by default, has this Jimmy Neutron hairstyle. This rig can be morphed into pretty much any shape needed, so it's great for many different kinds of characters and body-types...

And here's my desperate attempt at animating constraints... The weight of the box is questionable at best. I regret not using Morpheus for this assignment, since I couldn't switch between IK and FK mid-animation with Hogan here... Poor planning will be punished.

4 more Maya assignments

Here are the next Maya assignments (playblasts):
1. a bow (with a backstory and fitting acting)
The story here being a young man wanting to present a flower to the girl he likes. Unfortunately she's known for having a violent temper and he's caught her at a bad time - so he is cautious, but also hopeful his gesture will appease her, rather than give her a reason to beat him up.
2. a generic walk-cycle
3. a character walk-cycle (here a cartoony sneak)
4. a run-cycle

Trying to emulate weight-physics in 3D is surprisingly fun.

Early rig practise

Continuing where we left off after the Luxo-lamp rig - explorations and assignments featuring more rigs provided by the school: a floursack and a simplified, but well-rigged human character called Hogan. 

• A sack drop
• Sack hop-cycle (which I regret looks like a bunny)
• Hogan; 7 still poses to fit assigned moods
• Hogan weight-shift
• Hogan doing a tennis serve (no wonder these players injure their elbows so often)
• Nico, early facial rig test

That last rig is a freeware download for non-commercial use, called Nico. It's an incredibly well-rigged quadroped model that I've started to play around with for personal practise. As of now, he is still too complicated for me, but it won't be long before I'm doing stuff with this guy. Right now I'm just having fun getting to know the facial-controls.

The Nico rig can be downloaded here for free, for anyone who makes an account (which is also free).

Introduction to Maya assignments

The very basics - we have returned to the infamous bouncing balls.

And some practice with a simple Pixar Luxo Jr. lamp character. I loved acting with this guy. Pole vector was a bit glitchy, but this is only the beginning.

Fair warning, the last part of this clip has balls performing to music. Also, these are just playblasts - we're not in this for the rendering...

I'm really starting to like Maya and it's technical approach and its many different possible ways of doing thing; it IS an acquired taste.
Physics become harder to portray properly and convincingly, but at least the model is consistent by itself now.

These two weeks have been very fun, even if a bit frightening. Maya is not the most intuitive thing - but it IS very powerful and versatile.

1st year exam - FINAL -

A week of final exam assignment. We had a three panel storyboard in which the character Danny (oh god, not that spaghetti-cat again!) comes stumbling into the scene to pick up a ringing phone, he gets it takes a breath to speak, but realizes that the caller has hung up. He then has to change his mood to resentfully look at the phone. I did the action pretty straightforward, as the storyboard called for.

Still, ignoring the fact that I'm less than loving the character model, it was still fun.

Dance Animation -second take-

I was so disappointed at the tied-down outcome of my first Dance animation assignment that I decided to use my 3 days of self-study making a whole new version. This time I chose the charming and bouncy piece of Bruno Coulais' soundtrack to Secret of Kells.

I then chose to use my own character, which I was comfortable and skilled at drawing. Animating this was much easier because of this. This is as far as I've managed to clean it up, and I left the rough animation and time-charts visible underneath because I like ruffs with charts; it makes it look like you know what you're doing :)

I may have taken the high-road on this, but the character's personality really comes across, and it gave me a great excuse to practise bounces, overshooting and settling-wobbles. Fat characters are fun to animate.

Also, here's an old little rough practise I did of a flirty finger-walk, 12,5 fps:

Flash Introduction (Dialogue)

First animation in Flash... Good for tweening effect and for lazy animation that doesn't involve actual drawing... For classical character animation... it is the most unintuitive tool I've ever come across. It makes me miss TVPaint. However, I had fun with this particular excercise...

We had to make our own character and lipsync to a soundclip. It had to involve some acting of the hands. Basically we we're told to go nuts with the various tweening tools. This was mostly done using Classic Tween, but after dailies I have now thrown in a bit of Motion Tween as well. Also, we didn't learn how to control easing in/out in tweening until afterwards, but I threw it in where I could, without messing up the parented symbol-motions.... :S

Dialogue is from 'Deadwood', I think...

"Escape" Project Animation

The final outcome of the 2-scene excerpt of a story, thought up, written and storyboarded by CG artist David Crisp and myself.
David did the backgrounds and compositing, while I did the animation part (plus that last silly credits title-card)
These are the last two shots of the story called "Slaughterhouse Dreams", in which the main character, a little pig, accepts his fate...

We are going to hell for this one.



Due to an economical (read: easy) character design, I even had time for some serious procrastination at my workspace... So I put my old photoshop skills to use and made myself a wallpaper (and some silliness)

Have you hugged a derpy-looking salamander lately?

Dance Animation

Very rough - too rough, actually; but I went loose this time becuase of experimentation. Clean-up failed spectacularly because of this. So here's the rough animation, just the motion, no character... I still like this, but I should've picked a character I could actually sketch freely...

Looks like croquis come-to-life because of that brush-choice.

Dialogue Animation

Characters chosen are Gerald McBoingBoing and 'the cat who hated people' (no name given).

I chose this sound clip because it had a lot of energy to work with. This taught me a great deal about how to move a character in a fast way, using smears and rapid settling, over-shoots etc.
Lip-syncing was surprisingly easy; hadn't expected that.

The backstory for this scene is that Gerald has some anger issues - he doesn't take well to being told what he can or can't do... He's a child, so he throws a fit.

I really enjoyed having Mike Polvani as teacher. Swell guy, I'll miss him.

---
Also, here are some sketches of the day...

AfterEffects 2 final compositions

1 week course in Adobe AfterEffects for compositing. Used the bird flight-cycle from our previous TVPaint class and threw it all together. The plane near the end is a mood-killer, teacher and I agree, but it was part of the assignment to have a plane in there... I chose the creepy, rainy evil caste mood.

The final, "close-encounter" assignment... put onto a screen and played with camera-movement. This assignment basically involved a UFO flying around a background element like the tower here and to abduct/or beam down an animated character (animated using AfterEffects, here the Pin Tool)

This was so much fun, and very useful in our future projects...

Non-dialogue Acting

Some secondary-actions focus, a character (Bernard from "Rescuers" here) waiting for a blind date. 125 frames. I chose an anxious/nervous feel.

Also, we did walk-cycles earlier, and I was not happy with the copy-paste outcome of the first one I did (the realistic walk) so I spent some days re-tracing and properly inbetweening the legs and getting a better view of the arcs. (it's a gif file, so if you're using Explorer it runs slow)

1st semester ShowReel

A compilation of what I've done and learned during my first semester here at The Animation Workshop, starting from the famous and basic 'bouncing ball' assignments to the official mid-term test.

Background Music used: "Turtle Woods/The Pits/Night Fight" (Crash Bandicoot 2 Game Soundtrack) by Mutato Muzika.