Monday 23 June 2014

Personal Project: Body Mechanics

For the Body Mechanics part of my personal project I produced a run cycle and a short gymnastics piece. It was fun to work on body mechanics as I feel its an area I would really like to improve on.

The run cycle I found very challenging. Its obviously much faster then a walk cycle so I had much fewer frames to work with. I am fairly happy with how this turned out, though I would have liked to spend more time on the upper body, especially the head.


I rendered out a quick version with motion blur to see what it would look like. I actually think it looks quite cool. Its a feature in Maya I think I am going to have to play with in the future. 



I also animated a short gymnastics routine. I had a lot of fun with animating this because of all the interesting and unusual body shapes that I had to hit with the rig. The rig I used was Stewart by Animation Mentor. This rig was so much fun and so nice to work with because of how far you can push it without breaking. It was incredibly handy to have IK/FK switches on both hands and feet, it much easier to animate. There are still a few parts to this I would like to work on and smooth out but Im pretty pleased with how it turned out. Gymnastics was really hard but fun at the same time and I definitely want to work on more body mechanics pieces like this.


I also added some motion blur to the gymnastics animation. (This was an earlier version of the animation so there are still a few glitches here and there)


Body mechanics was something I pushed aside when thinking about stuff that I would ideally want to work on, but after working with the Stewart rig on the above animations I have changed my mind. I had a lot of fun working on both of these, and especially the gymnastics. I feel that its really important to have a good understanding  of body mechanics so I am glad that I enjoy it.
I think now I will make it a point to work on more Body Mechanics animation over the summer as I cant wait to work with Stewart again and improve my animation further.

Collab Project

My collaborative project is now finished. I enjoyed this project as I got to animate things I otherwise wouldn't have chose to do.
First, here is the 'Mimed Acting' part of my collab project:






I enjoyed animating this section of my collab project. A lot of the shots were very close up so I had a chance to really work on my facial animation. Because there was so dialogue, I was challenged to communicate the characters emotions purely through their faces which I really enjoyed. Over all, I am happy with how my character work turned out for this project. Animating many short shots is not what I have done in the past, so it was interesting to get used to working on a lot of short shots at once.

The second part of my Collaborative Project was the creature animation. For this I produced a Trot Cycle and a Run Cycle:



Unfortunately I had a lot of problems with this rig when it came to rendering. In the end I had to just have playblasts. With regards to animating it, it was the first time I had used a rig built specifically for a project. It took a while for me to get used to the controls. It was also the first time animating a quadruped trot and run. Im glad I got the chance to practice what I think is a good skill to have. It has made me want to work more with creatures as well as human characters.

Working on a collaborative was a very different experience to working on my own projects. I liked that I had someone who could help direct me and give suggestions with my work to make it the best it could be. I am happy I have had experience working in a team for a bigger project as I have a better idea of what to expect in industry. I look forward to working on more group projects in the future.