This is a compilation of my work completed during my third and final year at university.
There are still a few things that I think I may go back to tweak and polish or even just re-render but for now, this is my final reel.
'Final major project' were pretty intense but I had a lot of fun animating new things like the dancing on 'Project Dance' and playing with new original rigs on 'Alpha'.
It was a crazy three years and I am proud with how far I have come. I could have never imagined being able to not only animate but co-direct a CG animated short film before starting uni. But now it is done and I am officially a graduate.... now onto the real world. Ooo this should be fun.
I am of course going to continue to post here ( even if this was originally for university) I have a fair few personal projects planned and hopefully I will find somewhere willing to pay me to animate for them (which still seems crazy) ahhh into the unknown I go!
Here are the final rendered versions of my scenes from the project Alpha and also a few final thoughts.
Its really nice to see the whole thing come together and I am really happy we managed to get it finished in time (though it was very close) We ran into a lot of issues throughout but learning to fix them taught us all a lot.
Its always nice to see the rendered versions of your animation as it adds so much more to the atmosphere of the scene.
Over all I am pleased with the work here. I enjoyed the pace of this scene, and although not much happens, its really about the subtleties. This scene was about showing her curiosity and thoughtful nature.
I think at some point when I have the time, I would like to go back and fix the little glitches in the forearm. This was a rig problem that I was unable to fix in the time we had but I feel it distracts from the shot and makes it feel less polished.
I really enjoyed this creature piece! It was fun and playful even though he was scared and I enjoyed walking the line between him moving like a creature but having a human personality.
The rig was very challenging to work with because of the unusual shape of his body but I am happy with how it turned out.
This was my only creature animation for my final major project so I am happy with how it turned out. I would like to get into character animation, so I saw this piece as a character piece rather then just a creature animation. I would like to try more animation like this in the future as I had a lot of fun with it.
Over all, I am happy with the work I did for this project although there are a couple of tweaks I may make. It was quite hectic being the animation director also, but everything turned out okay in the end. I found it a good challenge to have more responsibility and more control over the final product.
And if you are interested, here is the final short film in full....
I am really pleased with how everything turned out. There are of course, always things I would change or do differently second time around but I am really proud with our teams achievement.
Just a reminder, here is the animatic for the creature scene...
First Block:
Here we have the first block for the creature scene. This took me quite a long time to get right but I felt that the poses were very important here. I wanted a nice silhouette throughout this piece for the creature and I really wanted to hit those key poses.
I really struggled with this blocking as the rig was quite challenging to work with. We initially had a lot of issues with some of the controllers and the rig did not like being referenced into Maya 2015 however we got it to work in the end, it just pushed us all back a little time wise.
First Spline:
Again, first spline is pretty ugly and I think I need to do a lot of work to get some weight into this piece. I have had a lot of trouble with the legs and shoulders when using this rig. The anatomy of the creature means the neck is very large and unfortunately doesn't deform to the nicest shapes. I tried my best to make the poses appealing (with as little clipping and glitching as possible) while still making the movement believable. Hopfully, the more I work into it, the better it will get.
Spline:
After the first spline, I moved the landing position of the creature so he covers more ground with his jumps. Getting the last run to look right took me a lot of time playing around. The problem was he is a big creature so if he doesn't cover much ground with each stride, it looks odd. On the other hand, his legs are very tiny, so there is only so far they can stretch before it just looks like im making him fly across the screen. I am quite happy with how it looks now and I am excited to get some nice overlap animation done and really smooth out the curves.
Overlap:
Here I really tried to work on making his movements fluid but weighted. I had fun adding some character and emotion with his ears. Its a little difficult again as I cant animate the eyes until the body animation is done and I also cant see what the totem glow looks like (the glow of the totem is what scares him away) So its a lot of guess work but I am over all happy with the way it is progressing.
Facial Anim:
Finally I got to work on the facial animation and really add some character and expression to the creature. We had a little trouble again with the eye textures as some didnt want to work, so the range of eye animation was quite limited however I still think it works and I am pleased with how they look.
I will be uploading the finished rendered version in another post once they are done.
Just a reminder, here is the animatic for the character scene...
First Block:
Blocking was fairly simple for this piece, no complex poses and im pretty happy with the timing.
Note: we are having animated textures for the eyes so they I will have to animate them last. They are pretty intense on the pc and bog down the file and make it pretty impossible to animate so im going to have to get everything for the body done first and then animate the eyes. Its a little different to what im used to but hopefully it will work out.
First Spline:
This is always the part I hate, so many glitches and nasty floaty bits. I have a lot of smoothing to do and I have to fix that hand but im quite happy with this as a basis to work on. I think i'll be spending a lot of time cleaning up the graph editor with this one.
Facial Animation:
[Sorry about the curves on show here] This is a different angle to see the facial animation as the render camera it quite far away. Here are the dreaded animated eye textures....they were quite a handful to work with. These took a lot of time to get working and I'm still not entirely sure how they work, however I really like the look of them so I think they were worth the effort.
Final Shot:
And here we have pretty much the final shot before rendering (you can see all the render cameras here) I had a lot of fun with her bouncy hair and her facial expressions with this shot. We did have a lot of trouble with the rig though and some things (like her bracelet) had to be cut out as they were just not working. A few more tweaks and I think we will be there
I will make a separate post for the final rendered shots of them both, but for now, its out of my hands and off to the techy people to do their magic to make it look pretty.
Here we have my animation progression for the ident/ sting project.
First off, the first block:
I found posing the K character very hard for this piece. He has very unusual body proportions and his large head I found to be quite a challenge. I used my reference video mainly for timing with K as the model could not hit the poses I could.
Spline:
Smoothing this out was a lot of fun. I tried hard to get nice curved lines on K's movement. N was pretty idle throughout this piece so it was a good chance for me to practice that. I haven't really done idle animation before as there hasnt been much call for it in dialogue or mime pieces I have done in the past. It is something I would like to make sure I can do however as it is very important (especially for games)
Final Render:
As acting TD I was responsible for the rendering of this piece. Im quite happy with how it turned out overall. It is not exactly as we originally planned but I am pleased with what we did in the time we had. If I were to go back I think I would have liked to make the animation with K a little more toony and really exaggerate the movements and the fall.
Finally, we had to make a 'making of video' brace yourselves as there is my video reference in there which is not the prettiest. I think its a nice idea to have a making of video though, I think I will try to do this with some of my future projects. Its a nice way to round up a project.
Now Im back in to the swing of animating, I cant wait to start up my final major projects. We will have a lot of time on these and a lot of freedom so Im excited to see what projects our class creates.
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.
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.
This is the first blocking stage of my gymnastics routine for my body mechanics project. This is the first time I have had a chance to get my hands on the Stewart Rig. I must say he is lovely to work with. Excellent for this type of animation.
I have really enjoyed this part of my project so far. The poses are really challenging but I like pushing the rig to its limits. Because the movement is so fast with with animation, I had a lot of keys just for my initial blocking. Though this meant the blocking took a while, I think it should be much easier once I take it to spline. There are a few IK issues I need to go back and fix, but im happy with this for a first block.
I have been working on my scenes for my collab project recently. It was really nice to get back to animating again, it feels like I have been planning for ages. It is different for me to work on a lot of very short shots rather then one long one. I am finding it more challenging because there isnt a single flow of emotion. I think it is a good challenge to have to get into the mindset of so many different emotions as I work on each one.
I also have a very rough creature run cycle. I found the model and rig quite a challenge to work with but I think i managed to hit the poses okay. It still needs a lot of upper body and head work but I am happy with the timing and speed.
This is a rough compilation of most of my scenes. Some scenes still need a fair amount of work but im happy with where they are going.
After all the planning I had to begin animating. I was super excited to start animating again, though I was worried that I'd be rusty with maya.
I went through two to three stages of blocking before I went onto smoothing it and getting the weight there. I then moved onto the lip sync and facial animation, making sure that was working before going back and tweaking the whole thing. I enjoyed getting into the routine and method of animation. I'm sure this is something I will perfect when I am more experienced.
During the smoothing stages, I realized I had underestimated how much movement I added to the hands. I found it tricky to get the timing correct on them. There was also a lot of problems with the hands and arms slipping across the legs and clipping through everything. It took a lot of work to fix it while not detracting too much from the gestures I wanted initially. I was ultimately happy with how the gestures turned out with the time I had. I personally talk a lot with my hands and I love character animation that uses hand gestures well. When I had a friend look at this she mentioned how it scared her because my character had the same gestures as me. I suppose you animate what you like and what you know without realizing.
Here is the finished character animation and the facial animation from the project:
During the weeks on this project we learnt a lot about humans facial expressions and eye movements. I found learning about when and why we blink especially interesting. I always enjoy gaining more knowledge about people and why we do things. Even how we look towards different directions when we are remembering something or creating something in our mind. I wish I had known this when I did A-level drama. I would have been the best little actress there.
Over all I would have liked to spent a lot more time on this honestly, especially with the facial animation and the acting of the character. Even looking at it now, I know what I would change. Still, I am happy with this and it has made me want to do more character animating as soon as I can. I love bringing life and emotion out of a character. Its definitely something I have lent towards since the beginning of the course and wish to pursue in the future.
[This animation was made using Josh Burton's Morpheus rig]
So I have already completed one year as a Computer Animation student and I am currently part way through the second year. I must say, its tough, but I enjoy it so much!
At our university, at the end of the year, we have an awards show called the Glammies. ( its a play on the Grammys, do you see what they did there) The nominated work is presented in our local Cineworld in front of all three years of animation and game art students, also people from industry. Any way, I was lucky enough to be nominated for 'Most Promising First Year' which was a massive surprise. I was asked to create a show reel with my best work from the year. I would then be send to people in industry to be judged. So here is, what I guess is my first show reel as an animation student.
Looking back at it now, its quite cringe worthy, even though not much time has passed since I was working on this. Its amazing how fast you progress in this course and the whole industry in general. I guess I am still a little proud of this as in the end, I won the award. I was so super surprised, and even though we were all asked to prepare a few words, i didn't. I went up on stage, managed to say "thank you" roughly 500 times and sit back down. It was a nice confidence boost which I think I needed. It also made all the work pay off and it spurred me on to work even harder and better for next year.
I guess we will see if I keep to that.
