For the Spell Animation, I used the Maniquin rig again. This one was the hardest to do as It involved a lot a refering to the reference footage that I took. I didnt do storybords to did gestural sketches to get the idea across for what i was about to do, to give me visual clues to how i was goin to do this.
I actually think this is probably the strongest animation out of them all because I think the slow in and slow out of the body movements are quite powerful. Like at the last bit where his whole body smashes to the groud and causes the ground to explode.
For Improvements next time, I would Like to have improved to curves and arcs that the hands were following. I felt that they looked a bit square because of mayas graph editor not working out how I wanted it to look like.
I think this is my weakest animation of the submissions, I Think that the biggest mistake for this one was that I spent way to much time on the acting of the character rather than the body movements of the character.
Although I think I got the sense of weight across with the character holding and dragging the sword, I still think that there are many errors associated with this one.
If you look when hes grasping the sword and pulling it, you may see that his hand disconnects from it, and looks really natural. This was because I forgot to parent the hand to the sword, and I realized this halfway through which would have made me loose weeks worth of animation. Another thing that I think doesn't bode well with this one is the sliding feet, Another thing I shall improve upon is to solve rendering errors within the time limit. As you can see, the floor appears out of nowhere once the camera moves in maya, I dont know exactly how to solve this without keying the camera to move ever so slightly.
Next time When I animate a character walking backwards I will try to leave s much time as possible to successfully pull off the walking action using more reference imagery,however, I do like the expressions of this character, I think I did that successfully, when the sword drops out of nowhere.
Alright So now onto a little extra one that I didnt intend to submit as part of my CAP submission. Here is a horse Gallop Cycle study. I wanted a really big challenge for this one.
First steps were to gather refernce imagery as always, and I used this fantastic image sequence. of a horse and jokey.
I love this sequence, and it helped a really big deal with the production of this animaton study.
This was actually the only thing that I used as visual reference for the animation, I didnt want to over complicate things by going into too many slow-mo videos of horses galloping. I wanted to get started right away with this one. And I wanted to do this in 2D as a little bit of a break from 3D
So first things first was to draw out the key poses, and then start from there referring to the reference imagery as much as possible. At first it started to look like a gigantic weird bounding dog. It wasn't graceful like a horse. So to overcome this I paid closer attention to the forms oscillating (front and hind quarters) and I worked on them a bit more so that the arcing of the major forms looked more believable.
And After A bit more refining I Managed to complete it, I quite like it,
I would really like to do another one of these again, because it really made me have to think about the anatomy of horses. I would definatly want to improve upon doing animations for creatures, as I would love to be proficient within all aspects of character and creature animation.
Alright onto the second Evaluation! Man, these things take their toll, ha!
Ok, so this is the custom animation that allowed me to make a choice into what the action should be,
I chose to do an animation of a biped diving. I felt it would be an interesting and fun challenge to do so.
So what I did first as always was gather reference footage, and ofcourse being an expert diver I found some footage of my most impressive dives at the london 2012. yeah.....
Also I took a look at this really good image of the arc that would form when someone cliff dives. It shows the cool arcs that you get when weighted objects are thrown into the air with momentum. Its these arcs that im trying to draw with these character animations.
So after gathering reference imagery and footage, I Started drawing out some gesture studies for how the dive shall look.
Interestingly, The process for animating this action was actually much quicker than anticipated. Because it was really the whole rig (which was a really cool mannequin rig I got from here http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/mannequin--5)
that was following an arc shape, and the picture shown above provided a lot of help with the trajectory of the biped.
Seeing it finished I like that its really exaggerated in the sense that he comes bursting out of the water at the second last bit. What I don't like about it is that it might also be too exaggerated in some bits, I don't like how he comes flying out of the water so fast into the air also he runs a little bit too fast in the first run up. So next time I will make a note and not to exaggerate everything about the animation
Alright, Heres my first set of evaluations for the animations I've been working on for the last few months.
So for this first animation test, it was the max rig running into a wall.
Typiclly it started with reference video footage that i took of myself, when taking the videos I knew that I would be exaggerating the body movements that was on the video, so there was no point in me running at full speed into a wall and ending up hurting myself! After me and Greame shot the reference footage I started drawing out rough sketches for what the sequence would look like.
Overall I quite like this one, I think his run cycle seems to be quite effective at first. But there are a few things that I would improve for next time for this, For one I think that I could have added more frames on the impact point. It also seems like hes almost bouncing off the wall rather than thudding onto the wall. If he had more of a dull thud kind of impact then it would have been a lot more successful in my opinion.
Another thing I think could have been made much better would have been the arm swings. I was aiming to make the arcs look really nice and powerful. But within the graph editor in maya I was having trouble with the curves to look right with the slow in and slow out movements that I was trying to aim for.
One last final thing that I feel that I could have made a better effort with would be max actually looking like hes getting comically shot by the flying turret.
What I like to do with all projects I do, (character designs, animations, sketches, paintings..) is to always introduce some kind of narrative, into it. For instance with this animation, of max running into a wall...why does he run into a wall? Whats his intention? What is he running from? The whole point of these animations are to show an animated biped reacting to some kind of force, but I wanted to add some kind of feature (like the flying turret) that will give a sense of slapstick within this sequence.
Thursday 14 November 2013
ok so im working on an action where my character tries to pick up a heavy sword and swings it with all her might. heres the story board ive got so far.
last few weeks ive been practicing 3d animation using the sound track from the 11second club. Heres what ive got so far. I've interpreted it as the girl is taking part in a "most mutant pet competition" and she gets points taken off for her pet exploding. Im going to use the andy rig and the eleven rig. haha
