Modeling practice

Over the past few weeks I've been looking more into the modeling process, What I've found with modeling is that once you are familiar with a few tools the making aspect becomes less crazy as you have a more idea of what your doing. As soon as you run into problems you start to find a method of figuring out what tools can fix that, so over time you start to build to that lift of tools which you know how to use.

This is a start of a broken down bar which is still in development, I need to continue modeling for now but hopefully next week I can start looking into textures and block mapping and finally lighting.

800 years Penryn Concept art

Here are a few concept art pieces which I have done for our final design of the Spanish Captain and also the barn where the play is taking place. I'm very happy with the final design, it is starting to feel like we are making progress.

3D motion interaction refence videos.

Here are a few of the reference videos I took for the 3D interaction. Some of the movement in the animation so far came from these. I haven't copied the actions completely as I believed the animation needed a bit more 'over the top' acting.

Sketch book

Here are a few pages from my latest sketch book, these pages really look into what goes into creating a good animation background. The main focus is clarity but it also shows how skills in knowing how to create perspective is important as well. 

Life drawing

Throughout the year I have been taking life drawing lessons, here are a few which I have done, all differ in time spent on them. Within life drawing I'm starting to learn how simple shapes can help to create the perfect curve or part of the body, helping to decrease the amount of time needed to create an on scale copy of the person. I am continuing to take life drawing and I hope to improve my skill over the next few years. 

800 years of Penryn Anamatic 4

Here is the next update for the Penryn project, we almost have a story that works but how it ends still needs to be re-thought. We should be able to go into production soon.

3D motion interaction 2

Since last time I've added in a more fluid motion for the girl, she still looks a bit stiff so I need to keep adjusting for now. I've tried to sort out the small feet movements and a few hand movements for the mother but again it's still in progress. It's slowly getting there but looks promising.

3D motion interaction

This here is my progress so far on motion interaction within 3D, the Mother character is getting there but still needs to be tweaked quite a lot before getting ready for polish. For the young girl I've got all key frames down and will be moving onto adding inbetweens soon. 

Parallax

Here is my go at trying to create a parallax within after effects, I believe it works, the thing I found most hard is trying to get all the detail within the correct layers.

Lip Sync

I've been working on lip syncing over the last week with the Mery rig, I've found out that it is important to act out and create reference videos as it is almost impossible to get the correct movements without it.  For this piece I believe that I animated it is a strange way. At first I animated the lip sync and all the small movements on the face and then I went into animating the rest of the body. To me it kinda felt like I was working backwards but I believe the animation turned out really well. I've also managed to work out how to batch render within Renderman which found to be less complicated than I first thought.

Looking back at it now, I believe that a few more tweaks can be made to the last 'in this' sentence with the lip sync and also the arm on the hip seems to move a bit too much, it probably like that due to the change in IK/FK.

Thanks once more to the people who made her. The rig came from MeryProject.com

The final render was possible through the use of Renderman. 

800 years of Penryn (Animation style)

 Here are some sketches I've done for the style we are wanting to achieve for this project, we are wanting to push the idea of the Spanish being in shadows making them look strong and scary but when they are frightened the captain burst into colour. These are not the final design but we are getting closer to and finalized style.

800 years of Penryn Project

For this semester we have been given the task of recreating historical moments for Penryn as it's there 800th year anniversary. For our project we have the story of when the Spanish Armada  arrived to destroy the town but ran away when the thought they were being attacked by the British, but it turned out to be the whole of Penryn cheering and shouting over a play that was happening just outside the town within a barn.

So far we have made 2 anamatics but we are still finalizing the final film as some scenes don't work and there is a lot that we can cut out of the beginning and we need to make the running away scene more funny as it happening too fast.      

Key poses with Mery

Here are my latest pose tryouts. From doing this exercise I've learnt a lot from the whole role the animator takes, and how understanding the inner feeling for the character is as important as planning out your animation as it will help bring feeling to the character. It's most important to hit these feelings within the key frames, as these will determine how the in-betweens and the final animation will look and feel to the audience .

The image above represents a character who has just seen something amazing, she is happy yet at the same time relieved that whatever is happening in front of her has happened, so in a way she is looking forward to the future as a heavy burden has been lifted from her shoulders.

This image shows her to be concentrating on achieving her task but she is trying to look confident, and a bit stylish at the same time as she knows that believing you can do something is half of the battle, therefore she is determined.

This image represents the character as relaxed, she feels as if she has had a lot on today but now it's all over and she can finally relax. While relaxing she has that small feeling for relief and finally has some time to dream and think of other things.

Here she is shown as being shocked and yet confused at what she is seeing. In her mind she is trying to come to terms with what is happening yet is so furious that she needs to swing her hands and just pause and ask....... why.

Here she is shy and not quite sure about the situation she is in; she is wanting to pull herself away than tackle or talk to whoever is interacting with her. She is not in her confront zone and is still trying to adjust to her new surroundings.

Thanks again for the awesome rig called Mery. She came from MeryProject.com

These photo were rendered using Renderman. Thanks once again Pixar