Smear frames within Maya

At the moment I'm trying to teach myself the art of smear frames within 3D animation, to help me I've put together an animation to work on where I can test out the smear frame method, here is a quick look at the ongoing breakdown stage of the animation.

Pie animation test

For the Pie project I did a quick animation test from one of the scenes. Within this scene Commissioner Blueberry gets caught by the 'thing' upstairs. I only had 2 days to animated, colour, shade and also produce the background, therefore I am happy with what I achieved in a small amount of time. The animation is not perfect and I do believe the colouring can use some improvement. I will need to add more tweens and also re-due the line work before I will consider it fully finished. 

 

Pie pitch bible

I have now finished the pitch Bible for my Pie project. With help from the team I believe we finished with a good amount of work and a good final bible. I still wish that I had some more time to with this project just to tweak some of the final character designs as they all still have a slightly different style with each of them. Overall I am happy with the progress me and the team made over the period of time give.

Life drawing year 2

Here are a few of my life drawings from this year. I've mainly been focusing on the head, I've been looking at the basic shapes for the head and how to use them to produce all kinds of head shapes. I've also been working a lot more with pencils than charcoal the past few weeks just so I can have that little bit more control over the tool, allowing me to focus more on the shapes than than having to deal with charcoal's messy mistakes.

So far it's been going well, I can see some improvements comparing the older drawings to the newer but I still have a very long way to go. I need to focus more on the strength of my lines, I need to try and lighten my drawing up, allowing me to have more revealing shading without the black outline of my line drawing.

Final 11 second club before render

I have made a few more tweaks to the animation, I have now delayed the head turn even more and I've also added a bit of motion to the arm while he is turning to indicate that he is trying to find the back of the cushion. I have also played around with the upside down man to give him a bit more life with his fingers.

I do believe I am now happy with the animation but I will be waiting a bit before putting it into the final rendering stage as I would like to render this out with Renderman 21 (non- commercial version) when it releases.  

11 second club second last final review

I've left this project for a short break but I've comeback to it now and I believe I have fixed a few things wrong with the animation making it almost ready for rendering.
I have fiddled around with the figures at the start as some where clipping into the rig, I have also played with the turn and have adding in more of a stare of the sitting down character. I have also changed the part when be moves his hand up to say "no" to last slightly longer so it has a bit more of an impact.

I need to look over the animation one last time and also ask a few people to look at it just in case I missed anything, but once that's done I will move onto texturing and rendering this animation out hopefully with Renderman.

Quad draw tool with live objects

 I've been playing around with the quad draw tool within Maya today and working with models created within Mudbox. I've managed to understand the process but I need to put in a few more hours into this until I get thins completely.