Character designs for a week long project

Here are a few character designs which I have done for a quick one week project. We were given three stories to choose from in which I took one and designed some characters for the story. This was an interesting process due to the short time frame. I believe they came out to be interesting but from this experience I've learnt better ways of tackling character design such as only creating the silhouette the the character to get a feeling for the character before going into detail, allowing you to play around with shapes much quicker than trying to go into the detail straight away. I know that I will be doing this more often in future projects.

     

Life drawing

 Here are a few of my life drawings for 2017, for this session we were given ink and charcoal. We had to use sticks to draw with the ink. This way of drawing was very new to me but I found the experience to be very enjoyable. Adding it on top of the charcoal was very interesting and I believe it does add another aspect to the drawing, bringing out the model. Some of the drawing I did were also with my left hand, I found that though drawing in this way I was looking and thinking a lot more about what I could see than using original knowledge and experience which I would be using with my right hand. I believe you can see that though the line quality of the bottom right drawing, you can see control but its not interesting, compared to the other drawings where the line art is more flexible which I believe has created a better flowing drawing.

I hope to do more of this in the near future.

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.