Client Project - (Semi) Finished Piece

I can't say I wasn't tearing my hair out in the last couple of days before the deadline...

I 'modified' my idea 3 days before the deadline after realising I would never have enough time to finish what I had originally planned to do, so 'Nottingham Loves Events at Old Market Square' quickly became 'Nottingham Loves Game City' (purely because I had the arcade machine built and ready to animate...and it has 'GameCity' plastered on the side of it...)
Even after changing my topic though, I was still quite short on time, so I have some sound effects..and admittedly, my camera shots are pretty rubbish. I'm planning on working on these things over the holidays so that I can resubmit.
I'm honestly gutted that I had to change so much of what I wanted to originally do, but I guess that's just the way it turned out to be. I am happy with what I managed to get done in the short time I had left but definitely needs a lot (a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot) of improvement.
For now...(excuse the bad quality..I don't feel like this should be uploaded anywhere else atm..)

Client Project - Short walk cycle

I'm getting there..slowly but surely...

And looking at the curves in the graph editor hurts my eyes.

Client Project - Some more progress...

Trying to keep my model as simple as possible:

This should be finished by tomorrow...I hope...

Client Project - I have a lion (:

After days of messing around with the interactive skin bind and all sorts of problems to go with it...

Excuse my lack of imagination for posing..and lack of proper lighting..but just a quick render of how he looks!

Client Project - Rigged and (nearly) ready to animate

Blend shapes, done.

Pre-rig, done.

Rigged character, done.

Just need to finish off the skin weighting! I was having problems earlier with the interactive bind..but having just watched my tutors video tutorials I think I may have found out where I went wrong...oops. Nearly there!
Quick scan of what I'm thinking my arcade machine will look like too:

Client Project - Unwrapped & Painted!

I could've done with doing this a little quicker...or just generally being a little more productive today, but at least he's properly painted now (:

 

I forgot to add his eyes in before I took the screenshots...onto blend shapes and rigging next...and some more modelling...

Client Project - quick paint job

Just a rough idea of how he'll look painted..

I was hoping I could get away with just painting straight in Mudbox without unwrapping my model in Maya, but there are some pretty visible seams that I don't think I'll be able to get away with. Back to Maya it is...

A bit more reshaping...

After a lot more reshaping...and about 20 minutes worth of panicking after finding triangles in my model...ta-dah!

I think a bit more work to his mouth and a tail and I'll be done with the modelling. Hopefully..I'll be able to start unwrapping tomorrow! Fingers crossed...

A little bit of reshaping...

Received some feedback on Friday after my client project presentation about my lion model. He looks a little too 'human' at the moment, so I've been doing a little bit of reshaping today.

fyi...his head isn't joined to his body yet...

I was told to think 'Alex from Madagascar'...and this is my result so far...I think he still needs a little more work on his arms and torso. I'm quite happy with his mane at the moment..still reminds me of a helmet though...I'm working on it.

Client Project, you'll have to take a back seat this week..

Whilst I'm in the throws of mild panic attacks about my research project...
I give you a not-so-headless version of my lion

Slow progress..but I guess that's better than no progress? I'll admit I'm not super happy with the way he looks at the moment, he definitely needs a lot of work..but that'll be reserved for next week whilst I finish off my research project presentation.

The only word I have for all of this, at present, is: sigh...

Research Project - Reading List

Just a little note of resources that I'll be using for my research project work...

The Animator's Survival Kit - Richard E. Williams 
The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation - Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston
Acting for Animators - Ed Hooks
How to Cheat in Maya 2013: Tools and Techniques for Character Animation - Eric Luhta, Kenny Roy
Stop Staring: Facial Modeling and Animation Done Right - Jason Osipa
Gesture Drawing for Animation - Walt Stanchfield, edited by Leo Brodie
Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief and World-Making in Animation - Donald Crafton
The Disney Villain - Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas

Cartoon Brew:
The Milt Kahl Head Swaggle
Why Is It So Difficult to Make Cute Cartoon Characters?

Cartoon Research

Power Centers and Personality - Keith Lango

Power Centers and the Importance of Body Language - Tea Time Animation, in a lecture presented by Frank-Joseph Frelier

Posing a Character

Animation Studies Online Journal

Gesture Generation by Imitation: From Human Behaviour to Computer Character Animation - Michael Kipp, 2003

I'm about 80% sure there's a very important reference that I've forgotten here...

Assigned Client Project: 'Nottingham Loves...'

Three weeks into my final year. I will blog, I promise.

For the assigned client project, I will be working on an animation for the Young Creative Awards 2014. The brief asks what we think 'Nottingham Loves...' or what we love about Nottingham?  
  I'll be honest, I didn't have a clue what to do at first and thought I may be at a slight disadvantage coming from London - even if I have been living here for roughly 2 years now...
But after some mind-mapping, I managed to get this far...

...and after some more thinking, I decided by topic would be 'Events at Old Market Square'.
My first few concepts for this idea involved a lot of architectural modelling..which I don't want to do, to put it simply. I want to focus on character animation, so I've decided to base my animation in a white world. For the 'events', I've chosen 3 events: GameCity, the Christmas Market/Winter Wonderland and 'Nottingham Riviera'. Each event will be represented by an object (as per listed event): an arcade machine, the 'North Star' swing ride and a deck chair and parasol.
For the character, I've decided to use a lion to represent the lions outside the city council house in Market Square. Here are my initial character drawings and T-poses for my designed character:

My idea is that the character will interact with each object with some sort of..distraction between each object. I've drawn up a storyboard..but having spoken to my tutorial group last week and getting a few more ideas, I think I'm going to redraw this so that it doesn't look so...plain...

That's it so far...I'll end with a screenshot of my (headless) character model so far...

'Character and Narrative' Evaluation

 I had planned on blogging a lot more during this project to show how I was progressing..but that didn't happen. I will get better at that in time!

 For this project, I decided to find a working rig that I could use for my animation. I wanted to try my hand at animating in Maya and decided that finding a rig would allow me to concentrate more on my animating skills, especially as this was the first time I was using Maya.
 I downloaded the 'Eleven' rig from 'The Eleven Rig Blog' for this animation. It's a really good rig to work with in Maya and I had a lot of fun animating him in this project.
 Initially, I found it quite difficult to navigate around Maya - I wasn't familiar with the controls, so it took me a while to get used to it, but after playing around with the navigation menus and messing around with the rig to see what all the controls did and how they worked, I started to get the hang of it. With this project, I also decided that I wanted to try and block out my animation first and then smooth it out later, rather than working in smooth splines right from the beginning, so that I can get used to this process with character animation. A few times whilst I was animating (probably while switching between computers), I accidentally managed to switch from stepped to spline keys as well.
 With the blocked animation, I noticed that the movements seemed a lot more fluid in the second half of the animation and timed slightly better. Some of the movements in the first half seem a little rushed and possibly slightly jittery - I want to go back and try and smooth out the movements so that they seem more fluid and natural. When animating the second half, I was much more aware of keying in the start and end positions and then timing and keying in the inbetween positions - which was very important when it came to converting the stepped keys to spline, as this stopped hands floating through the table and through the character's body and lots of spinning body parts...
 I've also learnt with blocking out the animation first that I need to leave a lot more time than I originally thought I needed to smooth out the movements, particularly for the first half of the animation! I think if I had managed my time a little better, I could have worked on smoothing out the animation a lot better so that all the movements were as natural as possible, without some of the snappy movements that I am aware are still in the animation.

 I had a few problems in Premiere Pro as well. When I exported out my animation, the audio clip seemed to be out of sync from the video, even though the lip sync was fine whilst I was editing my clips together. I didn't realise at the time that Maya had rendered my animation as 30fps, which meant that as I was editing in Premiere Pro, my composition settings were wrong, which was why the lip sync was out when I exported the file out.
 I'm going to fix this when I get back to my computer, as I'm currently working on a laptop that doesn't like to open Premiere Pro before it crashes and burns.

 Overall, I am really happy with this project! I've really enjoyed working in Maya and animating the characters. I definitely want to try and complete the whole sketch over summer, as I had to cut down a considerable amount to make sure I finished my work in time for this deadline, but for now have a little look at my animation!

Character And Narrative from Rachel Man on Vimeo.

Character and Narrative

For this brief, I will be reinterpreting and recreating a scene from a Fry and Laurie sketch. I have chosen this scene, set in a jewellery store (starting from 2:42):

I think it would be really interesting to play around with the facial expressions of the characters in this scene, as the emotions of the characters keep changing - particularly Hugh as he goes from confused to frustrated and agitated.

I've made a storyboard with some key shots so that I am ready to start animating:

 

Admittedly, I've been a little lazy with my last few animations and just animated as I went along, so I'm hoping this will help me to plan out my animation better and allow me to animate a little faster, rather than getting stuck in the middle!

I'm also going to have a try at the character designing brief. In this brief, I will be looking to redesign 1 (instead of 3) character from Neil Gaiman's 'The Sandman' graphic novels.

I've been reading the comics to give me an idea of which character I would want to redesign, but I haven't decided which one yet.
I've decided to try and take on this brief as I won't have access to a computer over the next 3 weeks, so I'll keep myself busy with character designing and sketches instead!

'In The Style Of...' Evaluation

The aim of my most recent project that I have been working on, 'In The Style Of...', was to relaunch a children's television programme. I had the choice of three different programmes: Paddington Bear, Roobarb and Custard, or The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Of these three, I chose Paddington Bear.
With my chosen programme, I then had to reboot them in the visual style of either Studio AKA's 'Lost and Found', Passion Pictures Australia's 'The Lost Thing', or Studio AKA's 'Varmints'. From these styles, I chose 'Varmints'.

Through this project, I have learnt how to model a character that I have designed and rig the character, ready for animation. However, during this process I encountered some problems. I designed my Paddington Bear as quite a fat bear with chunky and stumpy legs, as I thought it would give it more character when I started to make him walk during the animation process. Although it became a problem when I started to rig and animate him. Having fat stumpy legs meant that my character had limited leg movement - he could only bend his knee a certain amount, otherwise his calf would disappear into the thigh and if the foot was pointed up too high, his ankle would sink into the shin. I also modeled him with a big round belly, which meant that if he lifted his leg up too much, the thigh would disappear into his belly. The result of this was that when I started to animate him walking, he looked like he was waddling slightly.
A lot of his movements seem too block-y, especially when he's walking over to his suitcase in his hut and putting his hand down to rest on the table - his arm is outstretched for quite a few seconds and seems to bounce as he's walking. In the close up of him closing his suitcase, I can see that his hand doesn't stay still against the table. I need to change the chain on the arm from a FK chain to an IK chain to make sure his hand is planted firmly onto the table. The walk in these few seconds is also quite..wobbly. He looks like he's limping and ready to fall over. I've made some changes to it, but he still looks like he might fall backwards. When he's walking outside and swinging his suitcase, I think the timing is slightly out and the suitcase doesn't have the weight that I wanted to try and emphasise on. I'll definitely be taking this back into 3ds to redo the walking at some point, as I'm quite unhappy with it.

This project has also taught me that I need to manage my time better - I spent way too long thinking about the design of the character and modelling him. The problems I encountered with rigging meant that it took away a lot of time that I should have been using to animate. This left me rushing to finish the animation part, which needs a lot of reworking to get it to the standard that I know it should be at.
I definitely want to come back to this project in my spare time to try and correct the mistakes I've made and work a little more on the post-production side of the animation.
But for now, here's how Paddington looks...