3D enviroment

Here's log I modeled in 3D. The more I do 3D modelling the more I dislike it so this is pretty rushed to be honest. The bulk of the texture and sculpting was done in Mudbox which I actually really like using. It's nice and simple and the texture and bump map features are so good. Bye bye projection mapping!

Oh look, another background post.

This is background I tried to upload the other day but couldn't. If you could be bothered to click the link now all you have to do it just hit play. So go on.

Walk Cycles

Here you go, here are a few more walk cycles I've been working on. Love the happy go lucky one I'm really pleased with that.

The macho one is a bit rushed and you can tell so I'll give that one another go. I was going for cartoony rather than real life but it doesn't really work in my opinion. Must do better, Ben.

the last one is a late for work, it's the first time I've done a run and I think it's alright I'm fairly pleased. Looking back I think I could add a little more anticipation to the first step but it's definitely on the right track.

Even More Backgrounds

Last one I promise... This is from an adaptation project where we took a picture, photo, painting etc and adapted it into an animated background. The image I chose to adapt was this painting by American painter Grant Wood:

I chose this painting as I thought it would look great in an animation, I particularly like the perspective and also the shape of the hills and trees in the background. In my version kept the perspective and but I simplified the background slightly. I added a camera move in Toon Boom and also added a couple of people, a bit of chimney smoke and some movement to the trees. I'm really pleased with how this turned out I think it works nicely as an animated background.

(Sorry it's a link and not embedded video but YouTube will not link to Blogger at the moment.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giQJi-UVXA8

More Backgrounds...

These are our background I created for our group project that we are busy working all hours on at the moment! The style we are going for is a mix of 3D and 2D and these are the backgrounds that will be set behind all of our 3D models.

These first 2 are our sunset images. The models and overall style of the film is quite dark and rough around the edges so I wanted the backgrounds to mimic that and avoid nice pretty sunsets:

This image is going to be the background for our moonlit night time scene:

And these are the two flashback backgrounds. The will be behind 2D silhouettes of brutal murders, hence the blood spatters. Obviously.  I am really pleased with how all of these turned out but especially these two in particular:

Backgrounds

Here are a couple of backgrounds I've produced for a uni project. I'm really pleased wit them especially the car interior and the colouring on it. I have to admit that I copied the basic outline from a photo but I added all the fancy nobs and buttons and the screen. It's supposed to be the Knightrider car btw. But you already knew that...

Faces Of Animation

The latest interview in the Faces of Animation series that I have been editing. Say hello to BAFTA nominated producer Alan Dewhurst:
http://www.showmetheanimation.com/index.php/alan-dewhurst-interview/

Animating I Have Done

As I'm sure you are aware for the past few months I've been working on a 3rd year project called Hook Line & Stinker. I've been editing their animatic for them but as that is now locked and the animation process well under way I have had the chance to animate a shot for them.

This shot was originally linked to some motion capture that the directors acted out. We were hoping that the mo-cap would just need a few minor tweeks but as it happened I ended up starting the shot from scratch and just using the mo-cap as a guide.

Though it's only 3 seconds long this shout took me the best part of a whole week to animate! It's the first peice of proper animating that I've done (by that I mean on a film and not a simple walk cycle etc) and I found quite challenging but I really enjoyed doing it and I'm happy with the result. Animating in 3D is certainly something I want to focus on while doing this course and hopefully I get the chance to work on some more exciting projects like this one.

Faces Of Animation

Over the last couple of months I have been working with showmetheanimation.com editing some interviews with a selection of animation professionals. It's been an interesting project to work on it's been great hearing what they all have to say.

Here is the interview with Peter Lord co-founder of Aardman.

And here is the link to the rest of the interviews. They are definitely worth a watch!

http://www.showmetheanimation.com/index.php/faces-of-animation/

Rushing Hard

This is a bit of a rushed walk cycle. I didn't rush it, the character is in a rush. You know what I mean. This guy's double busy so he's walking on 12s. I aim to turn the walk into a run so I'll get that posted up when I do.

I'm really pleased with this one, I spent a bit of time trying to make the swing of the arms natural which I think is working nicely. The head's on a bit of a bobbing mission but I don't mind. Exaggeration and all that.

A Little Bit Mince

Here's a little feminine walk cycle I created in Maya using the Morpheus rig which I downloaded from the 11 Second Club website.

The walk itself is on 16s as I wanted it to look like a bit of a stroll. I'm happy with the technique of the walk although the balance is a bit off as the character looks like he's lent back too far so that will need fixing.

EDIT: He's a got a bit of a weird heel thing going on too :-\

TV Paint

Last week we were treated to a demonstration of TV Paint which is a pixel based drawing and animating program. I was really impressed with both the drawing aspect and the simplicity of the animation side of it. I'm not really a fan of the look of vector based animation so I please that there are options available to create a more traditional look.

We were shown a few examples of work that was created using TV Paint and one in particular that caught my eye was this trailer for a Danish feature film called The Apple & The Worm. The film looks completely bonkers and I love the style and the animation. It can't be easy to animate an apple but they've done a pretty good job of it in this! I'm gonna keep an eye out for the full feature.

Hook Line & Stinker

Here is an updated version of the Hook Line & Stinker animatic I've been working on for some 3rd years. This is the final animatic with the all the final dialogue added and production on the project is well underway. We're all really happy with it and the new actors and dialogue really bring it to life.

Experimentalcase

During the Easter break I've been working on my experimental project. I've always liked the idea of zeotropes so I wanted to do something along those lines and I decided to use a bike wheel as the spinny bit thing. There are a few animations online that use bike wheels and I wanted to try and do something a bit different to what was already out there.

I covered the wheel in strips of black tape so you couldn't see the spokes and attached it to a turbo trainer so that it was up straight. I then set it up against a black sheet so you couldn't see anything in the background. This was I hope it would look like anything on top of the tape looked like it was in mid air...

Next I started adding tiny coloured dots on top of the black tape. At first these were completely random but after I started spinning the wheel I could see patterns emerging they became more thought out. I spent hours adding new stickers then removing ones that didn't work. I have no idea exactly how many stickers I used in total but I know it was over 2000! Here was the result.

Next I set the camera up so it only saw the top half of the wheel so that the turbo trainer was out of shot. I set up a small lamp between the camera and wheel and switched off the main light so that just the wheel was lit up. This brought out the colour of the dots against the black background and I was happy with the neon look it gave certain colours.

To control the wheel I used a bike chain wrapped around the cassette behind the wheel. This meant I could speed the wheel up without touching or nudging it with my hand. To slow it down I just ran my finger along the rim.

I had the music track that I was going to put with the animation playing while I was shooting so that it started and stopped at the right times as this needed to be done in a single shot. It took a few takes to get that right and I spent a while playing around with speeds as the dots moved in different directions depending on how fast the wheel was moving so I wanted to get a variety of speeds in the shot. Here it is before any post was done on it.

I hadn't planned to do any kind of post production on it as I wanted it to stay exactly how I shot it but I thought I'd try out a couple of simple filters in FCP to see what it looked like. The results were so cool I couldn't resist using them! I incorporated the original shot so the viewer can recognise that it was created by hand and not all done on computer but all that was done to the shot was a simple kaleidoscope filter. No speed changes or extra color or anything like that. Here is the final film.

Group Project

Here's our animatic for the Group Project we are doing this semester. We were given an audio clip which is the guy narrating. The clip is from a real life sea rescue tale and we were tasked with creating an animation to help tell the story. We had no information other than what you hear in the clip and we wanted to try and make it a bit different and interesting.

The clip itself is pretty interesting there are some really nice moments and it's quite a compassionate story but we wanted to explore what he wasn't saying and the story behind the story. We opted for a bit of a dark horror type thing rather than a sinking ship and rough like it might suggest. We did a bit of brainstorming, wrote a script and then thumb-nailed out a storyboard together. Then I went of and made this animatic.

I used Storyboard pro as it's a bit of software I'm keen to learn. It's actually really simple so it didn't take much learning. I drew the frames and made the animatic in the same project so it was nice and easy to create.

We're pretty happy with it and we're now using this as a base and working on some character designs and layouts etc so I'll keep you posted.

Hook Line & Stinker

For the past couple of months I've been helping out on a grad films for some of the 3rd years. I've been cutting their animatic which has been quite a long but really fun process. The script has evolved somewhat since the first cut we did so there has been a lot of changes and re-edits but I think we've finally got something we are all happy with. It was a 9 page script so I think we've done well to get this cut down to 4 minutes.

These are not the final voices and there are more shots to add and I expect we'll drop in scenes as we go so I'll keep you updated.

Emotion Test

Here's a little emotion test I created for our motion studies project. It's a simple rotoscope animation of a video from my live action video test. It's the first time I've used the rotoscope technique and it took ages! Even though the drawings are simple and fairly rough 176 frames takes a bit of time to get through. After it was done I took it into FCP and dropped in the paper background and the ink splotch.

Colour concepts

For our group project this semester we have been given a short audio clip of a lifeboat-man's account of rescuing a boat crew. We're going to animate the clip however we feel fit. It's really early days but we've already started thinking about colour idea for the sea and sky and I've done a couple of quick concept drawings of rough sea and stormy skies.

These were both done in Sketchbook Pro using a Wacom Cintiq. I'm pretty pleased with them both the colours were exactly what we all had in mind.

3D Modelling

3D modelling isn't my strong point so I've started a tutorial on making a coke bottle in Maya. Even with it written down in black and white infront of me I'm still rubbish at it though!

Here is the first stage of the model. It kind of resembles a Coke bottle but I'll probably start from scratch when I come back to it as it's not perfect.

Sea Test

I have been set the task of creating some test shots for the sea. I've been given free reign to animate the sea how I want so for the first couple of tests I went with simple 2D styles.

The first style is a cut out animation and was created in Photoshop and After Effects. Each colour of wave is it's own layer, as it the boat and finally the background. To animate the waves I gave each one a swinging motion in then looped it the boat just bounces through shot with a slight dip on each bounce.

The one was slightly more fiddly. Because it's continuous I had to match the beginning and end point to the exact same place so it has a seamless loop. This was done in photoshop by drawing one wave then copying it and matching the lines up. I then took it into After Effects and gave it the loop.

I'm hoping to try out a couple more different styles so I'll post them up here soon.