Editing Techniques

So in concept class we were split into groups to develop stories for our animatics. My group came up with the story of this old guy named Hank who lives in the desert all alone with only his cacti. There's been a drought for a long time, but then one day a giant container falls from the clouds and smashes most of his cacti crop. Inside the container was water, and so he brings his last cactus with him when he decides to trek across the desert to the mountains to climb into the clouds and find where that source of water came from. When he does make it up there he discovers there are these "cloud suckers" that have been harvesting all of the rain water from the clouds and collecting it, which has caused the drought.

We then learned film editing techniques and had to use them to make short animatics about a section of the stories we made. The first is contrast, which I used to show that there's been a drought -- Contrast Animatic

My motif animatic has a bit to be desired but it's okay. I wanted to use repetition of the feet to kind of show Hank getting ready for his, but I don't think I showed the feet enough -- Motif Animatic

Simultaneity is basically two events or scenes taking place at the same time, that eventually converge. In this case I did Hank climbing the mountain and the cloud sucker -- Simultaneity Animatic

Last, there's symbolism. I tried to come up with something to symbolize Hank and the cloud sucker's eventual encounter and chose a mouse and a scorpion. The only thing I wish I would have done was have the mouse trying to take food from the scorpion so that it's more of a survival thing -- Symbolism Animatic

Robie the Robot

So for our next animation assignment we had to model Robie the Robot Banker in NURBS, which (in case you don't know) are basically primitive shapes that you can manipulate. That's the best I can describe them, but they're a pain in the ass to model sometimes. Anyway, Robie is awesome, he looks like this if you haven't seen him before:

We weren't really given all that much time to make him, but he really isn't that difficult. The problems that I kept running into were tools not wanting to work. Most of the time if you wanted to do something to a piece of NURB geometry, like cut it or something, you'd have to do it twice because it wouldn't work on the first try. The boolean tool kicked my ass but I finally conquered it!



Robie Turnaround

So here's what I was able to do. There a couple things that I would like to change like lightening the background a bit so it's not so dark in the corners, fixing the shadows so they're more soft around the edges, and change the ramp shader on the eyes because it's a bit weird right now.

Animation Quadfecta

We started off the spring with a couple of animation exercises using a character rig that the teacher gave us to work with so we didn't have to go through all the hassle of modeling and rigging; we could just get into the work that way.

The exercises included doing a finger point, a walk, a head turn, and a take. Here's what I did, although the only one I really like is the take at the end, the rest are kind of "eh, nothing special." I didn't get too good a grade on these either.

Quadfecta

Months of Neglect

Its been almost five whole months since I've updated my blog. I meant to during winter break but it just never happened, then I got busy with school and told myself I'd do it over spring break. Then it never happened. I'm here now though and taking time out of my busy schedule to finally update and put some new work on here. Part of the reason why I haven't had time is because I'm overloading this semester, so I have 6 classes (18 credits). I barely have time to do much else other than work. I'm never overloading again because I've had to do too many all-nighters this semester because my animation and concept classes are on the same day, and they're the most work and the hardest. Lucky me! lol

I think that I put up pretty much everything from last semester, so I'll put some of my work up from the first half of the spring term. This weekend I'm going to be scanning in a bunch of my recent figure drawings so I'll be posting those as well.

GO SEE HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON!