NEW POST!

I have like two minutes to spare! Plus, I just had an energy drink... *devious smile* HA

Anyway, here's what I've been making and working with for the last TWO and a HALF months. It's the 3D version of myself, only better looking :)

We modeled, textured, and rigged them from early January to early March, and the last few weeks we've been using them to animate our Lip Sync project. I don't remember if I've talked about that much at all. I'll post mine up here sometime in the next few months ;) OR you can check my facebook because I think I just posted it... can't remember. Rambling!!

So now we're spending the rest of the semester doing another 15-20 second animation, but this time with two characters. This is the first time we're animating a scene with two. It's gonna be fun! So I'm planning that right now and that's why I made these two pages. I posted them on my school forum for Computer Animation so if any other juniors want to use my rig for this next assignment they can email me and I'll send it to them. I have to find a guy who's character I want to work with, that also looks like it would exist in the same world. The teachers told us today that if we have to have a character of the opposite sex for this project. Again, sounds fun!

Pose Test

I just wanted to give you guys a taste of what the early stages of animation tend to look like. This is a pose test of my Push/Pull animation exercise, and it's basically just blocking in the camera shot and the poses for your character. Even now I've made a ton of changes to the poses since then.



This is my natural animation which is due before Thanksgiving break, and then after break we do an exaggerated version of this project.

Over Thanksgiving break I'm also planning on doing a 3D render of my character and I'll post that here too cause I really like Pete :)

Waiting . . .

So this was probably the most fun thing I've worked on so far this semester. We had to come up with a scenario where Artie is waiting for someone or something. I decided to make him a girl, Emily, and have her waiting for the results of a pregnancy test. Enough said :)




I do have a few problems though, mostly about the pregnancy test in her hands being a bit jittery. This is also a rendered version I did real quick, instead of a quick playblast like the Silhouette or Walk Cycle, so the lighting isn't the best it could be.

Silhouette

This was our second animation exercise for the semester, and we were give a week and a half in order to finish it. Basically, we were given a list of six words to choose from; we were to then choose from three of those six words and create a story. I came up with a story about Artie being bored at a bar when all of a sudden he sees a pretty lady and tries to flirt with her. She ends up slapping him and he's completely bewildered. The main purpose of this assignment was to work on poses and to make a clear silhouette.

It's OKAY, not my best. I definitely ran out of time on this one, not to mention my homework in my other classes was piling on.

Walk Cycle

So our first CA (computer animation) assignment was to do a walk cycle that portrays a personality, and we were given one week to do it. The character's name is Artie, and he was given to us by our teacher to use for the first three assignments. I just went in and gave him a different look by turning him into a mime (I redid the textures and modeled a pie and hat).

It was a bit odd working in Maya again after so many months away, so it took me a bit to get re-accustomed, but I think I managed okay. I'm fairly happy with my walk, but I wish it was more "snappy" instead of being so evenly timed. The hand is a little too fluid too lol

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

Primitive Theater

So our second assignment was due last Friday, the Primitive Theater. I'm feeling okay with it because it's definitely better than my ball bounce so I can tell that I'm improving. I wish we had another week with it so that I could fix my lighting, which I hardly had any time to finish, and just tweak it a bit more... maybe make the characters more saturated so they stand out from their environment more. Overall I'm liking the motion, and I think I'm getting the hang of how to create overlapping motion in 3D.

Anyway, here it is is: PRIMITIVE THEATER

Enjoy! :)

Ball Bounce

So my first assignment for Computer Animation was to make a sequence with two balls, one that's animated (alive) ball, and one that's a regular ball. This is it:



It's not THAT bad, but I wish I had more time to work on the timing and smooth out the actual motion of the balls. I had some trouble getting my rigging to work in the beginning so I didn't have as much time as I would have like to "polish"

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