For this project I was in charge of modelling a 3D scene. In this show reel you will my most recent models, texturing and also a brief attempt on green screen compositing. I plan to finish the compositing shortly.

In this assignment I was asked to work on some third year projects. I decided I would do some 3D animation on a project called light after dark. This is an animation of a girl running away from a monster. In this show reel you will see some of my most recent animations.

VFX

This is the colour grading I have been doing this term. I have been using DaVinci. Each video is a fasion photographers project. Enjoy

11second club evaluation

Evaluation:

In my animation I am most happy with the Punch. I feel the timing and arcs of movement are accurate to a real punch. I achieved this by studying the animation test shot very closely. I also feel the weight of the character is also very well represented. I did this by acting out the punch multiple times. I feel The anticipation of this punch is built up with the calm ‘cute baby’ scene before. There the baby is just sitting, then reacts to the punch a moment before it comes. When watching you are questioning who the footsteps are coming from, and as the baby looks in freight you know something is there. The camera then switches to a more zoomed out side view, where the punch is revealed and your questions are answered. The weight and and force of the Punch is then distributed across the body as it twists and follows the movement of the punch. The overlap is also seen as the legs bend and the punch follows the direction of movement, slightly slowed down after the impact.

The force of the punch is then transferred into the baby as he flies back at an appropriate speed. I feel the arch of movement as the baby falls back, hits the floor and rolls into the shelf represents its weight and body movement very well.

A problem that i initially faced was getting the shelves to fall at the right rate. However the first shelf smashing was relatively easy as it could just follow the rate at which the baby hit into it. I also animated the books on the shelf separately. This allowed me to produce a life like ‘smash’ as books tumbled on top of the baby. I feel the overlap of the books falling and then taking time to settle also represented a lifelike smash depicting the weight well. This was done with subtle adjustments after the shelf had landed.

Although the first shelf was easy to animate i did not have such luck with the second ‘smash’ / bookcase falling to pieces. The weight of the shelves appeared very light and floated down instead of falling, this was particularly evident in the top shelf. To overcome this I asked my friend studying physics how to calculate the rate it would fall.

This is what he replied : 

“You use the expression V^2=U^2+2as. Where V is the velocity (i.e the rate at which the object is falling), U is the initial velocity (so if the object is being dropped, U=0, if it's being thrown down with a speed of 1 meter per second, U=1), a is the acceleration (which for falling objects is 9.81 meters per second squared) and s is the distance which the object is falling (measured in meters).

So if the object is being dropped from a height of 2 meters: U=0, a=9.81 and s=2.

Then V^2= 0 + 2 X 9.81 X 2

=39.24

then, because this is the velocity squared, you need to square root this number to give the falling velocity

V=SQRT(39.24)=6.26 meters per second” 

I then used the information he gave me to figure out how fast the shelf would drop at. The top shelf was approximately at 1m. V^2= 0 + 2 X 9.81 X 1 = 19.62 

The square root of this was 4.43m/s

time=distance/speed

=1/4.43

I was animating in 25fps so 25 divided by 4.43 =

5.64 frames

After figuring this out i was happy with the timing of the fall. Although the actual movement didnt appear natural. After much playing about in the graph editor i still couldn't figure it out.

Overall i am happy with the body language throughout the animation. I feel the baby looks innocent in the first scene and the punch is completely unsuspecting. I am happy with the punch as it looks fast and aggressive and i am also happy with the limp flying baby. After the punch i feel the breathing of the ‘macho man’ appears fast and aggressive, calming himself down just before is ‘macho’ walk off the stage.

Although I am happy with the body language of the walk i am not happy with the way it flows. The arcs of of movement do not appear smooth. They ‘pop’ instead of flowing naturally. To solve this i read through Keith Lango’s blog. Unfortunately although this did help, the ‘pop’ did not go. Reading through keith Lango’s text i realized i still had some work to do on the animation: having to make curves in the graph editor smooth and timing making sense for the type of movement, I also had to offset the keys so parts of the body led other parts like it would in real life, not all at the same time.

I am also Not happy with the overall finish. I do not claim to be the best and texturing or lighting, but i feel if this was improved when watched the viewer would be more engaged.

In terms of ‘stretch and squash’ i only used minimal amounts as i was going for a more realistic animation. Instead of stretching the geometry the character is stretched in terms of its pose when putting all force into its punch. I think this is the only time you can see it being used.

Overall I am happy with the Animation. I feel the anticipation as the baby sits there is broken by a sudden punch, which overlaps and force can be see effecting the rest of the body after the punch. I feel the baby flies and tumbles well after taking a blow to the head. The two parts of the animation i am not happy with are the walk and the look of the top shelf falling. If i knew hoe to make them better i would makes the arms of the walk more free flowing and the shelf fall more naturally.

11 second club

Animation continued fairly smoothly from that point until it came to the Baby hitting into the wall. I knew of a method using nParticles where i could break a wall up using the physics engine on maya. Unfortunately after a few days of research and more than a few attempts this method was not working for me. As a solution i decided to make the wall a book shelf where i could manually animate each piece falling. This was a very time consuming process, but the end result was very nice.

By the 16th of January I had to hand in my lip sync test, animation. My animation had no speech, so instead i gave in my animation as it was so far.

Finally by the 22nd jan i had finished the animation.

11 second club, key poses and animation test shots

I decided to do the man punching a baby to appeal to a darker sense of humour. Also to build suspense as the close up of a baby appears very innocent, only the scene to be violated with such violence.

Over christmas I began the task of filming myself perform each scene; acting out the ‘cute baby’ scene, punching a teddy bear and practicing a macho walk. I then used these videos as reference and began to animate. My first challenge was with the moo moo rig; unfortunately i could not get it to key frame and after much searching on the internet for a solution decided to not use it. Instead i scaled down the morpheous rig to use as a baby. I then started to animate getting a fraction done before encountering my next problem: having no character sets to keyframe all attributes. To combat this i used the ‘All’ button that comes with the Rig. Unfortunately this button only worked for the baby and not the ‘macho’ character. This meant i only animated the baby until i could get further help.

When i came back after christmas i got help from my tutor Georg. He showed me how to create a character set correctly. I then continued to animate

On the 5th of January i handed in my key poses, live action vid test, animation tests.

Storyboard

11 second club project

Just before christmas break I was set a task of completing an animation using the 11 second clubs sound clip. By the 5th of December I had my concept of a guy punching a baby in the face down. I had also drawn up a storyboard of how i wanted it to go.

My original idea was to use the Morpheous rig as the ‘Muscular macho man’. I was then going to use the moo moo rig as the baby.

This was the final Animation. I was in charge of editing. I feel the final piece works well, although it would probably work better as a longer animation, to get across the final pupil change of the cow at the end.
 I am happy with most of the animation although i feel the second to last shot was not animated very well, this was most likely due to the struggles of the animator using Toonboom instead of flash. Despite this i think the piece flows well and the humour comes across in it.

Funny 15

On the 2nd of October my Tutor assigned me a project that that had the brief : create a 15 second animation that will make us laugh. We then got put into random groups of 3.

After the lecture I met up with Imogen: one of the people I was paired with. We decided to meet the next day with some ideas. The next day we met with 2 different ideas. We pitched them to our tutor and decided to go ahead with both of them, taking them to the storyboard stage so we had a better understanding of what worked best. A few days later we both had our storyboards finished and we still couldn't decided.

 At this simple stage of development it made sense to go ahead with both again to animatic stage. The following week we showed the animatics to the class and decided whatever got the best reaction we would go ahead with. My pitch got the biggest reaction so we decided to go ahead with it.

Over the next week I created backgrounds and charecters ready for the next stage of the animatic.
I enjoyed creating these and I was very happy with the style. I had asked another team member to get some done, but they were unable to do so in time so I did them.
(there are coloured versions but they are too large to upload)

The following week I created a plan for my group:

To Do
(in all shots of face especially lip sync, make sure mustache moves appropriately
( not too much))
Shot 1- walk across camera to left, cow in background eating mushrooms
-draw different steps of walking
Shot 2- lip sync to ‘mushrooms’
- cut out eyes
- eyes open from bottom pair on in psd document, to eyes already on character, to
widest eye. Stay wide until shot finished
- cut mouth shapes out and use for lip-sync, phonetics letter next to mouth shape,
don't forget u is already on character.
Shot 3- bent over cramming mushrooms into face
-use bent over character, have both or one arm blur whatever works best, with
head bob
Shot 4- pupils dilate
- go from rest face letter M
- make sure lips match the AHH phonetics in the sound on the animatic
- finish with big smile letter C
- make pupil dilation reasonably fast making time for a wobble in size at end of shot
Shot 5- lady standing there, use pout and maybe shot kiss of lips, not make lady 100% still
if possible
Shot 6- sex scene, man thrusting and woman bent over
- probably easier if character is cut up and rigged first
- don't forget to move woman as she is getting ponded HA!
Shot 7- Pupils constrict while face goes from big smile, maybe L, down to A, down to U,
make sure look is shocked
- eyes open from bottom pair on in psd document, to eyes already on character, to
widest eye. Stay wide until shot finished
Shot 8- lip sync oh my god,
- include a blink
- rest eyes at widest
- mouth rest wide aswell
- have happy cow
Shot 9 - cow mounted other cow
- cows pupils constrict and cow goes to shocked faceSound effects
Colour characters
Composite into Toonboom or after effects so we can give depth to background

I then divided out animation:

Imogen- 2, 3, 4, 7, 8
Me- 1, 5, 6, 9

Geoff- 3, 5

I made sure we had Geoffs shots covered just in-case he did not do them as we had had little response in terms of communication.

Over the course of the next few weeks the Animation progressed from test shots, to full colour animation:

Geoff then pulled through and created some very good looking animations:

Of the different animations, these are the shots I produced:

Dog designs

This ia all of my sketchbook and photoshop work for my group project.

3D enviroments

In this animation I used the same image as my background project. But aswel as giving the layers 3D space i also gave them 3D texture by projection mapping and modelling  I also created a wall in 3D from reference photographs and textures. I feel both pieces are well put together and exercised my knowledge of both mata and mud box.

Motion Studies

This is a selection of work i created over the last term. I decided to use only 3D in the performances which was a nice chalenge. I feel i have improved in 3D animation with a greater understanding of weight, emotion and reactions. Enjoy!!

Animation Adaption

To create this i copied a scene from wind in the willows in photoshop. Using a different layer for each layer of land/sky.
I originally created this in ToonBoom but after 3
times of deleting itself i gave up on the software and switched to after effects. I was able to create the same camera moves plus utilise the same visual space as in ToonBoom. I am very happy with the result and how it turns a 2D photoshop image 3D.

Background Project

These pictures are part of my background project. Each scene was taken from my storyboard project in the first term. I feel the use of colour, lighting and perspective is very strong in these images. The perspective in the panoramic shot proved particularly challenging!

SketchBook

This is a selection of my different sketchbooks. There is work to backup my background project and my private sketches. I really enjoy drawing from observation now; my use and understanding of perspective has increased astronomical amounts as i hope you will see!