Saturday 6 March 2010

a link to my finished animation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIsbAJfxCZc

for this video i made some 3d backgrounds and took the original footage out. Eventhough it is meant to be a compositing exercise, i found the actors in the background kind of distracting and thought it best to leave them out. Besides i wanted people to notice the character animation, ehich i am glad i got to stretch my skills a great deal for this. :)

Thursday 4 March 2010

Thursday before submission day.

its around 10; 30pm and i am in the midst of rendering my biggest shot from my animation.

took me all day to do and i think I will have time left over to render what's needed for the group project.

I did have a quick look at Clym's maya live animation and he's added a lot of good looking stuff to it. i can see some after effects, match moving, lighting. looks impressive :)

Anyway, sorta got me thinking hard about where i need to be pushing my work, because at the moment it is pretty much rotoscoping in 3d. Not that there is anything wrong with that, But i think i am using live action too much at a crutch for creating animation.

granted i would not just go straight into animation without sketches and reference work, But i think its a better exercise for my imagination to try and do a cartoony walk or run or conversation how i think it would go rather than match moving next to live action.

One idea i had was to do a martial arts fight scene, using footage taken from many movies and choreography a fight together. trying out different camera moves.

will be complex and will need to be story boarded, i do have at least 2 ideas for my Third term, both are fight scenes or martial arts or involving props or environmental interaction with a character.

I think they have potential as good pieces of animation work, its just doing a fight in live action is complex and probably you need to be doubly as meticulous in 3D.

Never the less, this is something i want to do, and it would probably take me a year to do what a team could do in like three to five months. Anyway, i have done storyboards for these ideas (basic ones at that) but i will hold out for other, maybe more creative ideas that are more economical. I think a great deal of research into other animations as well as just beefing up my own skills will help me a great deal in my time off.

Anyway, for the ANI09207 project i am working on this minute, as i say its in the midst of rendering the biggest shot, 30 seconds on high quality. I was very pleased with the result as i managed to animate two characters in one day. I did work for two hours and took a break every so often, but stayed regimented so as not to get distracted, and it seems to have worked:)

I would very much like to have the maya live project done by morning so i can put all my effort into the team project.

One thing is for sure, my character and prop animation skills have improved massively since last year.

About the maya live, i was planning to put dynamic curtains in the scene, but as my shot with the curtains has been rendering for about an hour, i say the horse has bolted and i may as well just move on.

Originally i was going to replace the actors with moom characters. That i did, but now i am thinking i may make a different background in after effects as i don't quite see the 3d working with the shot playing in the background. I figured go the whole hog and make it all completely 3D. shouldn't take long. All i have left to do after this is, compositing the shots with backgrounds, adding sound, editing, and thats about it.

the lighting from all the shots match. This was before i figured out i could export selected characters and lights, would have saved me trying to match it by hand, but i seem to have managed.

Anyway, this has all been an excellently useful learning experience for me.

Wednesday 3 March 2010

My Schedule for my Animation




this has been a pretty long process, but it has informed the way i think about organizing my time when i want to take on a 3d animation project.

For the next term and next year I will probably be using this format a lot more to help stay organized.

I needed to schedule my time down to half days, taking breaks into consideration, and i tend to do a lot more work before i take a break.

I think this has been pretty useful to do.