Author: helou-s

Introduction

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  • I decided to focus my attention on 2D animation for all my cycles, because it was easier to work on with our deadline.

Reflection over my summer animations:

Before getting into animating I decided to do a study of a walk cycle I found on the internet to get an early understanding of the principles.

  1. The first attempt I did was missing a lot of in-between, as well as a clear issue with silhouettes more on the legs and less for the arm. Although I do see some arcs the arms are rather stiff without overlapping specially the hands being completely still. With the knowledge I now have it would be easier to break the arms add those overlaps and create all these in-betweens.
  2. For the second attempt where I wanted to add a few more secondary actions: the hair and head scarf which I find are the only two elements that seem to be alright. The animation overall is extremely robotic, I can see a change of the form which is making it look very odd as if it was blinking and the feet lack the bends I had in my previous animation. There’s also not enough swing forward for the legs. Similarly to the first one there’s no overlap, no .broken arms and its silhouette isn’t right.

Here are two animations I did over the summer, to help get the idea of where I started:

  1. Done with a Richard William’s walk cycle.

2. Done with the animation study guide I did.

Week 3

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CHARACTER COLOUR AND IDEA DEVELOPEMENT:

  • I loved the child like take on the minotaur of Michael Ayrton we looked at in class and wanted to go for something similar. A kinder and innocent look while keeping the big and imposing size: gentle giant, huge baby.
  • He is meant to be a farm hand, but is rather lazy and enjoys lounging around.

First model attempt:

Week 2

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FINAL CHARACTER DECISION 

After consulting my lecturer I decide to work on the minotaur from week 1:

I was more interested to work on sculpting the wrinkles and sagging skin on the minotaur rather than the sharp shapes of the sea monster.

My references:

Week 1

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We were introduced to our assignment and tasked to look for some inspiration to decide what kind of character we would be making,

here are some sketches and their references:

HOUSEWORK

I decide to focus on the sea creature simply because it felt interesting to see what I could do with that idea

First attempt after drawing the concept:

Here I focused on fixing the position of the limbs to make it look more believable:

The skeleton:( first quick attempt, I changed the bottom limbs to be more like crocodile limbs)

Here I tried colours and patterns and made a few changes to the first drawing:

The references:

Pre-Introduction

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We started off  our week getting introduced with our coming assignment as well as posing a model given to us with references to understand how IK and FK function and in which scenario they would work better.

Little tip to help me:

The poses I worked on:

 

Reflection on the module

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This module was heavy with new skills to learn which was definitely not easy for us all. But it’s a lot of new knowledge we get to practise over the summer for next year which is very exciting to finally be able to focus on expressing ourselves as artist as opposed to doing assignment where it isn’t our goal or priority to do so. Overall this years animation course was an eye opening experience filled with excitement, so many things to learn on animating in 3D and 2D as well as the history of animation from different regions. All done in what felt like such a short period of time, it was a lot of pressure but I did learn a lot, not to perfection but to the stage where practice will evenly reach a level of comfort. For me it’s a long way from home, so it was stressful in the beginning, starting in a new country and as an undergraduate. But it was worth it, the teaching style for this course was great, something very unfamiliar to me, yet very easy to comprehend and all the questions were answered when there was a problem, which made it very easy to understand and be able to progress even if from scratch.

Reflection

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There was a lot to take in for this assignment, working on my first 3D animation in a team, learning how to rig a model with constraints, learning how those constraints function, adding many other models in a scene and animating them without it being heavy and most of all the importance of organisation in our blender files and shared OneDrive’s. But slowly I built an understanding of how to do most things, not perfectly but just enough to be able to help my team member which I felt very happy and proud to do so specially going in and knowing nothing about rigging. Like many other group work there’s the learning experience of balancing art styles and simplicity of the model to have a consistent work flow, as well as time management and making sure our animation isn’t too complex for the time we were given. Furthermore, knowing when it was time to take the lead and take the heavy load of work if we were behind on our schedule and when I had to entrust the work back to my team mates, because in the end this is a group work. The work felt very consistent apart from the few delays, and we managed to finish ahead of time which allowed us to perfect all the final touches in the SFX like making sure the volume was even and some extra sound effects, as well as a film filter. Overall there was a lot to learn from, which makes the following projects to come very exciting to practice this new knowledge and get better in my team work assignments.

Final touches, rendering and SFX

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  • Entering the scene and introducing it to the audience, spotlight to keep the attention in the centre.

  • Stead camera with a highlights on the sun.

  • Low angle to emphasize the fox’s dominance and the bunny’s fear. highlights on the moon and green low light inspired by the classic Disney villain.

Render:

  • We rendered it as a whole, thanks to having almost all the files linked into one blender file. and 4 separate shots as extras encase of a mistake in the main render, plus credits.

SFX:

We worked on after effects, it was, like many things new to me, but I collected a folder of sound effects over a few days on a OneDrive file and spent the day as a team adjusting the sounds to our liking, we added a filter to add to the grunge and creepy style we were trying to achieve.

Generally speaking we had no issues with the render.

Props and Background models

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All the props I made, rigged and textured:

Team issue:

We were behind on schedule, and I felt the most comfortable to do rigging, so I took a heavier load of work at this stage to allow my team member to focus on getting there rigs done.

All the textures were painted on substance painter with a combination of height maps to make it look like cardboard.

  • Drawings for the moving background I used as a reference for some props:

Reference for the trees:


Early tree models:

I chose to use the round foliage because it was more suitable to fit in the stage when I added a longer trunk

Most of the props, like the cloud, bush and tree stayed the same but we decided not to use the sun and moon due to the stage being too crowded.

We initially changed the background to be circular as a replacement because we started to fall behind on schedule and focused on the priorities, but we progressed very fast and had the opportunity to do some changes, such as the originally planned background.

Reference children’s book:

I used the background as a refence for mine.

Here is the first animation of the props and (old) background, I used the damped track constraint shown to me by my lecturer, which later on changed.

Here is a test of two different option of constraints I gave my team: the damped track which eased animating by swinging on its own but wouldn’t work on the track I created and the copy rotation and limit rotation which worked on the track but had to be swung by hand. We decided as a team to use the copy rotation constraint with the track which is similar to the idea of the carousel in one of our early rigging exercises.

More props I made, rigged and textured:

  • Final moving background.
  • Signs.
  • Short curtains.
  • Day props.
  • Children.

The children were recycled from the 3D previs, to cut down time and have more time for our individual models.

Overall view:

Final rigging of the props on a track:

Animation Test for the props: