Animation Strategies, Assignment 2 | Leave a Comment on Animation Strategies: Body Mechanics and Performance – Weight Lift Feedback and Final Animation

Animation Strategies: Body Mechanics and Performance – Weight Lift Feedback and Final Animation

As before, extensive feedback suggesting ways in which to improve my animation was provided by my tutors, Rachel Dixon, Aodhan McNicoll and Alec Parkin. Feedback was again provided during class one-to-one sessions, and on a frame-by-frame basis through SyncSketch, and given a weight lift animation is such a difficult piece to get right at thisContinue reading Animation Strategies: Body Mechanics and Performance – Weight Lift Feedback and Final Animation

Animation Strategies, Assignment 2 | Leave a Comment on Animation Strategies: Body Mechanics and Performance – Weight Lift Animation

Animation Strategies: Body Mechanics and Performance – Weight Lift Animation

  ‘Body Mechanics‘ is a term used to describe the way in which we move, and hold our bodies as we sit, stand, lift, carry, bend, and sleep (Physiopedia, n.d.), and when animating, our ultimate goal is to relay this movement in a realistic and physically accurate way, which increases believability, and creates emotion byContinue reading Animation Strategies: Body Mechanics and Performance – Weight Lift Animation

Character Creation | Leave a Comment on Character Creation: Navigating the Industry Pipeline – Rigging and Posing

Character Creation: Navigating the Industry Pipeline – Rigging and Posing

Rigging:  To facilitate posing, my creature was then rigged and weight painted in Blender. However, on checking the weight painting, I discovered that issues had been created in the extremities of tail appendage due to some weight painting leaking into other joints within the pelvis. However once the ‘bone’ causing the problem had been identified,Continue reading Character Creation: Navigating the Industry Pipeline – Rigging and Posing

Character Creation | Leave a Comment on Character Creation: Navigating the Industry Pipeline – Texturing

Character Creation: Navigating the Industry Pipeline – Texturing

Texturing: With UV mapping complete, the next stage of the pipeline was to texture the model in Substance 3D Painter. Already having a clear vision from the development stage of the project of the colouration and textures I needed to use to both make my creature emotive and relay its backstory, I quicky realised thatContinue reading Character Creation: Navigating the Industry Pipeline – Texturing

Character Creation | Leave a Comment on Character Creation: Navigating the Industry Pipeline – UV Mapping

Character Creation: Navigating the Industry Pipeline – UV Mapping

UV Mapping: The basic process of preparing a model for texturing in Substance 3D Painter had been taught in first year, which involved marking the natural edges and seams and unwrapping the model, before then combining the mapped pieces into an ordered UV map and baking these as a ‘normal’ map. However, given the detailContinue reading Character Creation: Navigating the Industry Pipeline – UV Mapping

Character Creation | Leave a Comment on Character Creation: Navigating the Industry Pipeline – Retopology

Character Creation: Navigating the Industry Pipeline – Retopology

Source: Eun, C. 2023 (cganimator.com blog)   Retopology: The next stage in the pipeline was retopology; a process which creates more optimal geometry, and a clean, quad-based mesh. However, as some detail may be lost when retopologising the model, additional sculpting is often subsequently required to add this in again. Understanding that, as it notContinue reading Character Creation: Navigating the Industry Pipeline – Retopology

Character Creation | Leave a Comment on Character Creation: Navigating the Industry Pipeline – Modelling/Sculpting

Character Creation: Navigating the Industry Pipeline – Modelling/Sculpting

  An important part of this assignment was to also gain a more in-depth understanding of the industry pipeline and the workflow involved in 3D character creation, as shown in the diagram below. Therefore, with the concept design stage now completed, the next stage was to begin modelling and sculpting. Source: Serra, 2017   ModellingContinue reading Character Creation: Navigating the Industry Pipeline – Modelling/Sculpting

Animation Strategies, Assignment 2 | Leave a Comment on Animation Strategies: Body Mechanics and Performance – Assignment Brief

Animation Strategies: Body Mechanics and Performance – Assignment Brief

  Having now grasped the fundamentals of biped movement, the aim of this, our second Animation Strategies assignment, was to gain a better understanding of body mechanics and performance, and guided by tutorials and workshops exercises, to create two final animations reflecting our learning in these areas: one depicting a heavy object being lifted fromContinue reading Animation Strategies: Body Mechanics and Performance – Assignment Brief

Animation Strategies, Assignment 1 | Leave a Comment on Animation Strategies: Animation Walks and Runs: Feedback Reflection

Animation Strategies: Animation Walks and Runs: Feedback Reflection

  While the majority of my tutor feedback is included in the relevant posts, I felt it important to also reflect here on some of the recurring issues I’d encountered during this first assessment task. My biggest takeaway was, unless purposely doing ‘stretchy’ animation, to not overextend or overstretch the limbs as this makes theContinue reading Animation Strategies: Animation Walks and Runs: Feedback Reflection