Animation

After sorting out the shaders and the look of the animation I was able to start animating it. In the group we decided we would split the animation into 4, I chose to do the beginning. Firstly I worked on shot 1 as it is the simplest and after a few days I have nearly completed it.

I am very happy with how this shot is looking. I think having the background clouds drifting to the right, the character floating up and down and blinking really brings some life to the animation. I did have some trouble when animating the blink as the toon shader made it hard for the eyes to look like they are closing completely. Next I started working on the previs for the more complicated shots. This is so I can show the others what I am roughly planning to do and see if they can offer any improvements or suggestions.

In shot 2 I found it quite difficult to morph the clouds into their shapes. To do this I simply took the fruit cloud models and changed their shapes to look like normal clouds. I then used the blend shape tool to slowly change between the two versions of the model. I feel this works well I just need to keep them floating up and down as they morph to make it look more fluid. I also still need to work on the timing of everything in the shot as right now I feel it all happens too fast.