Sunday, May 3, 2015

Business Official!!

Welp, the time has officially come. I now have a business card, and an official website. This all feels kind of surreal, but also really freaking cool. Below is a link to my personal website, and images of my new business card. Short post is done, and I'm out for bed.

http://www.jaredbsneed.com/

Business Card Front


Business Card Back


Monday, April 27, 2015

Portfolio Pre-Production: Animation Exercises

Hello on and all! I'm back, after a little while, to update you on what I've been doing this last month. I will admit, I was a bit lazy when it came to working on my own stuff. Unlike my Directed Studies class, I had daily animation assignments to work on, PLUS having to create my own business card and website. In the new month I got a brand new animation mentor, and learned a variety of things. For this post I will be showing off a small portion of what we had to do, otherwise I would be showing off 15 different animations haha. So without further delay let's get started!!

Animation Exercises: Peels



Each week we had to do 5 different animation, all based off a concept. Week 1 was Speed poses, Week 2 was Takes, and Week 3 was Peels. A Peel, is when you show a hand or a foot, peeling off of a surface. We were shown lots of examples, but there was always something missing with each new example.... Personality. Every example showed only a hand and an motionless object. No story, no emotion, just a hand and a table or pole. I chose to do something different and add in my own humor. Now the animation of the man in the orange shirt is not the focus of the exercise, the hand is. I just thought that the guys reaction was hilarious when his lip gets touched haha



The next peel I did was mimicked off of me, and my natural habits or ticks. I often touch my face, or more specifically, stroke my beard without even noticing it sometimes. I cant help it, it's just so soft! But I figured I'd want to practice a character touching their own person and see how it went. I could have done more animation on the rest of the body, but never got around to it.


And here we are on the final exercise that I will show. After spending time do hand peels, I wanted to try my hand (pun totally intended) at a foot peel. The original thought was to get across a more shy, or bashful girl, and getting that emotion across with just her feet, but it was just out of my skill level. I was trying to have her swivel on her toe, like she was talking to a crush, but couldn't get it looking right. It made me mad that I had such a clear idea, but couldn't replicate it. But I think it's important to show what I would consider a "failure", so that I can show that I know how to move past it, what I can learn from it.

Well that's pretty much it for this post. I have more things I could show off, but don't want to bore you. Hope to see you again, for my next update!

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Who's that?!

Short post today. As a Character Animator I'm always looking for new animation rigs to use. To me it's like Christmas, every time I get a open a new rig, I don't know what it is about it. Either way I never feel like I have enough variation in the rigs that I currently have, so I took to modifying one of my favorite Rigs.
“Malcolm character courtesy of AnimSchool.com”
So here we have the AnimSchool Free Rig, Malcom. I personally love the way this looks, but I it's hard to find another rig that fits the same style of this particular character, so I took it upon myself to modify this base Malcom Rig to fit my needs.


So here it is! This is the modified Malcom Rig that I made. I took some new geometry for the hair, and scaled some of the controls in order to change the shape of the face. It can be a little tedious to use, seeing that I can't zero out certain values, but it works for what I need him to do....and I'm really happy with it, so isn't that all that matters?

Anyways that's all for today, I hope you're all doing well.

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Directed Studies: The Sneeze

Oh man, it's been quite awhile since I've been on here to update you all on my progress through Full Sail. I have been fairly busy with school work and personal projects and just haven't even been able to think about updating this blog. I never really meant to, but sometimes you have to put some things on the back burner. Oh well haha

Well this time I'm showing off an animation I had 15 days to work on. If the title didn't give it away already, I had to animate a character sneezing. So without further delay, here is my progression through my animation.

Directed Studies



This was the first draft that I was able to get done in about 10 hours. I was proud of it at first, but quickly realized how much was wrong with it, after I took a step away from it. I learned a very valuable lesson that day...Step away from your work every so often. Nothing is worse than getting tunnel vision, and not being able to see faults in it anymore.




After some critiques from my mentor, I started to change up my animation and add some more personality to the character.  There was still a lot of things wrong with this version, that I fixed up for the final, but as you can see here almost the entire animation has changed.




And here we are. This was the final animation that I turned in for a grade. Again there was still a lot wrong with this animation, but I learned SOOO much from my mentor, and drastically changed the way I work in Maya. This month was very valuable to me, as a student, and can't wait to see what else is waiting for me later on.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Animation: Stewart Run Cycle #1

Hello all, Jared back with another animation for you all! Today I pulled out this quick and dirty run cycle, in order to get to know a new character rig. There are many things that are wrong with the cycle, yet I didn't feel like modifying it anymore. I was happy with where I got, even though I know it's breeding bad habits when I do things incorrectly. The problem I had was that I was so excited to play with my new Rig, that all logic went out the door haha Seriously getting a new rig is like getting a new toy for your birthday, all you want to do is play with it all day long.

Blocking Stage



Like always here is the initial blocking stage, with the inbetweens already placed in. I kind of just did everything at once, and didn't work like I normally would. I personally found that this way worked pretty well for me, at least for this kind of animation. I don't know if I will use it again, but it's definitely something I'll consider.

Auto Tangent & Cleanup



So here is the final piece, overall it is rough, and I know that. I didn't get the right rotations on the torso, and the arms and legs could be moving a lot smoother, but for the 2 hours that I worked on it I was fairly content with it.

Once again I learned from this project, and can't wait to work on more.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Animation: Zombie Walk Auto Tangent

Welcome back everyone! Jared here and I this time I want to update you on the Zombie walk that I posted last time. I was able to work on this walk a bit more, and you'll see some significant improvements, or I guess for some it may just add on to the list of "Things that are Wrong". Either way, I'm having fun, and that's what this is all about. NOW ON TO THE UPDATES!!!!

Back to Blocking?!



That's right I went back and added a bit more to this animation. I felt that the original two steps was not enough, so I added on two more. That's why the end is in blocking, while the begining is still auto tangent. If you look at the first part of the walk you'll notice that I did a fair bit of work on it, by tweaking the dragging foot, and the left arm. I felt that having it up all the time, made it look too much like it was Heiling Hitler, and that's not good, so I made it look like the zombie was reaching out for it's target. Honestly I think it add a bit of a story to the character.

Auto Tangent 2.0



Okay so I quickly realized, after I switched the animation to Auto Tangents, that my timing was a bit too fast. You can see how the character speeds up half way through the animation. To me that's not really something that would happen in the "real world" so it needed to be fixed. Oh I also forgot to mention that I worked with the hands a bit more, so that they would actually look like they are grabbing something, instead of just being stiff.

Tweaking



Okay so here it is, the point where I'm probably going to call it quits. I worked on this project for 6-7 hours. It was only ever meant to keep me busy, and work on doing something different. I learned a few things here and there, and am fairly happy with the end product. There is still sooooo much that I could do to make this look 1000 times better, but I would rather move on to another small animation, and see what I can learn from that on.

Until next time!

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Animation: Zombie Walk Blocking

Hello everyone, Jared here, and today I want to share a simple animation that I have been working on for the last few hours. Now this is nothing special, it was just an exercise to keep my imagination and skills up. In the next month or so I have to take an art test, and then I will be spending a few months on my Animation demo reel. Oh boy, this time at school has been crazy fast, and soo much fun. But enough about that. We are here to talk about Zombie walks!

Blocking Stage



So this is the first wave of Blocking out the animation. This was the result of 2 or 3 hours of work, including working out simple thumbnails....huh, I really should show off the thumbnails that I used, but to be honest I am really lazy, and don't want to deal with that. It sounds like too much of a hassle haha, sorry >_<

Auto Tangent 1



The ONLY reason why I am posting this up is because I have a lot of family and friends who are not animators, and have a hard time seeing things working out when my animations are in stepped. I know it's not a good showcase of skills, mostly because I have not tweaked any of this animation. There are no holds, no anticipation...nothing.

It's tough right now, but I will update this post as I continue to work on it more. Hopefully I will be able to show you a finished walk, or cycle, very soon. Keep an eye out for the updated post!!