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.

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!

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!!

Compositing and Scene Finishing: The Helmet

You know originally I was not going to post anything up about this class, but I figured that I would end up regretting it in the future. So here we go!

The second class I had to take in December was Compositing and Scene Finishing. This class is just a continuation of the first Composting class that I took waaaaaaaay back when, where I learned some of the ins and outs of The Foundry's Nuke. For this class our teacher was entirely overworked, and stressed. He was very lenient about our projects and grading, so there is not really too much to show, or that I want to show. One thing that I was happy about, was our second project, The Helmet Project. For this one we were tasked to take a live action reverence of a girl, and overlay Maya lambert armor overtop of it. There was a bit of freedom to this project, but not all that much. We had a target that our art director wanted us to hit, and we couldn't stray too far from it. It was to mirror a real life way of working in a studio, where we don't have control.

Helmet Project

So here we go! It was a small clip to work with, but it took forever to work on with our school laptops. Every time I would add a new node into the Nuke script, my computer figuratively make an audible groan of displeasure. I felt bad for it, she clearly wanted nothing to do with all of this. haha So the freedom that I was talking about before are some of the more subtle things in the shot. For instance the color of the helmet HUD, the pattern of the armor, and finally the background. Those three things were simple things that we could stretch our creative freedom over, but it was enough to keep the class interested in watching `8 of the same scene, during our critiques.

I'm glad that in our shortened month of December, our teachers didn't overload us with work, because it allowed me to have fun with our projects more so then I would have if we were constantly rushed to get our projects done.

Visual Effects 2: The Flame Demon

Okay so I know this is essentially just a repost of one of my others, but I have a reason for doing this. At school we are required to make these blog posts at the end of each months classes. Now normally this would not be a problem, in fact I have really found that I love updating my work onto this site...the problem that I had in December, was that I was so excited to go on my winter break that I kind of just put up a garbage post, which would get me the necessary points for my class. I kept on meaning to update this, sometime over my break, but every time I thought of it something would come up and I would forget about the blog. =/ Well now that I remembered the blog existed I am back to update the last post the way that I originally MEANT to do it. haha

Visual Effects 2 

So now onto the meat and potatoes of the post. Normally December is supposed to be a hell month at Full Sail, but I have to say 2014 was sooooo much easier than it was in 2013. My teachers were pretty overworked, tired, and ready for a break that they eased up on our assignments haha The class that I have the most work to post for is my Visual Effects 2 class. If you remember the first Visual Effects class that I took I had to use dynamics, and particles to create my effects, but for VEF2 we were delving more into the fluid effects of different programs. The assignments themselves were pretty open ended, as long as they used some sort of fluids, so with the freedom in place I went about thinking of an idea. It wasn't too long that I thought of something I wanted to try my hand at. Now I am in no way a Visual Effects artist, but I try to take pride in my work, and don't like when things come out looking like garbage. So for this project, after much thought, I choose to use a free rig, made by Justin Kirk, and revolve all my effects around the rig. 

So this was the first turn in that I did, for the class. After downloading the rig, I animated it to have an idle animation. In my mind there, was no reason to put the rig in there if I wasn't going to animate it, otherwise I would have just created the effect on a black background. haha So after the animation was baked on the geometry, I created the lava textures you see, since the rig was originally all Lambert Grey. After that I added a fluid container and started working on creating the effects of the fire. Again I am not a VFX artist, so unfortunately I don't remember all the details and sliders that I messed with, in order to get this effect looking like it does. But over all I think it looked pretty okay...except for that black halo that shows the bounding box for the fluid container. But alas, it is what it is.




For the second part of the class we had to create the effect of smoke. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do for it, but I knew that we had to use the node-based program SideFX Houdini. I will say that I can appreciate what SideFX Houdini can do, but it was not fun for me to learn everything it has to offer. To me I thought that it was too complex of a way to about things, and I didn't enjoy my time in it as much as I probably should have...but, what can you do? you can't win them all. As far as what's happening, I guess I should at least explain that a bit. When I was in Maya I was able to animate bake on the animation to the Geo, and have the lava texture, but when I tried importing everything into Houdini things started to fall apart. It took me far too long to get the Rig into Houdini, and not have it freak out, but once I got it working I could finally get the smoke effect to work with the rig. Overall it was a hassle and a half, but in a way it was sort of rewarding........No, who am I kidding, I was super frustrated.

Overall I had some resemblance of fun in Visual Effects 2, but I wish that I understood, or wanted to understand the Visual Effects side of CG more.

Character Animation 2: Character Acting

Oh man, where do I start for this post. I was really excited for one class that I had in the month, character Animation 2. In my time at Full Sail I have had the pleasure of taking 3 other different Animation classes, 2D Animation, Fundamentals of Animation, Character Animation 1. Each oth those classes have taught us more and more about the principles of animation and how to refine our skills further and further. For Character Animation 2 we had two different projects to work throughout the 4 weeks, a Pantomime and a Sound Clip.

For the Pantomime we had to tell a story, and show two different emotional shifts, throughout the Animation. For my pantomime I choose to tell the story of a young boy that is walking happily, with his balloon, and ends up loosing it due to a gust of wind.

For the Second project I we had to choose a sound clip from a sound clip library and animate our character according to the clip.

Pantomime Project: Final Submission

  

There was a lot that I could have done better in this animation, but overall it came out pretty much the way that i wanted. I tried to get the emotion of a younger boy that lost his balloon to the wind, and that child like innocence of losing the thing that is important to them.

Sound Clip Project: Blocking 

The first layout of the Sound clip animation. Everything is very rough, in order to get the timing and feel of the overall animation.

Sound Clip Project: 2nd Pass

This was my first run through after the initial blocking stage. Everything feels really floaty right now, because I was in too much of a rush to get out of the blocking stage. I could have benefited from staying longer and adding anticipations and holds.

Sound Clip Project: 3rd Pass 

On this pass I've really pushed the animation to its next level. I added more anticipations, moving holds, and refined the downward point to make the emotion translate through the action.

Sound Clip Project: Final

This was my final go through of the sound clip animation. Here I added in the final mouth shapes, in order to get the character to look as though he was speaking the words. Last minute animation fixes, and the quick and dirty render to finish off this project.

Overall I loved this Character Animation class, the teacher was extremely helpful, and always willing to help people with one-on-one critiques. The further I get through my degree the more I appreciate all the hard work, and dedication to Animation. I hope to continue animating characters and creatures and further refine my skills.

Visual Development: Shading, Lighting, and Texturing

October, the month of everything spooky and scary. In this month I had two classes to work my way through, one being Visual Development, the other being Motion Capture. This post is going to focus only on my Visual Development class, and the things that I learned during my time here.

Now just to give you guys a little history I am not a very technical person. At all. End of story. I don't like looking at the minute details of a project and often overlook small parts that snowball towards the end. My philosophy has been, "as long as it looks good" and even though I could point out every possible thing that is wrong with that way of thinking, it's still part of my belief. The reason why I'm saying this is because I wanted you to know where I'm coming from when writing this, and the struggles I went through trying to complete each project. In the end we had 2 main projects scenes, all of which took multiple days to complete and one of which counted as our final project.

Project 1

 This was the first project that we had worked on. This scene was provided to us, with all the geometry in place, and we were tasked with matching the original lighting in the Reference photo. This was a good way to teach us the power of the lighting system in Maya, and how it can add to a scene without ever needing to texture anything. Oh yeah, did I mention that all the geometry has a Lambert texture on it? Because, yeah it does haha.

Project 2

Look at this picture.....look at it. Okay you got it in your head? Good haha This was the scene we were working on for the rest of the month. We had to break it down the project into a bunch of different parts. We learned about UV's, Texture Projections, Reflections, Refractions, and Compositing. I'll try to break it down to each piece, but I may not have all the files to show off. 

UV's

Like I had mentioned, the first part of the project was to UV the Scrapper, and texture it in photoshop. This was the one that I did. I know it's a little hard to see the details with the UV layout over everything, but all the details are there. Trust me.

Texture Projection

After we got the Scrapper all worked out, we had to move on to the box and work a lot more in the Hypershade than I am, or was, comfortable with. There were so many nodes to work with, all intersecting each other in haphazard ways that made my head spin. The only other Node-based system I had worked with before was Nuke8, but even that was a much more intuitive to me than the Hypershade. Though I did get it all worked out in the end.

Reflections and Refractions

Next up was getting the bottle to actually LOOK like a bottle. We had to learn about how the MIA_material worked and how it reacted to the lights in the scene. Of course we used some of the other skills to spice up the bottle, and make it our own creation. I choose to replicate Slurm soda, from Futurama...as you'll see is sort of my "theme" for this project.

Scene Finishing

And here it is everyone. This is everything put together, and rendered out. Here you can see how my Scrapper, and Box ended up and see the theme that I had stuck with.

Compositing

After everything set and looking about the way that we wanted it, we learned about rendering out all our different passes, and bringing it into Nuke. Here we had to adjust our scene in order to fix the lighting. Nothing too special here, just basic Nuke.

Overall this class was a lot of fun, and the teacher Jared Edwards was very helpful in not only teaching us the materials we needed for the projects, but also for our own personal work. Even though I wont ever be a shading and lighting artist I liked everything that we learned.