The BESP: Character Development

As a part of my sketchbook referral I chose to work on one of my characters the BESP. This is a unfinished concept sketch. I have to come back when I have time to complete the pelcvic wings and the rest of the spine.

 

 

 Using the reference material I made a mock up collage of the complete character and its Pelvic wings basic motion. Excuse the penis, I've decided to remove it and to double up the sacrum as one. Which will be Horrible!

 

 

After this I realised I should be focusing on post production so I decided to start modelling this freaky thing.

 

Lumbar Vertibrae

 

Thoracic Vertibrae

 

Cervical Vertibrae

 

The Sacrum/Penis

 

Pelvis/Pelvic Wings

 

 

BESP so far.

 

 

 

 

I wanted to achieve near anatmomical perfection, this very far from that. Very good modelling pratice though. Next will be tweeking the spine so all the vertibrae sit better with each other, which will include making soft discs to fit inbetween each one. Customizing the spine so it has a spined back. Eyes and Brain(not looking forward to this). Then the rigging which is why I wanted to start modelling. I really want to rig the brain so I can get emotion from throbbing cortexes and squishing.

Still work in progress.

Experimental Referral

For the experimental project I had to redo the three experimental pieces that led to the main piece. The first two were redos of my originals which were lost but were still nothing very exciting. The first was pretty limited as I couldnt find my white board pen(which would of helped). The second was using a clay painting technique which I found pretty laborious. The lack of patience and direction are vivid to me. The third experiment was using pixelation to demonstrate what bears do in the woods. The result felt really rushed even using 12fps, I guess this was due to the camera following the bear in a third person angle. However it worked alot better when I used static camera shots which made the movement more clear. A nice day out in the woods and an awful amout of pictures(almost a thousand)!

Stop-Motion Workshop

This was a workshop to pratice stop-motion technique. I was the only one in this class apart from lecturer. I was the one animating the left armature doll thing. Certainly ain't my style of stop-motion armature, bah heck! Now I said that I need to go into the summer and remake all my character armatures to demonstrate this point.

Cinematography

This was a group project from last term, where we had to produce a 1 minute silent film. The film had to demonstrate good composition and filming technique. Our group decided on doing a film noir. There was an award ceremony and everything! It was like being at the Oscars! lol Because our group won.

Voila....

Sketchbook Bloggable Selectables

End Of Year One!

It was quite stressful by the end of the term but its almost over (basically is). There will be a few more updates with work I've completely neglected to upload this year e.g. my sketchbook and cinematography. But other than that its going to be my own projects that I will be cracking on with over the summer, in and around a job hopefully.

I really just wanted to leave a reminder for myself for what will drastically improve my work standard.

TIME MANAGEMENT!!!

Next year I will keep on top of everything as soon as I get it, even though it probably won't eradicate the whole end of term/year rush but..it will definitely help. Same thing for my blog, keep it updated while its fresh in my mind.

Motion Studies: End of term Showreel!

Here is a compilation of everything I've done in motion studies this term.

Motion Studies: 11 Second Club Performance

This final piece for motion studies was all about the performance, We had to concentrate on solely the body language and expression.
Here is the final piece....

This to me is quite a good attempt for a days works. Not out of bone idleness, but once again I experienced major problems with Maya's character sets and this was my third attempt. The first attempt was almost finished just literally the smoothing out of the animation to do using the graph editor when I needed to stop and sleep. The next day all the animation I had done had gone! MAYA! The second attempt was pretty similar but I thought I had solved the problem, I was wrong. The third attempt was key framing everything my self, and I still managed to get it looking alright. I just wanted to avoid using flash again, until I get a lovely Wacom Tablet. 

Ident Project

This project was quite brief, it was based on using our experimental animation footage to produce a 10 second ident for the university, which had to include the uni's logo and the words 'Digital Animation', using the software After Effects. I have to admit that I felt a bit stumped! How could I use a kitten having its intestines pulled out of its bum? So I decided to avoid that bit and use just the fingers. I then proceeded to luma key out the kitten and the background leaving just the fingers, which were then layered up to produce a trippy finger tunnel using the black and white theme of the logo. This then en cured a few problems of trying to make the logo stand out over the top. I achieved this differently to how I wanted.

Anywho.... Heres the final ident....

Cornish Stories

This was a ongoing group project from the beginning of this term where we had to produce a 45 second animation based on one of three stained glass windows to accompany a sound file which links directly to Cornish heritage. The choice was either fishing, mining or St Piran, each one had a small selection of Cornish people telling relevant stories. We chose the fishing window and the fish and the screwdriver story to accompany it, as it had the most potential to be humorous.
The animation style that we planned was a Monty Python esque  cut-out animation using a similar style to the window.
Here is the end result...

My part in this production; was to asses the audio then produce a script, clean up the audio and do the sound effects after production, make one of the assets for animation (the screwdriver) and also to animate one scene.

This was a generally very last minute animation, as we were not animating until the very last week before the hand in. This could of been improved drastically if we all pulled our fingers out way before it actually happened. It got completed (almost) though.

I was a bit annoyed that I didn't have more time to get the sound effects perfect and I didn't get a chance to use the audio that I cleaned up to near perfection as my external hard drive kept corrupting files I put on there. Something else I've got to replace.

The original window.

 

Screwdriver.

3D Enviroment Creation Project

Here is the final piece for creating a 3d environment using camera projection techniques. Included is the original photo, "Matte painting" and a wire frame version.

 The end result wasn't as good as I hoped, I think this was mainly to do with the matte painting I created was very shabby. Also when it came down to the final render I had animated a physical sun and sky which moved from over head to behind the engine house as the camera moved, which didn't come out in the final render even though I tried a few solutions. It wasn't having any of it!
To improve this further I would  actually model the foreground and trees to rid the 2d effect and redo the matte painting.
In hind sight I would of changed the scene to having the mine in a fish tank, which was my original idea that I completely forgot about until afterwards. I might redo this over the summer.
Also the final production was really jerky, maybe this was something to do with me messing up the assembling in Premiere. This is quite likely. 

2D Background Project

This was where we had to take scenes from our story board project from the previous term to the next level in development. We had to do 3 final pieces. The first was a animation background layout. The second was an interior, which in my storyboard there was none. it had to have a single light source. Lastly the third was a exterior.

1st: Background layout. Not as clear as the real thing unfortunately.

2nd; The interior. It's not an interior, but I enclosed the scene with more trees and kept the sun for the light source. In hind sight I should of enclosed the front of the image more and if i was made aware that I could of changed the scene entirely. This was my first digital painting using a Wacom Tablet, which was lovely as it was quite forgiving.

3rd: The exterior. I would of liked to of done this in digital paint as well but wasn't possible. This was painted in watercolours like a infant school child would. I'm not happy with this at all.

Supporting sketchbook work....

Meadow and foliage practice for the layout

More foliage and types of gates for layout.

Top: Rolling hills for layout. Bottom: Lighting practice for interior.

More lighting practice

More lighting practice. I really liked the left hand one.

More lighting practice on the left. Monochromatic water colour test on right.Should of done more colour tests for the exterior background.

Motion Studies: Life Drawing Portfolio

Here's a selection of my "best" life drawings from the classes I attended. I apologise for the poor quality photos and drawings.

Quick movement poses with ink.

Here is also some figurative sketches done in my sketch book..(A bit lacking)

Motion Studies: My walks

This was an exercise to make us animate our own walks using footage as reference (not rotoscoping) which was taken at University. The first walk was our "normal" walk and the second was a walk that conveyed a emotion of some kind but ended up being slightly abnormal. I was going to do this in Maya but I experienced problems with the character sets so therefore I resorted in using Flash (not my favourite animating software) which I believe is quite apparent in the result.
The first walk...

The second walk.....

  

Experimental Project

The objective of this project was to produce a minute long animation to go along with a piece of audio which had to be selected from a list. The animation had to be produced with the use of no computers except image capture or post production to enhance the final production.
I chose to use the audio 'Blues flamenc' by Joan Cot Ros as this was the track that appealed to me the most, also the track that gave me my final idea of Kitten Mitten and the Flamenco Fingers.
For the animation method and style I chose to use stop motion and plastercine to create a 2D effect.
The making of the parts that were needed for this production took me a couple of days and the filming also took the same amount of time.

Here is the final piece....

The overall result was quite a disturbing and generally weird animation. Quite art house!

Easter Holidays!

I had lots of projects to do over this period and also some paid work. The latter became way more prominent in my schedule and it became clear my time management was lacking.
The projects that I should of been working on were as follows:

• 3D Environment Creation Project (Which I did go out to get photographs of some old engine houses, which involved a nice long bike ride but unfortunately were unusable. Then I managed to get to Ding Dong Mine at the back of Penzance and actually got all the photos and info I needed.)
• Experimental Project. (I got an idea involving Kittens and Mittens)
• Cornish Stories. (I cleaned up the audio a bit more, pretty much the only thing I could do)
• Motion Studies: Two walks based on my own footage.

I think main reason I didn't get as much work done as I would of liked was the fact that I had no computer (previously mentioned in previous post) and the payed worked took more time than I expected because of my nood credentials.

The payed work was through my friend, Mike Thomas from CB Graphics, for the company Coastal (Kestrel) 's glass balustrade product . Originally I was employed to undertake the modelling of components and the animation, but this changed to just the modelling and rendering as the animation was done in 3D Max which I have no experience of. Here's the final result...

Motion Studies: Walk Cycle

The first proper walk cycle, this is pretty self explanatory so I don't feel the need to describe the task.

 
I was pretty happy with the result, it's quite a purposeful stroll. I actually manged to get into the graph editor to tweak the animation, for example when the feet come down to ground in the forward position before was quite gradual but after they come down with a bit more weight.
I might of put a bit too much wobble into his head though.

Motion Studies: Weight Throw

Another exercise to demonstrate the required necessity to achieve weight to objects when characters interact with them. This one was focusing on the throw.

Once again I managed to get a alright anticipation but still the weight is missing. I really want to get this down, so over the summer holidays some more weight exercise will have to be done, along will quite a few others.
Unfortunately I wanted to upload a better quality vidio than this especially when it came to my Motion Studies showreel but this was over the time when my main computer was very ill and extremely costly (Water cooling everywhere) wasn't pleasant as the CPU and motherboard had to be replaced. So somehow I lost the working directory to improve this.

Motion Studies: picking up a weight

This was an exercise to practice giving a inanimate object a feeling of weight in the interactions of a character.

The result in my opinion was okay in the anticipation but the actual lift was lacking the weight which it alluded to. I should of spread out the lift time wise and put in a lot more strain in the characters emotion and limbs. I will need to practice this further.

3D Camera Projection Class Pratice

Using a camera projection technique in Maya, I had to project a image of a red suitcase type thingy onto a simple 3d polygon cude and plane to create a 3D image out of a photograph.
This is the end result..

 

This technique will be used later for the main 3D Enviroment project.

3D Modelling Pratice.

Over the first few months of the term I had put a fair bit of time into practicing my 3D modelling skills. One of these exercises was through Uni which was to model my own face using reference.

As you can see it didn't really flatter my features! I think I over complicated it by adding too many extra polygons, especially around the brow and nose bridge. Maybe it would actually look a bit more like me if I modelled the other side of the my face separately, as my face is far from symmetrical.

The next couple of exercises I did, I did under my own steam.
The first was modelling a skull, which came out a lot better than my face.

I then preceded to try and light it and I was going to make it rain green skulls for a screen saver type thing but subsequently I ran out of time

I did want to smooth out the very ridge like cheek bones and the pointy chin.

The last model I created was of a goldfish, i was trying to get pratice for a few charcters that I have been developing (The Gypsy Fish)  which won't be realistic type goldfish but pratice all the same.

 I'll probably come back to this, to finish putting a mouth, eye and the other half. Probably wouldn't be able to rigg this though. We shall see.