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.

New Term: Major Blog Update

Once again my Blog has fallen into a seriously malnourished and neglected state. All the following posts will be in a rough chronological order of all the university work since the beginning of the new term. Here it goes....