Because I finished so early I was blessed with the once-in-a-life-time opportunity of fully testing my animation on people! To do this I uploaded it to my personal website and advertising it to as many people as possible to view and give feedback on as well. On top of this I took my animation around with me and pestered everyone I knew to view it for me as well.
In doing this I was able to make adjustments to the sound and animation to improve it and by the end of week 11/start of 12 I could only find 2 improvements that I could have made.
One was to animate Drew's run at the end to be slightly more convincing by adding shoulder movements and the second was to add a third camera angle into the animation at the start when Drew falls down the cliff to improve the continuity/consistency of the overall animation.
These would be things that would improve my animation if I had more time to do it but I spent so much time at the start of my semester on this module that I needed to concentrate on catching up in the other modules! THis said I am still chuffed with the level of animation I have somehow pulled off and think that it is a complete short animation which has been the pinnacle of my degree work.
Friday, 8 May 2009
Friday, 13 March 2009
wk 7: Another thing
Oh and yes before you say it the voice over does sound strangely like Mr Bean! This was not intentional but during recording it sounded the best out of all of the styles of dialogue I made.
Thursday, 12 March 2009
wk 7: Premier and dun !
As it goes I have been collating my avi's as I get them in premier pro so there wasn't much left to alter! Under the advice from Chris I did not compress the avi's from max, I left them uncompressed so that Premier can do the compressing, unfortunately that left me with 7 gbs worth of avi's as you can see below. Because I had to split the files up for rendering some of them are in four rather large parts!
Firstly to get my avi's and mov's into premier I went to file/import (Ctrl+i) this imports them into the pool which then allowed me todrag them onto the timeline for arranging.
Sometimes I hadn't left enough room either side of an animation and instead of re-rendering alonger version I used the cut tool (c) to trim a bit off the end to copy and repeat making the animation longer.
For smoother transitions between shots I creating a black jpeg 640x480 to fade between images. By holding Ctrl and clicking on the line that crosses each clip I can add points and drag them to alter the opacity of the fade jpeg to give the effect of fading to black. There is probably a simple effect/pre-built transition to do this but I prefer the good old botching technique that I use for all aspects of my life!
The same technique can be used for adjusting the volume of the sound. Also The panel above the timeline line allows you to finer adjust these nodes using the same principal of creating points.
I have spent the day recording the voice overs, soundtracks and sound effects and after all of this I can proudly say VOILA! I have finito'ed. The finished file is unfortunately a good 600MB so cannot be uploaded, but the story that I had in my mind was meant to be humourous and I believe that I pulled it off perfectly with only a few set backs!
Having said that I may yet add another 2 second shot to smoothen out the transition of Drew falling down the hill because it is still a little rough around the edges.
Thanks to the uni mac's I endured around 522 hours of rendering instead of my laptops dual-core 2030 hours of rendering! So I just want to say a really big thanks to Apple for creating such an amazing machine.
I also want to say thanks to Autodesk Backburner for creating such a simple way to manage a rendering farm. Maybe next semester I will actually be allowed to use it!
I have really enjoyed this module and can honestly say that it was the best module ever, which allowed me to produce the only bit of work that I am proud of during this degree! The reason I have finished 9 weeks early is because I have rejected every other module so forgive me for not posting for a while whilst I catch up with my other modules!
See ya laters taters.
Firstly to get my avi's and mov's into premier I went to file/import (Ctrl+i) this imports them into the pool which then allowed me todrag them onto the timeline for arranging.
Sometimes I hadn't left enough room either side of an animation and instead of re-rendering alonger version I used the cut tool (c) to trim a bit off the end to copy and repeat making the animation longer.
For smoother transitions between shots I creating a black jpeg 640x480 to fade between images. By holding Ctrl and clicking on the line that crosses each clip I can add points and drag them to alter the opacity of the fade jpeg to give the effect of fading to black. There is probably a simple effect/pre-built transition to do this but I prefer the good old botching technique that I use for all aspects of my life!
The same technique can be used for adjusting the volume of the sound. Also The panel above the timeline line allows you to finer adjust these nodes using the same principal of creating points.
I have spent the day recording the voice overs, soundtracks and sound effects and after all of this I can proudly say VOILA! I have finito'ed. The finished file is unfortunately a good 600MB so cannot be uploaded, but the story that I had in my mind was meant to be humourous and I believe that I pulled it off perfectly with only a few set backs!
Having said that I may yet add another 2 second shot to smoothen out the transition of Drew falling down the hill because it is still a little rough around the edges.
Thanks to the uni mac's I endured around 522 hours of rendering instead of my laptops dual-core 2030 hours of rendering! So I just want to say a really big thanks to Apple for creating such an amazing machine.
I also want to say thanks to Autodesk Backburner for creating such a simple way to manage a rendering farm. Maybe next semester I will actually be allowed to use it!
I have really enjoyed this module and can honestly say that it was the best module ever, which allowed me to produce the only bit of work that I am proud of during this degree! The reason I have finished 9 weeks early is because I have rejected every other module so forgive me for not posting for a while whilst I catch up with my other modules!
See ya laters taters.
Tuesday, 10 March 2009
wk 7: The distraction
To orchestrate my distraction I thought about having another human waving at Drew or calling his name, but I wanted Drew to be alone in his dream so to emphasise this fact I chose to have an animal distract him in someway. Below is my thought process, I wanted a bird originally and I also wanted it to empulate Drew but I couldn't get the design right so I tried other animals, after failing at this I then went back to the bird idea and finally got a likeable bird design and so decided that Elory would whistle a distraction at Drew.
My next post will show my process in Premiere pro.
My next post will show my process in Premiere pro.
Wednesday, 4 March 2009
wk 6: Elroy wanna a cracker
After viewing the beginning of my animation in Premier Pro I found that Drew randomly falling off a cliff wasn't coherent enough and needed a distraction, thus I invented Elroy (thats for you Lisa!). The idea being that He flies in and distracts Drew in a distractingly distracting way ergo leading to Drew's tumble. It is only a side bit to my original storyboard so it won't appear on it when I post it because I've already scanned it!
Below is my fully meshed and modelled Elroy. I tried to keep his styling in line with Drews which I think worked. I didn't really want to mess about with boning another character as bipeds keep giving me gyp, but being an idiot I thought I'd do it anyway! Elroy not being 100% human needed some modification to his bones hence the twisted nature of the biped below but I assure you it fits quite well!
Due to the radically altered biped the envelopes on the Physique were really playing up, but me already having similar problems with Drew meant I overcame them pretty quickly and below are all of the envelopes.
After consulting top designers and specialists in the field of 3D bird modelling (my Dad and Mum) it turns out red works better and I agree as he stands out more against the sky, so Elroy is more of a Macaw now, even though Macaw's can be blue as well!
Because General lighting has radically changed my scenes, turning it off produced quite a nice shot I thought almost a Photoshop Cutout filter there!
One last decision before we make flight that is the mouth. I say mouth snd not beak because Elroy has many human features which I think link him to Drew but also provide a humourous factor to him. When Elroy tweets I wanted it to look like a whistle So I think the best two mouths are the top left and bottom right. (The yellow mouth represents the bottom part of the beak) I quite liked both but as far as looking like he is whistle the bottom right won in the end!
Below is my fully meshed and modelled Elroy. I tried to keep his styling in line with Drews which I think worked. I didn't really want to mess about with boning another character as bipeds keep giving me gyp, but being an idiot I thought I'd do it anyway! Elroy not being 100% human needed some modification to his bones hence the twisted nature of the biped below but I assure you it fits quite well!
Due to the radically altered biped the envelopes on the Physique were really playing up, but me already having similar problems with Drew meant I overcame them pretty quickly and below are all of the envelopes.
After consulting top designers and specialists in the field of 3D bird modelling (my Dad and Mum) it turns out red works better and I agree as he stands out more against the sky, so Elroy is more of a Macaw now, even though Macaw's can be blue as well!
Because General lighting has radically changed my scenes, turning it off produced quite a nice shot I thought almost a Photoshop Cutout filter there!
One last decision before we make flight that is the mouth. I say mouth snd not beak because Elroy has many human features which I think link him to Drew but also provide a humourous factor to him. When Elroy tweets I wanted it to look like a whistle So I think the best two mouths are the top left and bottom right. (The yellow mouth represents the bottom part of the beak) I quite liked both but as far as looking like he is whistle the bottom right won in the end!
Thursday, 26 February 2009
wk 6: A few other things
For my Drew-drop scene instead of animating Drew falling down a hole with the camera falling to keep up, I decided I could recreate a falling effect with out have to move Drew much at at. What I did was to use the set from the mountain falling scene and cloned the edges to make it round. Then by making it skee-wiff it isn't the exact same shape so when it rotates at speed it looks like an actual cliff-face/rock-face. Then by making Drew flail his arms around wildy we have a falling effect. Finally to sweeten the deal I animated the materials to grow darker as Drewey falls ever closer to the ground.
To animate materials you select the desired material press 'n' or auto-key. A red box should appear around the material, Then clicking on the diffuse button and changing the colour (with the timeline in a new position). Now a red box appears round the diffuse button showing that it is animated. Now scrubbing over the timeline shows that angry old Drew is growing red!
It turns out Drew does have a mouth. I thought about animating just the moustache and the beard, but to show Drew's true ecstacy I thought it would be appropriate that he has a mouth that I could lip-sync. I turns out that creating and animating a mouth is quite easy. All I had to do was 'connect' vertices to create more edges and then drag the vertices below the mouth to a satisfactory shape. Then by turning animate on and moving the selected vertices I had a happy Drew! Alternatively I tried using dummies and FFD boxes but actually found vertex editing easiest when it cam to lip syncing.
Next the slow-mo shot! I went through various thought-trains to get to my final idea. Firstly I tried motion blur on the camera, but this pushed up the rendering times massively, and I mean massively, also it wasn't the effect I wanted. When it came to rendering instead of rendering one frame every teo minutes it had to make 12 passes of each frame, one pass taking two minutes making the whole rendering time HUGE!
After much thought I found a better way which was to cross reference Drew back into the same file and delay his key frames back 40 each time and then in object properties bring down the opacity and repeat the whole procedure 3 more times and voila a crazy slow-mo effect!
To animate materials you select the desired material press 'n' or auto-key. A red box should appear around the material, Then clicking on the diffuse button and changing the colour (with the timeline in a new position). Now a red box appears round the diffuse button showing that it is animated. Now scrubbing over the timeline shows that angry old Drew is growing red!
It turns out Drew does have a mouth. I thought about animating just the moustache and the beard, but to show Drew's true ecstacy I thought it would be appropriate that he has a mouth that I could lip-sync. I turns out that creating and animating a mouth is quite easy. All I had to do was 'connect' vertices to create more edges and then drag the vertices below the mouth to a satisfactory shape. Then by turning animate on and moving the selected vertices I had a happy Drew! Alternatively I tried using dummies and FFD boxes but actually found vertex editing easiest when it cam to lip syncing.
Next the slow-mo shot! I went through various thought-trains to get to my final idea. Firstly I tried motion blur on the camera, but this pushed up the rendering times massively, and I mean massively, also it wasn't the effect I wanted. When it came to rendering instead of rendering one frame every teo minutes it had to make 12 passes of each frame, one pass taking two minutes making the whole rendering time HUGE!
After much thought I found a better way which was to cross reference Drew back into the same file and delay his key frames back 40 each time and then in object properties bring down the opacity and repeat the whole procedure 3 more times and voila a crazy slow-mo effect!
Whilst on the subject of rendering I had some initial problems along those lines, these being that if I was to render one 300frame file on my dual-core laptop it would take 70 hours... I think not. But on an 8 core Mac machine that is monstrously fast still takes 18-20 hours. So my solution since there is no rendering farm was to split each file up into 50-100 frame segments and log on to about 15 Macs and set them all rendering a chunk and then I can put it all together in premier pro. This was each computer only goes for aboput 2.30-3.30 hours! much better thanks to the power of 150 processors!
It turns out that backburner, the software responsible for rendering farms is installed but it won't let me configure it so I can't it use it! AAARRGggghhhgg! The long way it is acht!
Monday, 23 February 2009
wk 5: Heads, shoulders, knees and toes, yep they're all animated.
A fews things to cover in this post, firstly I have been experimenting with path constraints because getting my character to tumble down a cliff took aaaaaages getting the keyframes looking smooth and accurate and doing that all again but for loads of rocks did not seem appealing so I thought I would venture into the world of path constraints.
Firstly I created all of my rocks out of a box which I altered with the help of some noise and edit poly modifiers and materials. Then I created a line and by using Refine to add point, and by convert the points to Bezier corners I used the point handles to make the bounce convincing and sharp when the object hits the mountainside. Then I highlighted the rock and went to Animate/constraints/path constraint. A dotted line appears and you drag that to the path and the rock snaps to the path and automatically keyframes an animation for you. This turned out to be much faster than individually keyframing each movement and spending hours in the curve editor getting the curves to the right speed.
Below is a little taster of what the finished article will look like. I did this quick render by going to Animate/Make preview.
In scene 9&10 Drew is slightly annoyed about having just fallen off a cliff to portray his annoyance I animated 10 parts of his body, those being:
Left arm
Right arm
Moustache
Beard
Left eye
Right eye
Left eyebrow
Right eyebrow
Drew's skin
Drew's body
Each part has been animated separately whether its to shake, wobble, rotate or fade, I think that together they all converge to achieve a working animation.
As an aside project we were asked to follow a tutorial which used FFD boxes to modify and shape eyes. Below is my character with a rather enquiring look on his face! The tutorial of how to do this is at www.infinitee-designs.com.
Firstly I created all of my rocks out of a box which I altered with the help of some noise and edit poly modifiers and materials. Then I created a line and by using Refine to add point, and by convert the points to Bezier corners I used the point handles to make the bounce convincing and sharp when the object hits the mountainside. Then I highlighted the rock and went to Animate/constraints/path constraint. A dotted line appears and you drag that to the path and the rock snaps to the path and automatically keyframes an animation for you. This turned out to be much faster than individually keyframing each movement and spending hours in the curve editor getting the curves to the right speed.
Below is a little taster of what the finished article will look like. I did this quick render by going to Animate/Make preview.
In scene 9&10 Drew is slightly annoyed about having just fallen off a cliff to portray his annoyance I animated 10 parts of his body, those being:
Left arm
Right arm
Moustache
Beard
Left eye
Right eye
Left eyebrow
Right eyebrow
Drew's skin
Drew's body
Each part has been animated separately whether its to shake, wobble, rotate or fade, I think that together they all converge to achieve a working animation.
As an aside project we were asked to follow a tutorial which used FFD boxes to modify and shape eyes. Below is my character with a rather enquiring look on his face! The tutorial of how to do this is at www.infinitee-designs.com.
wk 5: Why won't you roll darn it!
I have made quite a long storyboard which I'm not going to reveal for a while because it is quite long and by quite I mean too long so I may not get it all done in which case it may need shortening/revising.
Anyway in one of my scenes (7) Drew falls down a hill in rolley-poley style but getting him to curl up was proving to be a mission! When I moved his hands to touch his feet it turns out that my perfect Physique envelopes weren't so accurate after all, as you can see below I think he has a dislocated shoulder and a black-hole where his sleeve should be!
After a large amount of crying I managed to get a good adjustment level on the envelopes and he finally co-operated with me as you can see below:
As far as scenes go the sets are quite large, for example scene 3 Drew is just about to fall down a hill in the forest but I managed to reduce the amount of trees to as few as possible to lessen the rendering times which were 18 hours a scene! With some clever camera positioning below is the entire forest you see in the final video.
Below is scene 7 showing Drew falling off the hill/cliff and again with some nice positioning of the camera I didn't need a huge amount of trees to fill my scene. The trees I envisioned in my video were very stylised impersonating the giant redwood trees. My trees imply that they are so large that you can't see the canopy at all. This calls for very tall tree trunks with very few branches on each if any at all.
Anyway in one of my scenes (7) Drew falls down a hill in rolley-poley style but getting him to curl up was proving to be a mission! When I moved his hands to touch his feet it turns out that my perfect Physique envelopes weren't so accurate after all, as you can see below I think he has a dislocated shoulder and a black-hole where his sleeve should be!
After a large amount of crying I managed to get a good adjustment level on the envelopes and he finally co-operated with me as you can see below:
As far as scenes go the sets are quite large, for example scene 3 Drew is just about to fall down a hill in the forest but I managed to reduce the amount of trees to as few as possible to lessen the rendering times which were 18 hours a scene! With some clever camera positioning below is the entire forest you see in the final video.
Below is scene 7 showing Drew falling off the hill/cliff and again with some nice positioning of the camera I didn't need a huge amount of trees to fill my scene. The trees I envisioned in my video were very stylised impersonating the giant redwood trees. My trees imply that they are so large that you can't see the canopy at all. This calls for very tall tree trunks with very few branches on each if any at all.
Friday, 20 February 2009
wk 4: Bone-ywassawarriorwayayix! (read your Asterix and you'll know)
Now onto boning and as if on cue the problems begin to arrive. Firstly I tried for a whole day with the IKHI solver bones under create/systems/bones. As you can see below It was quite successful and I added fins to help me animate at a later stage.
Then I used an IK Solver to link them all together
Once I realised how frustratingly rubbish The above bones were at walking I gave up after a days slaving and spent another day attempting to use a biped instead!
After this I tried using the skin modifier to attach the bones to the skin. Below is a shot of me editing the envelopes so that When I animate the biped bits aren't left behind!
Here is a shot of just the biped. I Had to give him very short legs because you can only really see his feet. I also had to give him an extremely long neck because he has a very big head!
After a while using skin it wasn't working as planned so I tried another approach. A modifier called Physique which works in a very similar way but is more suited to bipeds, below you can see the envelope gizmo running through the body. Unlike skin you can not adjust the envelopes by using the transform tool you have to use the parameters laid out by the Physique modifier which is almost as easy anyway.
After countless screams of anguish I finally had a working set of bones and envelopes and here is Drew-boy taking a stroll!
Then I used an IK Solver to link them all together
Once I realised how frustratingly rubbish The above bones were at walking I gave up after a days slaving and spent another day attempting to use a biped instead!
After this I tried using the skin modifier to attach the bones to the skin. Below is a shot of me editing the envelopes so that When I animate the biped bits aren't left behind!
Here is a shot of just the biped. I Had to give him very short legs because you can only really see his feet. I also had to give him an extremely long neck because he has a very big head!
After a while using skin it wasn't working as planned so I tried another approach. A modifier called Physique which works in a very similar way but is more suited to bipeds, below you can see the envelope gizmo running through the body. Unlike skin you can not adjust the envelopes by using the transform tool you have to use the parameters laid out by the Physique modifier which is almost as easy anyway.
After countless screams of anguish I finally had a working set of bones and envelopes and here is Drew-boy taking a stroll!
wk 4: But how did I do it?
Heres how!
Firstly there is the face break down. Made from an extruded capsule with literally a NURM smooth to sort it out! I drew a box around the area to be created then I converted it to editable poly and adjusted the vertices in vertex mode to fit the bill in the front view point. Then by viewing in each other viewport I lined up the vertices till I was left with a beard looking shape. I used symmetry on all of the face parts to make my life a tiny bit easier.
For the body I created a circle and in edge mode cloned it upwards whilst adjusting the vertices to match up with the orthographic planes I have in place.
The hands were slightly more interesting but I went about it by creating a box with one length segment, then using the inset tool in polygon mode I added some extra segments that I then moved out to give a rounded finger effect. Then I cloned this and attached them altogether using the ... wait for it ... the ... attach tool! Then using the create tool in polygon mode I created the quads in between that joined up all of the fingers. My ideas for the hands were that I did not want them to be to be too rounded but more squared off and chamfered for a more stylistic feel. I did the same with the feet as well.
And with a finished Druid I have rendered in wireframe mode.
Below is my fully textured Druid. I used very very simple textures with little shine to get a matte surface and I then allowed my global lighting to do the rest!
Firstly there is the face break down. Made from an extruded capsule with literally a NURM smooth to sort it out! I drew a box around the area to be created then I converted it to editable poly and adjusted the vertices in vertex mode to fit the bill in the front view point. Then by viewing in each other viewport I lined up the vertices till I was left with a beard looking shape. I used symmetry on all of the face parts to make my life a tiny bit easier.
For the body I created a circle and in edge mode cloned it upwards whilst adjusting the vertices to match up with the orthographic planes I have in place.
The hands were slightly more interesting but I went about it by creating a box with one length segment, then using the inset tool in polygon mode I added some extra segments that I then moved out to give a rounded finger effect. Then I cloned this and attached them altogether using the ... wait for it ... the ... attach tool! Then using the create tool in polygon mode I created the quads in between that joined up all of the fingers. My ideas for the hands were that I did not want them to be to be too rounded but more squared off and chamfered for a more stylistic feel. I did the same with the feet as well.
And with a finished Druid I have rendered in wireframe mode.
Below is my fully textured Druid. I used very very simple textures with little shine to get a matte surface and I then allowed my global lighting to do the rest!
Wednesday, 18 February 2009
wk 4: Lets get orthographic
To model my character I drew some orthographic drawings of what he looks like from the front, top and side. Admittedly most of the angles looked bizarre but I found them useful for modelling purposes, especially the hands.
Below is a working progress of my character now called Drew the Druid!
I made the face out of a capsule and everything else out of boxes by creating a simple shape then converting to editable poly and adding vertices using cut, create, connect, cap, chamfer and lots of other tools beginning with 'C'!
To make the body I started with a circle shape and extruded upwards altering the vertices as it went up. Using the planes with my orthographic images I did this till I made the entire body and torso, As shown below. To make the arms I used the same technique except I extruded from the top of the body.
Below is a short video of my final character walking on the spot after being fully modelled/rigged and textured. I will have a follow up post on how I did all these things!
I told you it was short! I'm having problems animating so I may have to re-bone him!
Below is a working progress of my character now called Drew the Druid!
I made the face out of a capsule and everything else out of boxes by creating a simple shape then converting to editable poly and adding vertices using cut, create, connect, cap, chamfer and lots of other tools beginning with 'C'!
To make the body I started with a circle shape and extruded upwards altering the vertices as it went up. Using the planes with my orthographic images I did this till I made the entire body and torso, As shown below. To make the arms I used the same technique except I extruded from the top of the body.
Below is a short video of my final character walking on the spot after being fully modelled/rigged and textured. I will have a follow up post on how I did all these things!
I told you it was short! I'm having problems animating so I may have to re-bone him!
Monday, 16 February 2009
wk 4: On the face son!
Now to the problem of converting a flat 2D character to 3D dimensions, normally this is relatively easy but my characters head is inherently 2D because all of his features are on one side of his face so I have decided to use fast head movements when his head turns around the eyes switch to the other side of his head. Below is a quick experiment on the face to see whether the whole idea will even work, and it turns I does work hurrah!
Below are a couple of images of the test. I will be making a proper version later will full explanations of how I made it as well.
And Just because I was momentarily bored heres a video!
Below are a couple of images of the test. I will be making a proper version later will full explanations of how I made it as well.
And Just because I was momentarily bored heres a video!
Thursday, 12 February 2009
wk 4: On the 'ed son
This is the inspirational tutorial which allowed me to model a head in 2 hours instead 6 weeks last semester so I thought it fit to re-visit it again, partly because I've forgotten max over Christmas!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr4liDcdVA0&feature=PlayList&p=D3F1825FB486ADB9&playnext=1&index=6
But before I reveal my beauteous fizzogs a little bit of background knowledge on our friends the Celtic Druids couldn't hurt;
But before I reveal my beauteous fizzogs a little bit of background knowledge on our friends the Celtic Druids couldn't hurt;
- Laws were made by the kings but it was the Druids who advised the kings.
- Druids spent 20 years in training.
- To get mistletoe a Druid must climb a tree and cut them with a golden sickle and throw the branches down to two Druids to be caught in a white cloth as the mistletoe mustn't touch the ground.
- The Druids were the village wise men who advised the villagers on problems like the best time to plant their crops.
- The Celts didn't write much so most evidence is written by the Romans.
- The Gaulish Celts sent their Druids over to Britain to be trained.
- When a Druid wanted spirit help he slaughtered a bull, skinned it then slept on it to experience dreams to solve his problems.
- Druids were also fortune-tellers and said they could see into the future by chewing on the flesh of a dog to call upon its spirit to guide him by giving him visions.
- When the Christians arrived in the Celt world in the 5th Century the Druids had to go.
- Druids also said they had powers which allowed them to:
- Change their shape,
- Control the weather,
- Bring down mists to make them invisible,
- Travel through time.
wk 3: Le sketches
For a fews weeks now I have been attempting to remember how to draw with varying degrees of success. After 16 pages of doodling/remembering I came up with my final-ish character. Luckily I chose the Ancient Celts because it turns out I wasn't allowed to do the Middle age Knights anyway! So here are my etchings:
My bizarre thought pattern is probably apparent as the pages progress. Firstly I was sketching to find a style that suits me, like what shape eyes and head and how the arms flow. Then I experimented with facial features, and found that big noses looked good! Eventually I stumbled upon a stlye that I liked, My only problem is making it 3D as my character style is inherently 2D but I like a good challenge!
My bizarre thought pattern is probably apparent as the pages progress. Firstly I was sketching to find a style that suits me, like what shape eyes and head and how the arms flow. Then I experimented with facial features, and found that big noses looked good! Eventually I stumbled upon a stlye that I liked, My only problem is making it 3D as my character style is inherently 2D but I like a good challenge!
Wednesday, 11 February 2009
wk 3: Spread your wings and walk
I followed the tutorial given to us for creating a leg and attaching it to a dummy but I couldn't stop there so I animated him quickly and because I had such success with animating a donkey (not) in a previous module I thought I'd keep with the trend.
To make this I will into the create panel/systems/bones and drew out a leg-looking bone structure I then went about joining them so they would move in a normal-ish fashion by going to animation/Ik Solvers/HI Solver then I connected the top bone to the bottom bone and the bottom bone to the foot bone.
Then to make life easier I added a dummy to help me control the leg by going to create/helpers/dummy then once on was drawn ut I linked it to the bone by Select and Link.
Now I can move the leg. With this done I cloned the leg to make copies and using keyframes I animation my horse/donkey/thing to walk and jump. (I also used Select and Link to attach the body and the head.) After some simple materialising and lighting voila a simple animation!
P.S. Heres the link to the tutorial:
www.free3dtutorials.com/modeling/3d-max/walk-cycle-part-1.php.
Monday, 2 February 2009
wk 2: Mood Boards
At the moment I'm torn between knights from the middle ages and the ancient celts. So I made a mood board for each civilisation.
I then drew some characters from various civilisations and in the styles of Deary and Uderzo.
I think I may end up going with celts although I've been drawing some cartoon characters (to be posted at a later date) and I like the whole cloaked druid idea at the moment, but hey King Arthur may win through yet!
I then drew some characters from various civilisations and in the styles of Deary and Uderzo.
I think I may end up going with celts although I've been drawing some cartoon characters (to be posted at a later date) and I like the whole cloaked druid idea at the moment, but hey King Arthur may win through yet!
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