Wednesday 5 December 2012

Georgina and the Dragon

So... one of my modules going on at the moment requires me to create a one minute animation on myths and legends. I chose to base mine on the legend of George and the Dragon, however I chose to role reverse it and do Georgina and the Dragon.
I've done lots of designs and redesigns of the character of Georgina and here is my final design:


Next design will be of the Dragon... :)

Wednesday 28 November 2012

Getting Back to Work

Right! Lets get started shall we?!

It's been a long time since i've blogged and it's high time I started again!

It's been a busy busy few months. I'm now back in England in good old Stoke, now as a third year student (scary stuff!). It's been quite an adjustment getting back into sync with everything again, but i'm getting by.

In the first few weeks of uni, as a warm up task, we were asked to carry out a 3 part series of projects over the course of three weeks - inventively named "The Three Weeks in October".

Project 1 was "The Power of Nine" - this was a short film showing the following prepositions:

1) Inside
2) Under
3) Between
4) Through
5) On top of
6) Above
7) Behind
8) Next to
9) In Front of
I encountered a few problems with this work and if I had had more time I would have gone back and re-rendered it, after having turned the glossiness down on the objects in the scene.
To take a look at this piece of work just follow this link: https://vimeo.com/51849478
 
Project 2 was "Onomatopoeia" - this was a 30 second animation which needed to include a sound, text and imagery. I used Animate Pro to animate this piece of work and decided to take a slightly rougher style to it than i usually use. Click on the image below to see the animation:


Project 3 was "25FPS@STAFFS" - this was an animation which we were asked to produce in pairs. The idea was to create a short sting for Staffs uni. We were given the music clips, logo and colour palette and had to create something from that. Me and Dan Roberts used Maya to create this piece of work and we encountered some problems along the way... like Maya expression editor doesn't understand brackets when typing in calculations (which wasted a bit of our time), but we enjoyed it and our pleased with the results. Click on the image below to view our work:


Currently I am working on some more animations and my Design Project Report. I have posted up my animatics for both animations on my vimeo page, so please feel free to have a gander.

That's all for now folks, but I aim to try and blog some more about my work over the next few weeks. https://vimeo.com/51850788

Thursday 12 April 2012

Long time no see....

So after what is now... what...months? I've finally been able to face talking about my project again...

As you can probably guess the project is now finished YIPPYYYYYYY!!! Not that I didn't enjoy it.... I may have wanted to chuck my laptop out the window a few times and burst into tears now and then when my rig decided to flip out... but in a weird way I did enjoy it. I definitely learnt a lot and I actually produced an end product I'm sort of proud of for once.

So in my last blog, I was redoing my UV maps so that I could get a more precise finish and I was waiting to here back on my rig. Well my rig was fine, but I decided to drastically change it in places to make it easier to use when animating. After sorting out the rig, I then paint weighted Cleo... that was lotsssss of 'fun'..... encountered many problems and sort of solved them. Eventually, I had to except that I wasn't going to create a PERFECT character and got on with animating. Animating went pretty quickly and easily in comparison to modeling. I did however encounter one problem with the arm at one point during animation... I must have done something to the rig which meant I couldn't rotate any of the joints... but instead of reanimating the whole scene I just positioned the camera in a way that meant it wasn't noticeable.

Rendering took lots of time as usual and then it was just a matter of cutting up the renders and adding sound and effects in After Effects.

Giving me this end product: http://vimeo.com/35287100

So now on with the next project... which is to model a hill climbing racing car from between the years 1920 and 1980 and create a 10second animation.