Bottle Strike - Mery test animation

Two months ago Meryproject.com released a rig named, you guessed it, Mery.

It is very Disney/Pixar inspired, but also very easy to use.

I decided to test out the rig in a animation, but I didn't want a simple walking or talking animation.

I wanted something more physical, so I came up with the idea of having Mery using her charm and strength to immobilize a annoying disturbance that won't let her enjoy her drink in peace.

I started off by recording a reference video where I just basicly threw a bottle up and down, and made swinging motions, to get the animation right. It helped a lot to get the physics right to get a smooth curved animation. It took a lot of tweaking to get the arm to swing correctly, but it was a easy fix once I rearranged a lot of the keyframes, since I ended over complicating the motion when it's just a simple curve.

Afterwards I started tweaking the facial animations for Mery's face, which was definetly the most amusing part of the process. The rig comes with a very extensive picker and poser extensions that really helps out. Did run into some issues with it at first since it wouldn't react to my script commands, but I managed to sort it out.

Check out my youtube channel and website for more animation

#2 Inktober 2014

Second #Inktober drawing. Was going to just be a simple anatomy drawing of a hand, but added in a small creature in there to make it more interesting.

#1 Inktober 2014

Decided to join the bandwagon of the Inktober craze. 

Not because it's popular, but it's purpose as a genuinely useful incentive to keep my drawing skills sharp. It can be very easily dulled, especially when you tend to focus mostly on 3D animations like me. This is my first entry. Not sure if I'll be able to post one every day, but I'll do as many as I can per week if I got time. #inktober

11 Second Club - August 2014

This was my submission for the August edition of the 11 Second Club competition.

The idea was to have a woman blinded by a bright light, suddenly finding herself in a interrogation room with a suspicious and authoritative man holding a folder in his hand, which contains curious information that probably relates to this woman on the spotlight.

Since the animation ended up being longer then I had planned, I didn't upload the whole thing unto 11 Second Club, and instead edited down to just the man speaking. However, for this I uploaded the whole thing here.

I started off animating by my references, but I started to dislike it more and more until I decided to just follow my instincts. Which ended up being the better option. References did help a lot with animating his right hand tapping on the chair, but it got too distracting when I started animating the entire body, as I felt it got increasingly "fake". After I removed all distractions and just went by my own imagination, things got a lot better. Looking at it now, I feel I should have added more squash and stretch to the male character's face, to sell further on his devious attitude of having this person in his clutches, but facial animation is still one of those things I need to really improve on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQyEdsY1AnU

11 Second Club July 2014

This is my submission for the July contest of 11 Second Club.

I went for a more darker atmosphere as I try to convey the mood of a deluded murderer who has killed a man for mysterious reasons in a cabin, out in the woods.

I went about this animation by picturing how each person would move and react.
The woman was obviously going to be angry and upset, and I imagined her holding the victim as she
accuse the other man for killing him. The main point was to figure out how the murderer would react and move as he tries to explain himself, starting with a angry swift denial and then turn it into a slow deluded explanation for his actions. I was going for a split personality motive for him, starting with a angry personality and then ending with a calm personality to represent his duality about the fact that he has murdered someone.

My main attention went to animating the murderer, so I filmed myself for reference, then blocked out the characters movement and then added the keyframes necessary for a more expressive animation.
At first his movements we're a bit twitchy, seeing that I had added too many keyframes, and so I ended up having to redo many of the arm movements and hand expressions to suit my idea for how the character would behave. I even ended up deviating more and more from the reference as I formed a better image in my imagination for how the character should behave.
The actual animation took about 5-6 hours in total to do, but I tinkered with this video for about a week before I decided to submit it, seeing how I wanted it to be good enough for the contest.

As such I also took this opportunity to practice more on lighting, camera and rendering.
To get the eerie late night cabin in the woods feeling, I used a lot of blue tinted lighting to create a darker tone for the event unfolding, as well as trying to recreate moonlight. I used two spotlights with blue colouring, one outside the windows aimed towards the three characters, and one solely for illuminating the front of the murderer, since he was left too much in the shadow. I was going to initially render this clip in mental ray with ray tracing, but figured that it might be more beneficial in terms of time to simply render in Maya Software without additional shadow effects. Mental Ray gave deeper colours and stronger shadows, but Maya Software gave a much softer look that I felt would benefit the scene more.

Rendered with Maya Software.

Rendered with Mental Ray

I have also added this video to my youtube channel, which can be accessed by clicking this link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCosmwSqngbzDqKmlYef3IfQ

Walk cycle and backflip

As I've got more time between the end of my BA education and finding work, I felt it would be best to spend some of that time to improve my showreel. So I decided to add in more physical movements to my showreel, such as a female walk cycle and a simple backflip.

With this I wanted to show in my showreel that I can do realistic keyframed walk animations.

The way I approached this was by first finding a appropiate reference video, which is just a short youtube search away, and then keyframing the legs at note worthy frames.

As in her legs touches the ground at frame 10, move and keyframed, and then they slide towards mid-section at frame 15, moved and keyframed, and so on.

When all of that is done then I start looking through the animations to see if anything is out of place, like the foot spins or knee starts jerking. Once the legs are done I start animating the upper body, since the movement of her arm and torso is just as important as her legs moving properly, since no one walks with stiff arms and shoulders unless they are a android. After that I move on to smaller details, such as the head, hands, toes, etc... Everyone has they're own style of animating, but with this I usually take 30-45 minutes to do the entire walk cycle, although using references helps a lot to keep the workflow strong.

Here I wanted to show I can do more complicated movements, that both looks good and realistic.

Once again I used references, since it's a tricky move to get right, and I approached it just as I would a walk cycle by keyframing major movements. The biggest problem with this was that the rig kinda made itself confused when I flipped it over, meaning that it's feet, legs and arms spontainously started to spin on themselves between keyframes, which meant that I had to go back to each keyframe "clean" them.

11 Second Club - May Submission

This is my submission for this month's 11 Second Club competition. I kept having problems with the shadows when I rendered this, but I'm hoping they will look past that and focus on the animation, but I will still try to render the scene again if I have time.

Other then that, I put extra effort into making my characters show more body language and facial motion, to properly convey the dialogue. I feel this finally shows the improvements I have done since November, when I decided to focus on becoming a 3D character animator. Following the advices from my mentor, I made sure the audience knew who/what the characters was talking to, and made the dialogue very clear to understand. I acted out all the dialogue in the audio clip and made notes of what both characters are doing, and how to progress from one motion to another without breaking the flow or making the motions stiff.
That helped me a lot to plan out the scene, because most of all I want to catch the audience attention and get them interested in the exchange of words between those characters, which won't happen if you don't find the animation fun or compelling to watch.

To get a proper portrait of how the old man should react to the woman, I filmed myself mouthing the dialogue and acting out how he would behave. Took a lot of takes, but I liked this one the best.

It worked as a excellent reference material, and it helped me a lot to improve my animation.