Lone Wolf - Production report 1

First production report for my third year projects.

In this report I will be focusing on my work on the Lone Wolf project.

To prepare myself for the end of pre-production I have practiced on animating canines and felines so that I can effectively start animating with precision as soon as I get my assigned scenes.

Working on quadruped characters is a challenge since I need to get down to a reflex on how a four-legged animal walks and runs, and how they interact with nearby obstacles.

Below are some WIP's of a wolf rig that performs walking, running and landing, to get myself familiar.  

Running-cycle animation.

Has a tendency to slow down as it leaps forward, and I need to change the order of how the paws touches the ground, since they always land one at the time and not all at once.

Walk-cycle animation.

Still a bit jerky with the movement, but still feels it walks in right order. 

Landing animation.

This one is still very much a WIP since I feel I need to work on how gravity pulls his body down when he lands, and where his paws should be placed.

Walk-Cycle.

This is a walk cycle for a feline character, using a common house cat as a reference since felines has generally the same movement. Only thing is that the feline character in the animation will be a lynx, so I need to find a way to imitate it's movement since a lynx has very big hind legs in proportion to it's front legs.

The Barn Confrontation

Time for a new weekly. This is actually an older animation I did, but I haven't been able to render it until recently and I've done some tweaks to the animation. Still needs a lot of work, but this weekly is for making quick animations once a week and not perfect ones.

Sketch Dump

Working on a animated short about wolves made me think about doing more sketches of animals.

Here are some I've done to get myself more prepared for production.

I did these sketches to get myself familiar on the pose and movement of wolves/dogs that I did as preperation for the animated short Lone Wolf.

Simple sketch of an elk.

Some sketches of a mountain lion that I did as practice for the animated short Lone Wolf.

It's been changed to a lynx now, but I think the movements and poses still remains as they are both felines.

Just a fun sketch of an annoying cat.

The Naked Gun

This was suppose to be up here last week, as part of my weekly animation, but this was also the reason why I made it possible to stretch into bi-weekly in case of delays. I took the monologue from the movie The Naked Gun.

Devilish Date update again

New update for Devilish Date.

Production has finally begun for real, but currently I'm still a one-man animation team.

Decided to go for a 2D approach, since I don't have time to model and fully rig two characters and would only lead to more delays. I am animating everything in Flash, but I will still be using 3D environment, which will be modeled in Maya. I have also decided to do some re-design for my characters, in which makes them easier to animate on a 2D perspective.

New design for Lora. Previous one was a bit more older looking with very expressive motions, but decided to notch things down to make it manageable. So her face is more outlined and curved to make it easier to animate expressions. Also changed her look to a more goth/punk appearance.

Dave's previous look was more handsome and rugged, might even say playboy'ish.

However, I felt this didn't feel right for his personality, being a wannabe devil that insecurily tries to get lucky with mortal women. Made him more skinny looking with a 90's boyband hair, and added a big nose, big eyebrows and big eyes for better comical expressions.

A screenshot for a dialogue scene I'm currently animating lip synch on.