Light From the Dark - Production report 1

Unfortunatly, Lone Wolf has been cancelled or temporarily put on hold for the final third year bachelor project, and I have moved over to another project that I was still attached to that uses 3D animation.

Yesterday the project went into high gear as everyone has finished they're dissertations, and finally have enough time to focus on getting into post-production phase. For now I am doing test animation for the protagonist, practicing on various physical motions that will be in the film, as such it will help speed up the animation process. 

Here the protagonist falls down after a sudden hit.

It was a bit tricky to make the fall look believable since the movements had a tendency to be jagged.

Another tricky thing was to get the FK joints to do what I wanted since they went a bit crazy as I turned the rig in a horisontal position, so I had to plenty of clean up for just that few second clip.

I started off by posing the rig in a free fall position and then animating the entire body to fall and slide in one motion, and then I animated each limb and body movement to correspond with the impact.

The protagonist is trying to shut a heavy door, using her body strength.

This one was to test myself in physical acting, just as in the fall test, because it's important to get the audience to believe that she is having a hard time closing the door. As such I keyframed places in which her body would move slower as she pushed to simulate resistance, and move it fast back as an opposite effect.

This is a basic running cycle to get myself acquainted with efficently posing and keyframing a run cycle.

Sometimes it can get tricky since the timing might be off by a tiny milisecond and throw you off by how unsymmetrical her running is. I keyframed each pose three frames at the time to make sure her running was as smooth as possible, and give the illusion of fast running. I ended up not having to do much animation for her feet since you barely making them out, but I added toe rolls on each kick since I didn't want to cut corners.  

Waiting on the bus

Time for weekly practice again. This one was sort of last minute, since I had to finish up my dissertation.

On this one we have a man waiting for the bus, bored out of his mind and not paying attention to his surroundings. He looks around and sees a small creature sitting next to him, not caring at first, but suddenly realises how bizarre it is and panics. It was originally going to end with the creature being annoyed and gets on the next bus coming, but I didn't have enough time to animate the punchline, hence the sudden ending.

I only got started on this on friday, and I managed to do the entire animation sequence for both rigs in just two hours. What I did was that I just positioned each rig on designated spots and posed them, then I did a breakdown with keyposes throughout the designated frame count of 410 frames. Then I filled in the gaps as fast as possible, fixing things as I went on to make sure it was all animating properly. Both rigs are very well made, so luckily I didn't have any problems with any IK or FK joint movements, since I worried that they would break as the Ben rig jumps up and moves away. The Hobo rig was pretty straightforward as well, with easy-to-use control panel that allows me to give him a nice springy animation as he leans away and jumps up to face Ben. Hobo didn't require much keyposes since it is pretty much just a flexible blob that can be thrown around without breaking anything or the animation getting screwed.

The setting was made as quickly as possible on saturday, just modelling basic blocks and propping them up like lego blocks to make a bus stop shelter, and then I made a quick building in the background as purely to fill in the void behind Ben. Lighting was done very quickly as well, and I wish I could do more with it, but it ended up just adding unnecessary amount of time it would take to render the entire scene without breaking it up.

Ben rig 

Hobo rig

Car Speech

Time to restart my weekly/bi-weekly animation practices after too many weeks of no updates.

This one here is where I tried my hand on a bit more acting practice.

My own critique is that I should have animated his mouth more, but hard to justify it since the dialogue is very low key and subtle. I still chose this sound clip because I felt it had potential for some emotional animation.

We have a man with his car in the garage the night before a big race. He is obviously excited, but knows he doesn't have the best car. So he gives a speech to his car, which is more intended for him, about not to be intimated. The sound clip is taken from Top Gear UK.

The background is just a flat image, but as you may notice I forgot to turn off "recieve shadow" on the plane.

Which causes the moving shadow in the background, if you are wondering about it.