Dog Animation

A little late on this post, but I've been busy with the Holidays these past few weeks along with the fact that me and my girlfriend recently just moved back to Florida from Texas because we really just weren't feeling the Dallas atmosphere (though the recent snow was cool).

That aside, my first semester of iAnimate finally finished up and with that I will post my last assignment.  The assignment was essentially a re-hash of a previous assignment that we already worked on, but with a quadruped.  I decided to choose having a dog go from a standing position to sitting/laying down.  I searched YouTube for a viable clip, but really wasn't getting what I wanted, so when i went to visit family over the Thanksgiving holiday I decided to use my relatives' dogs for inspiration.  The first dog was a little too hyper, way too much movement for me to try to capture anything, however the dog Roscoe who was a bit older and slower proved to be a much better candidate.

My initial passes went quite smoothly, and when I presented it to Steven he was quite pleased with what I had.  His comments were that I was moving a little smoothly, without the proper pacing to give it a natural feel, as well as that the dog was looking away from the camera the entire time.

So when I went back, I fixed the timing issues, added a little bounce and let him look at the camera, which really added much more personality to the piece.  I still wasn't quite happy what I had though and added a little extra personality to the piece by adding an ear twitch and some eye darts.  The eye darts though, I had to really cheat the camera because otherwise I was mostly just seeing the whites of the eye and it was kinda creepy.  Ultimately, I'm pretty pleased with the final results and when I find the time in my schedule i plan on adding some nice scenery such as grass and some lighting to bring the whole piece together.

Transitions

My fourth assignment for iAnimate was a focus on transitions of movement.  It's easy enough to create a run/walk cycle, however in real life it's quite rare that we move in a continuous even fashion for long, and even less so in Animation (unless you count the intro sequences to bad anime - which I don't and you shouldn't either).  The most common shot we'll find in animation and what also happens to catch the eye the most is the transition, whether it be from a walk to run, run to walk, walk to stop, stop to run, whatever... you get the idea.

The Snippet this assignment was a look into how the head and neck move with relation to the body.  In my lessons here I was quite surprised at what I learned.  The neck turns much more than I was expecting the head turns far less.  Using what Stephen Melegrano taught us, I managed to produce an animation I'm quite satisfied with.  Before, using earlier rigs such as Morpheous, I couldn't get the head to behave believably, the neck always felt flimsy to me and I really didn't know where to go to get it to stop behaving like a chicken head.  With a closer examination of the head in this snippet, I now have a full understanding of the physical capabilities of the human-like body.  I felt comfortable enough towards the end to start experimenting with some facial animation and while it's nothing special, Stephen did commend me on the animation within the eyes, stating that I had none of the issues people typically have when beginning facial.  He liked how I was constantly adjusting the the upper and lower lids to be in synch with the irises as well as the offset in the blinks.

The lighting isn't great, but I'm no lighter and still learning in that area, but I felt that it helped make the scene feel better.



For my transition assignment, I decided to go with a run to walk exercise.  My character would enter screen left and exit screen right.  This actually presented a challenge that was unexpected but is actually a very common issue: continuity of the shot.  I could not see the poses before or after my character (in this case George Stevens from iAnimate) entered and exited screen respectively.  The reference also did not contain any useful information, so I was required to figure out where my character was in order for him to flow smoothly and life-like with the rest of the animation.  The best way for me to go about doing this was to plan it out first.  I analyzed my reference video, and found all my contact poses and indicated my passing poses.  The drawings were simple, but I knew that if the simple collection of drawings I drew could convey the motion, then I was on the right track.

When I was satisfied  with my poses, I entered into Maya and began to block in my animation.  For the most part, it all went pretty smoothly and I'm pretty happy with the progress I was making.  My biggest issues were in the lean back, it was actually quite hard to get him to lean back and have a believable drop in momentum, and even now I still feel that George isn't slow enough when exiting frame.  With that being said, this is by far the most satisfactory run and walk I've created so far.

I can certainly give a little more time to work on this, but I do have other animations to clean up as well as a new assignment tomorrow and I'm excited for it.  My first in-depth look at quadrupeds and creatures that we can't act out ourselves.

iAnimate Assignment 3: Arm Snippet and Stretch

Now that I've been launched on assignment 4 for Workshop 2 from iAnimate I'm posting about assignment 3.  The assignment was our first in-depth study into the limits to which our bodies move; we were to push our character to the limits of their rig with reaching and stretching animations.  We would only have 2 weeks for this assignment, as opposed to the three weeks were given previously, something I drastically underestimated.

The first part of our assignment was the Snippet.  This snippet was one that I've been looking forward to: the arms and shoulders.  Mainly this is because I never really understood how they move that well and I was quite interested in learning their proper movements.  The reference we were to use here was a guy raising is arms and dropping it - acting aside, it was essentially the exact same movement that I utterly failed on while producing Ember and ultimately hand it off to another animator.  With the proper instruction and education, I was able to get the motion, and now feel much more comfortable with the arms and shoulders now.  Unfortunately, due to lack of time, a failure on my part,  I did not get the snippet to a polish that I like, though intend to clean it up shortly when I find the time.  The problem here still lies with the timing as the arms comes into the swing and the settle.

The reference video that I was given to work with was reaching into cupboards and reaching up to a tree.  When I first got it, my first thought was to shoot my own reference, but essentially keep it the same.  I had the idea to have this one character, "Jackal" who is an awkward character quite similar to gru from Despicable Me, reach up and fail and to grab a cat in a tree with no intention of coming down.  The idea would be funny.  Unfortunately, the idea was shot down by teacher.  He told me that Jackal's rig really wasn't built to work well with this particular assignment, he was a great acting character, not so much a mechanics character.  So back to the drawing boards I went, and instead decided to shoot myself doing a simple yoga transition from a simple standing stance into a full back bend, then coming down into a forward fold and walking out to downward dog.  The whole reference was about 9 seconds.  When I showed my teacher the reference he said "Great, go for it."

The animation itself was going to be both simple and difficult, I ended up using Jane since this was whom I had used for the Snippet and knew she would have needed flexibility built into the rig to accomplish the motions.  Since it was a yoga move, the animation itself would be symmetrical, which is generally frowned upon in animation because it leads to boring film, nothing would really be offset, and this was concerning me at first; but my teacher commented saying that typically yes that's true, due to the nature of this particular movement, the symmetry would add to the animation and give it a desired sense of balance... so I was pretty happy with that.  The next problem I had to solve was how I would approach the arms.  Ideally I would leave them FK mode, because it's nice and natural and follows rotations from the joints, but in this case I would at least need to be IK for some of the time since I would be walking on my hands.  I've done many animations where I switch between IK/FK and honestly I really quite hate it.  This rigs actually do have a really nice switch built in that makes things easier that honestly I probably should have used in retrospect, but, the purpose of this animation was of pushing the rigs to the limits and really stretching them out.  I knew that this wouldn't really be all that possible within FK, so IK it was.

After first critique my animation was looking alright and my teacher liked, plenty of criticisms but that was to be expected.  I decided over the next week to change the camera to a more appealing and dynamic angle.  It was so much better and also really exposed mechanics.  At next critique my teacher's first response was "Holy crap, you changed the camera... don't do that." but almost immediately after though commented that I absolutely made the right choice in this particular case for all the right reasons.  He then told me to go ahead and try and push the rig even further and try to cheat the camera to give it an even more extreme pose.  I was all good to try it so push I did and it really worked out better.

The whole animation itself was rather a difficult process, fraught with tons of pops and awkward bends but eventually I managed to smooth most of it out into a nice stretching animation.  I'm still not that satisfied with it and intend to clean it up, but I really lost track of time during this assignment period and didn't devote the time it needed.  I intend to clean it up soon but for now it is... acceptable.

Watercolor Orchid

A short post for today.  With the Holiday season coming around I needed to start getting some Christmas presents gathered and I'm terrible at getting gifts, so I decided to make one at least for my mom since she typically likes my art.

The project was simple enough and took around 5 hours total to produce.  I began by first drawing out my guidelines in pencil for the Orchid I had selected to draw.  Once drawn in, I went through and carefully started to paint with watercolors.  It's been many years since I've touched watercolors, typically I've preferred Oil or Acrylic, but I decided I wanted to give it another shot.  The paint worked wonderfully so long as I remained patient for it to dry.  I didn't want the entire drawing to be painted however, I purposefully left open negative space to contrast the bold colors.  All in all, I still think I put too much paint on the paper, but there's really nothing I can do about that.  With that dry, I then turned to an old technique I learned way back in Junior High School - outlining the watercolors in a fine black ink line.  In this technique, I look very closely at each individual shade of color, whether intentional or not, and then draw a line to separate each color from the others.  The cool part about this, is that due to the nature of watercolor, some of the shades don't quite blend perfectly, you find little areas where the water pooled and changed the way the paint dried, leaving very intricate and delicate designs within the paint.  I added a few extra "random" drops of paint just to add to the aesthetic and then I was done.

I'm really quite happy with the color palette I chose.  Typically I tend to go overboard on the color and then the whole thing just turns to a muddy color.  But here I stuck to just a few colors: Green, Violet, Magenta, Pink, and Orange.  I'm really quite happy with the way the flowers themselves turned out, though the picture I took here doesn't do them justice.

Any questions regarding, just ask.

Introduction

Hello all,

I'm new to this, and as such my first post will be kept short, or I'll try to at least.  Just a little introduction into what it is that I'm doing and where I'm at doing it.

My girlfriend and I moved away from Orlando, Fl in June to Dallas, Tx on the prospects of a job offer and the desire for a new city.  Upon arrival, that job fell through which left me to work a grueling manual labor job, which while hard and stressful certainly taught me to appreciate the work I am now doing.  Whilst working this job, I took it upon me to hone my skills as an animator and brush up on my software skills.  I started picking up After Effects pretty quickly, and must say I've grown slightly enamored of the program.  This practicing led me to create a new Demo Reel, which when I resubmitted, got me the job as Graphics Animator for DeepSpaceRobots.  The job is not the most glamourous, but it gets me to practice my art skills all day in the comfort of my living room (it's a remote job).

DeepSpaceRobots has me creating 30-second animations for Holiday E-Cards sent out by our corporate clients.  The animations themselves are actually quite fun to put together, even when I don't exactly know how I'm going to go about an effect.  I'm working primarily within Adobe AfterEffects on these, and the job is getting me tons of invaluable experience with animation in general, as well as with rigging, scripting, visual effects, compositing, and rendering.  Most of the work here is also... temporary.  But I'm hoping I'll still be able to do some stuff after the holidays...

...if not, that's ok.  Because I'm moving back with my girlfriend to Florida come Christmas because I really can't stress this enough: Dallas sucks.  Or at least, Dallas sucks to be in for someone in my position.  If I could get a job at the ReelFX studio here or something else, it could be very fruitful, however as it stands, I'm just in a city with people (we) don't really connect with, and miss our friends.

This summer (and this fall) I came to the realization that my college education, while quite essential and helpful, would not quite cut it in the eyes of a major film studio when I got denied by the hundreds of places I applied to.  So I've enrolled in the iAnimate school for animation.  It's really quite great, founded by a bunch of DreamWorks Animation Studios animators, they really sit us down and take us step by step through the process, really working each of down at an individual level.  The instructors are wonderful as are all the rigs and assets provided to us by the school.  As someone who used to complain a lot about the quality of the rigs in school (sorry guys) I must say I'm incredibly happy with them, as they are better than anything you can find for free online.  And they should be, after all they were rigged by DreamWorks riggers.

I'm currently in Workshop 2 of 7, I skipped Workshop 1 because iAnimate felt I already had a solid enough background in Animation to skip the basics (thankfully).  However, they and I agreed that my body mechanics were pretty rough, so here I am in workshop 2 and it's really more than I could hope for.  My instructor Stephen Melegrano, a senior animator at DreamWorks, and having worked at places such as ReelFX, Sony, and Pixar, is excellent and has walked us through all the principals of animation that I always wanted to know but just didn't know where to look.  This workshop focuses solely on body mechanics, not acting.  At first I was slightly disappointed in this, but as I've gotten into it I've realized just how necessary this really was.  My first assignment was a walk down the stairs, a little more difficult than the standard walk cycle, but not too bad.  The second assignment I had my character sit down, something that I was actually quite surprised at the level of difficulty of, yet with persistence I produced a quite solid animation with believable weight.  My third animation, which I am currently working on and will detail in a later post, is about extending the reach of my character.

Something I also have appreciated with iAnimate is the use of Snippets.  These are short animations that focus on a particular body part such as the feet and ankles, hips, torso and arms, or neck for example. (Though I think these snippets later become more complex)  I'm really finding it helps to be able to ignore the rest of the character and just focus on one body part to learn how it works.

As for now, I think I'll close up this rather lengthy introduction and hope things continue to progress.  From now on, I'll be detailing what I'm working on.