dangitjanie

[dangitjanie]

After Feedback on the 31st July

Feedback were: 

- more hang time

- make him go lower and have a higher jump

- track the arc of the arms at the end

- as he lands at the end, make sure his hip does not look as if it hits a wall

- switch legs after the jump for more of a dynamic pose

The feedback for this video:

- track arc for the first jump because he seems to speed up in Z as he is about to land

- more hang time

But all in all, good :) 

[dangitjanie]

[dangitjanie]

Learning basic constraining and parenting so in the future my character can hold props. 

This is a quick test whether I can animate and constrain the ball to the board again after animating. 

This is not a representation of my animating skills! :) 

[dangitjanie]

WIP

I really enjoyed relearning Zbrush. It gave me a break from character animation because I have only been focusing on character animation since qurantine began. I was attentive in creating hard creases and hard edges in each feature, which I feel makes the the 3D model appear high quality. 

Some animation internships or animations jobs require basic 3D modelling, so I am glad I retaught myself Z brush to be prepared for any applications for that.

I will add texture to the hat, apply the lips and formed the body soon. 

[dangitjanie]

Relearning Zbrush again. I missed 3D modelling :)

What I relearnt and applied:

- Common brushes used by proffessional 3D modellers including clay build, standard brush, move tool, slice rect, etc.

- Of course, knowing when to dynamesh and add resolution

- Masking, Polygroups, Boolean, Extract. 

- How to import from Maya to Zbrush 

[dangitjanie]

Applying what I learnt from character animation in character designing to help visualise what the characters will roughly look like... 

It helped with planning and the group to envision the characters’ personalities on paper because I was to able to think about how they would use their facial expressions and body to move. 

[dangitjanie]

Side Project

Besides developing my character animations for my showreel, I decided to join two other people in making an animation from scratch. I wanted to learn more about the process of making an animation as a whole.  

[dangitjanie]

To get better understanding of cartoony a run, I watched and analysed League of Legend’s character run cycles, especially with Ekko’s run.  

[dangitjanie]

Starting to understand how to use references constructively.

What is recommended in a character animation showreel is an Action Shot to display understanding of body mechanics. 

I don’t know to do a front flip so I had to slow down the movement and watch a tutorial in how to achieve one properly. Even though I was looking how to do one realistically, I was aware to push the poses to its extreme and tried to apply the bouncing ball effect. This included creating a clear C shapes in the poses and pushing the character further down before jumping for a cartoony look. 

[dangitjanie]

Right now, I’m waiting for feedback from a professional character animator on the 31st July 2020 to improve this character animation to display my understanding of body mechanics in my showreel.

[dangitjanie]

Feel free to directly compare Then and Now :] 

Hopefully when I create a character animation with acting in it,I would develop interesting pose to pose from regularly analysing big poses with life drawing and practising creating just solid poses in Maya.

I quickly readjusted the weakest pose (imo) from last month so hopefully we can see improvement. I focused on making the siluhette look more interesting and tried to achieve this by weight shifting her body more to her left than the other, have on hand clenching and the other open, twisting the hip and the shoulders opposite to each other etc. 

[dangitjanie]

Improving the foundations of character animation  // Solid posing practice 

I made a pose a day quickly to improve the rate I create a quality pose. These are the poses from day to day. Unfortunately I my most recent poses but I feel I have improved my speed and awareness of making an interesting pose. 

[dangitjanie]

Testing out  Brendan Gottlieb’s ( a Pixar animator ) workflow

He describes his workflow like “layers” and works in spline throughout his animation. For instance, in spline mode, he would focus on a body part and blocks out that particular body part first. But as he does this, he uses the graph editor to offset the rotation and translation by moving the keys earlier than the other. Once he’s happy with a body part , he would look another body part and continues offsetting.This is different from the workflow I’m used to where every body part is key’d to form a whole pose in stepped. 

When I was attempting his workflow, I was not particuarly good at offsetting in the graph editor because I don’t know what effect I should be expecting. I understand it helps with what body part leads but as I’m typing this, I should probably investigate the relationship between rotation and translation of a body part further. Therefore, I still key breakdowns in the same key. Furthermore, I think I like working in spline rather than stepped first, because I get a better understand of the timing and spacing.

Pretty keeewl. 

[dangitjanie]

MDX Animation’s Life Drawing Discord and I

I also regularly went to Life drawing on DIscord oragnised my the MDX Animation Group to  participate to draw images I would not think of. They were strict with the time to draw and it helped me observe relationships bewteen parts quciker. 

[dangitjanie]

Still life drawing in quarantine because I enjoy it and it is useful :)

During quarantine, I continued life drawing becasue I wanted to continue developing my observation for line of action, twists, relationships between body parts including hands, legs, hips, head and legs in big poses. Since I was at home, I was able to choose specically big expressive poses to give me inspirations when I create extreme poses when I character animated.