Finally finished...

It's done! Yes we've finally finished our major project. As we want to enter it into a few festivals it's not publicly online yet. However we have made a website and trailer for the animation in order to publicise it. Here's the link if you want to check it out - theplaguedoctormovie.blogspot.co.uk

Because I worked in a group project we each had to produce a making of reel to show our personal contribution to the animation. I had a great deal of fun (and stress) working on the project but it's all been worth it and I'm really proud of our final film. Here is my making of reel:




So now I'm done it's time to take some time off before the degree show and work on some personal animation and rigging projects. Then hopefully in the near future, get a job!

Stu

All of the rendering, all of the time...

Hello again web goers. It seems I've been quite absent form here for a while, but things have been busy. I finally managed to finish my animation shots on the major project, thought I was done, then re-animated some shots based on feedback, but it looks better now so it's all good. And now, at last, we're rendering! Rendering is going really well, if a little slow, but the results we're getting are good. Thankfully our deadline was extended to the 8th of June, so we're not quite worried about finishing rendering just yet. However with all this rendering I find myself twiddling my thumbs a bit.

So what am I doing with my time? Mostly catching up on some gaming, but when it gets a bit tricky I relax by doing a personal rigging project which I am quite excited about. My house mate and I recently finished watching The Clone Wars series, which is very good, the style and animation is amazing. Obviously I won't be working on that project any time soon (although I would love to), so I did the next best thing - find a model like those from the series to rig and animate. So here it is, this is an awesome model of Starkiller (not official) I found in the style of The Clone Wars.

This is a WIP of my rig, none of the controls are coloured yet so it's a bit messy. But I assure you I know what everything is.

So after some re-doing of the UV maps I've gotten down to rigging. I've done my fair share of rigging before, but I'm trying to make this one right. Including stretchy stuff and dynamic cloth rigging I can't wait to get down to animating this. And hopefully getting myself a job on the show! ha. With any luck I'll have some animation of this bad boy to show you guys in June (after rendering).

Finally, keep your eyes peeled in June for our major project, it's coming together and I can't wait to see it rendered and share it with you guys.

Stu

p.s. Don't worry, I have his lightsaber ready for animation.

So... nearly... there...

Well hello again fellow interneters. It's been over two weeks since my last post, so I think it's time for a good old fashioned progress update (and maybe a cheeky plug).

First of all, the major project! It's going well, as of today I only have 6 more shots to animate. So by the end of next week (fingers crossed) I should be done with my shots and ready to set my computer rendering. Talking of rendering we have nearly finalised our characters. We just need to tweak a few displacements maps and turn down the glossyness of the Doctor's gloves. But here you are, two rendered tudor London gentlemen.




And here is a quick turntable with a bit of animation to show the blend shapes of the sick man in action.




I obviously can't take credit for all of the hard work that's gone into these characters. So if you're interested about who did what:

Jenesta Smith - Modelling, Blend shapes, Displacement & Specular Maps.
Agatha Gomes - Character Design & Texture Maps.
Lewis Haley - Hair, Sub Surface Shader & Render set-up.
and Myself - Rigging & Pose/Animation.

...(Cheeky plug coming up)

In other news it's getting close to the end of my time at university and the reality of job hunting is looming over my head. So with my new show reel up and running I've started to apply for various internships out there. One of which is the CGSA awards, you can check out my entry here. I'd be very grateful if you could check it out, and if you like it please vote and share it with others. Thanks!

Finally, since putting my show reel together I've been mulling over what kind of animation I'd really like to hone and focus my skills in, creature animation or more performance based character animation. I know they share a lot of similarities, and I love doing both. But I really feel like I need to have a better grasp of one in order to focus my job applications. I might go more into this in another post, but I'm still going over it in my head and I don't want to waffle too long.

So that's it for another blog post, hope you liked what you saw/read.

Take care,

Stu

three down, one to go...

Hello internet goers. I've finished three projects now and that only leaves the major project to go. We've still got 5ish weeks working on that, but we've got to get cracking with it, other projects have taken priority over the past month or so.

The latest project I've done is the animation assignment for our AAT unit. Our brief (simply put) was to pick a 10 second clip from any film and then reinterpret that performance in an animation. Once we had picked a clip we had to analyse the performance based on what Ed Hooks taught us, highlighting the objective/action/obstacle and the conflicts within the clip. With this information we could then go ahead and reinterpret the performance.

So I chose to do a clip from the first Harry Potter film, where the sorting hat is sorting Harry into a house. I chose to reinterpret the performance of the hat for two reasons. Firstly, the hat goes through a lot of thoughts during this clip, and as Ed teaches, thoughts lead to conclusions which lead to actions. With this in mind I knew I would have a variety of options in regards to acting choices. Secondly the hat is... well, a hat, so my view of how the clip could be acted would not be tainted by any live action acting choices. I don't want to say too much about my analysis of the clip, but my main aim was to make the situation seem a little more sinister than it is in the film. I wanted the character to be like a clever villain playing devil’s advocate as he tests the hero's worth. One last thing I must say is that the reason there is no detailed facial animation is because we are not marked on it, we are only marked on the body performance.

And without further ado, my animation:




Now that the animation project is done it is all hands to the pump on the major project. I've done half of my shots on the animation so far, which is great, but I've got some pretty tricky/important shots left to do which will take some time. It is going well though, and overall we have a third of the piece animated now. Below is another sneak peak of some of the W.I.P animation I'm doing. (The last shot is still in blocking).



That's it for now, I might go a bit quiet for the next few weeks as we work flat our on the major project, but I'll try and keep everyone posted on progress when I can.

Stu

while the going is good...

Hi again people. Just thought I'd write a little post while everything is going good to show you what I've been up to.

First off, the innovations project is due in soon, so I've finished that. It's about the process of fantasy creature animation, and how a company would build a creature document to ensure continuity of movement when a creature is animated by more than one animator. The main point of my project was the report, but the bit i can show you is my final bit of creature animation. The model and rig are not my own work.

Here you go, short and sweet.





Moving onto the major project. I've been putting off starting animation on this because of other projects, but now I'm fully into animating my shots on the major project. I've been starting with some of the smaller shots, just to get used to the rigs again. It's going quite well at the moment though. We have a sick man in our animation who coughs a lot. I've been dreading animating coughs, but so far with a lot of reference it's not been too hard. All of the coughs for the sick man have been provided by one of our group mate's dad - Phil Smith. We also have a good few sound effects for our animation, and people working on the music. So overall it's going very well. Below is a sneak peek at one shot I've animated.






In other news, we've now been given out AAT2 animation project. It is basically to take a 10 second film clip, analyse the performance based on what Ed Hooks taught us, then reinterpret the performance in an animation of the same length using the film audio. I've found a nice clip I am going to use and I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into some nice physical animation. I say physical because we're only marked on the body animation, not any facial stuff.

So that's it for now, good progress everywhere, just got to keep at it.

Stu

Dreamworks?! YES... Dreamworks!

Since I last blogged a lot has happened. Uni has actually properly started, and its hectic. Lots of animation for me to do this term, it's a bit daunting really.

Other than that we had the week of animation lectures from Kevan Shorey and his wife Robyn who work at Dreamworks in San Francisco. The whole week was a great series of lectures and talks about Kevan's process and approach to animation, it was an invaluable insight into how another animator works and I certainly came away from it having learnt a lot and will be applying a lot of what he taught us to my own process. On top of that Robyn talked a lot to us working in the US and the studio's pipeline and departments as whole, after hearing everything I was sure that Dreamworks is where I want to work one day. Overall it was an amazing week and it was shame we couldn't kidnap Kevan and keep him as a full time lecturer, haha.

As for my projects, everything is plodding along nicely, I'm currently finishing up doing the layout for our major project. Once that's done I'll be focusing my attention on the Masterclass project and it's impending 3rd of February deadline. I had a good meeting with Mike Wyatt who set us our Masterclass brief. He says I seem to have a good sense of animation, I just need to push my poses more, which I agree with, it's come up a few times so I need to work on that. My innovations has been slow to get going, but after a meeting with my tutor this morning I've got a clearer idea of what my plan is and I'm really looking forward to that one.

Kevan mentioned when he was talking to us that animating a horse was hard, he was right, you can see my attempt here in my latest showreel edit. Hope you like it, let me know what you think.




Stu

Busy, busy, busy...

Hello again. I've got a lot to show you in this post. Here we have the environments for our major project. But this time we can see all of it as we fly through the Tudor streets. The (not so) stealthy cube in the posher street (1st video) is where the Doctor's surgery will be, however that is still to be modelled by Nesta.

   


   


Moving on. Next up we have the final and re-worked rig tests/walk cycles for both of our main characters. The sick man I've only done recently. But the Doctor I went back and started again after taking on feedback from one of our screenings. People generally said he looked a bit stiff and had no character. So I gave him his cane and tried to give him some more swagger. I decided he needed to look more posh and dignified, so I slowed his walk down from 16 frames a step 20. Which I think helps, it makes him look more deliberate and less in a hurry. I also added more shoulder movement because it helps loosen characters up and make them look less robotic. I don't think its quite there yet, however the Doctor only has to walk once in our animation, so for now I think I should concentrate more on the acting side of things.


   

   

I am very much looking forward to having some Dreamworks animators, Kevan and Robyn Shorey, coming to talk to us next week. It will be nice to learn from animators from one of the best studios in the world.

For now though the Christmas holidays have come to an end and I'm back to uni tomorrow. It seems like it's been non stop work for the whole of the 'holidays', however I'm sure it will be worth it in the end.

Stu

rigging up a storm...

After a long, hard fought battle with rigging I've emerged victorious. I've finally completed the second of our two character rigs. It was a long and at many times frustrating process but we got there.

The whole process of rigging two characters to a level at which they can move realistically was a challenge. It was the first time I'd attempted such a level of rigging, previously I'd rigged very simple cartoony characters. I didn't appreciate the amount of work involved, particularly in skinning. I was introduced to a few new things along the process, namely Pose Space Deformers (PSDs). These are essentially corrective blend shapes but are easier and quicker to produce using Michael Comet's scripts and plug-ins. Although the PSDs do the job on the rigs, I am curious as to how well muscle systems would've worked on our characters. The characters aren't very muscular, but they do have areas of loose clothing and I think that muscles would've been very useful to get a nice roll over and around the skin in the absence of nCloth. I've never used muscle systems but I'd love at some point to look into them when rigging, I think it's a very interesting area.

I am overall pretty happy with how the rigs work, if any issues crop up during animation then I'm sure I can go back and tweak the rigs suitably. So without further a due, here is the walk cycle rig test for the sick man:




This is just the rigged model. The displacement maps have yet to be added. I will post the final version up soon.

Stu

rigging the sick man...

So for the past 2 day I've been working (almost) solidly on the sick man rig for our major project. It's had it's up and downs but I'm back on track now. There's a lot more work to be done, but for now this is how it looks:

Unfortunately due to my lack of concentration on the first day I have spent the second day going back through the rig and fixing things. It's my own fault, I should have made a plan like it did for the Doctor rig, however I thought I could just breeze through this as it's pretty much the same. Alas it's never that easy, and by missing one little step I've managed to lose a day of productivity. At least I now know in the future not to be so keen and take the time to make a plan, especially for rigging, but also other things. The time it takes to make the plan will be more than made up for in the time saved from avoiding mistakes.

The rig is working pretty well now though, and is almost identical to the doctor's rig, except for a few spine alterations to allow us to hunch this guys back. I still need to do the hands and the face, and of course skin the damn thing, which is by no means the most exciting thing to do. However skinning is made a lot easier by Michael Comet's scripts and plug-ins, I don't think I'd be so keen on rigging if it wasn't for them, they save so much time.

Ah well, live and learn I guess. At least I can crack on and make some progress tomorrow (with a plan!).

Stu

major progress...

Today I'm packing to go home for Christmas tomorrow evening. But me and Lewis have found some time to finish up the exterior environments for our major project. Here they are:

This is the first scene street

Second scene street

So our project has two exterior scenes, both streets however both need to have different vibes. The first one is meant to be a posher more up market street, it has bigger houses and is where our doctor character will live. The second is set at night and is where the murder will take place. It's supposed to be a poorer street and feel more claustrophobic and intimidating.

I think these streets have come out really well, I modelled all of the houses and laid out the streets, then Lewis come along with his TD hat on and procedurally generated the cobbles and curbs for the streets. I think we've really managed to capture the feeling of each street, and even though the second street isn't lit correctly it already has the feel of being close and a little bit uncomfortable. Also what helps is that there are few straight lines leading down the street, we originally had the curbs of the street straight down the middle and it just looked too CG and perfect, so with a quick lattice deformer we managed to give the street a much more organic feel. If I had more time I think I would add more detail to some of the houses, but ultimately they're not the centrepiece of the animation and they don't have to be perfect, I'm confident that they'll do the job as they are.

Next up - rigging the old man. I'll let you know how it goes.

Stu

the big one...

The second of my projects for this year is THE major project. The culmination of 3 years at uni, the thing you have to show for your efforts. It's big.

So for my major I'm in a group with three of my friends; Nesta Smith, Agatha Gomes and Lewis Haley. Our project is set in the 17th century and is centred around a plague doctor and a sick man and it's called 'His Cure'. I'm not sure you want me to explain it all, if you want to know more then head over to Aggie's director's blog, which can be found on the right of my blog.

My contribution to the group is rigging and animation, and I also happen to have modelled the Tudor houses for the streets in our piece.

These are the houses, the cobbles are generated procedurally by our TD Lewis. This isn't the final layout for the houses, but I think it gives a good feel for the scene.


The rigging for the Doctor character is done and the man will be done soon. The only animation I've done so far is simple walk cycle and rig test for the Doctor.




It's not come out exactly how I would hope, I'm happy with the mechanics, I think they work fine. But the walk lacks any real character, you get no sense of who this guy is, or what his demeanour is. The one thing I'm really going to have to think carefully about and work on before I get into full swing animation is acting. Getting into character and really thinking about what their motivation is etc. I know I've got the ability to animate well, I just need to stop being so cocky sometimes and rushing into it, I need to take a step back and plan my animations, take time to really get into the moment.

But that will be the focus over the christmas holidays, for now I have to rig the sick man.

Stu