Through February and March,
I have been modeling and rigging a new rig.
The plan has been to create a great four-legged
character to animate for my animation reel.
I wanted to build a more comprehensive rig than before,
and this rig includes a complete range of face controls.
I also built in some extra legs into the rig
for fast cartoony […]
I have been working at building
a quadruped rig for four-legged animation tests.
Just a few more tweeks.
My ‘final verson’ posted for AnimationMentor.
There are still a few things to polish.
Mostly, I need to refine the hands.
I willl be smoothing out some hand overlaps
and working in more finger movements throughout the piece.
In January, I will be working on the face animation as part of class.
Animation takes forever to learn, as any experienced […]
Continuing to smooth and polish my shot.
I’ve been smoothing the begining and
working out bigger problems throughout.
It still feels jerky in places, but
that is part of the process.
We aren’t supposed to work on the face features
more than a little mouth and eyes.
Full face animation begins in January.
This is the first round of blocking for my next shot.
I started to add in a step at the beginning
so that the feet don’t look so static.
Here is the video reference
I am using for my next dialog piece.
I recorded around forty some takes
to get the performance I wanted for the line.
The dialog is from Desperate Housewives,
but don’t hold that against it…
This week, I officially went back to online school.
Animation Mentor is allowing alumni to ‘refresh their skills’.
I am back in the Intro to Acting class.
I will be posting Works In Progress soon…
This was my entry for the
11 Second club animation contest for September.
This one was fun to time out.
It took a bit to get the right amount of movement
to match the energy of the voice.
This was my entry for the
11 Second club animation contest for August.
It was ranked 29th out of 188 entries.
The sound was offset from
the editing process in After Effects.
So the lipsync is a little late.
There are still some things I’d like to fix about it.
The magnifier arm I created and rigged.
There are particle effects in […]
I was having troubles with the ol’ blog here,
but now things are looking ok.
This means more posts are coming!!
whoo-hoo!
This is as final as it’s going to get for the competition.
This is playblast lighting, so there is no shadows from the unicycle.
I’m pretty happy with it so far.
I’d like to add another shake on the arm during ‘liberating’…
Smoothing for the unicycle guy…
Checking arcs, finger fixes and overlap, etc.
Pupils are still a mess,
but this feels like it is
getting somewhere now.
Here is the next pass.
I got carried away animating the tutu.
Some of this is still in stepped, most in linear.
I really need to do a hand pass and a pupil pass next.
He talks so fast, the mouth shapes are popping some.
Then comes the smoothing…
So… here I’ve blocked in the unicycle guy.
Lots of work still to do with the arms,
and his body after he turns.
The trick was to keep him mostly still
but keep him moving enough to look like
he’s still alive (and on a unicycle).
Tomorrow it’s lip syc time and
I still need to do some modeling.
Hair pieces would […]
So this afternoon, under the cover of the rain,
I built and rigged a unicycle. It’s made to fit Moom,
the character model I’ve been using.
When you move it, the pedals turn and the body
moves forward. There’s also a control for the lean.
whooo!
So, I’ve finally gotten some things in order
and am working on another animation.
This is for the February 2009 dialog for the 11 Second Club.
For this animation, I really blocked in the movements I was more interested in, and left the other actions still. The next pass should block in a bit more movement for […]
Here’s the animation final cuckoo clock animation smoothed out and completed for the 11second club’s September’s competition. There may be other small things to fix, but I’m pretty happy with it at this point. I’m glad I was able to get some clothes on them too. My favorite is still the movement on the […]
This is the phase where things get bumpy, but the performance is well defined. I’ve worked out the timing the way that I’d like it to be and am moving on to polish some things out. I really get excited about some of the little details like his grimace when he lifts the hand and […]
This weekend I’ve been slowly plodding through the blocking of this shot. For some reason, this has taken more time than others. I’m not real happy with all of this yet either, his head movements are really choppy. I have been working out some other issues with the shot, including building and animating the clock […]
Last night I was building and rigging a cuckoo clock. The spring bends and stretches, and the wings go up and down. Yeah I went a bit overboard, but it looks cool, and it’s an important part of this scene. Heres an image of the clock and the widdle birdie. Plus, I started blocking out […]
September brings another line of dialog to the 11 Second Club. I’ve roughed out a bunch of ideas, but this one clicked the best. One of my goals was to not use any of my instant first thoughts: fedora hat, pencil and paper, tray of cookies. I want to keep this with very simple and […]
So this evening I spent some time refreshing my modeling skills. I started to build the head and the eye of a new character I’ve been wanting to model. I’m deciding weather or not to give him brows or not. I did spend a lot of time working out the shape of the eye. […]
Those keeping up know that this summer I was busy doing a number of shots for a little mini-short animation. The story was built around a rig I had started to build around thanksgiving of last year. (oy- it’s been almost a year?!) The rig was giving me some troubles but eventually, I started to […]
Somehow, off the rush of Siggraph, inbetween classes and driving I was able to pull of an animation for the 11 Second Club. It turns out that the schedule was perfect to use this as a class project, so I was able to demo lip sync and process and still work out my own […]
I’m proud to announce that our team, The Fjantastic Fjorgers, won second place in the all-night 32 hour animation competition! The contest involved sixteen three-person teams of CG animators from around the world who forgo sleep and resist several staged distractions for 32 non-stop hours to produce the best character-driven animation.
This was our take on […]
Anyone attending Siggraph 2008
should definitely come and check out the animation event Fjorg!!
This is a viking themed, iron-man animator competition where 16 teams will be battling out an animation in 32 hours over the next two days. Our plastic swords have been sharpened, the bone horns of our helmets have been shined and we are […]
Last week I was invited to do an article for Pixar Planet. I went to experience Wall-E and the live character show at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood. Obviously, I had a great time, I love the theatre, the film and ice cream. You can find my complete article here.
There was a few […]
Here is a shot where birdy moves in a quick movement. For this test I’m only looking at frames 688-698. Nothing is polished and clearly there is a lot of work on all of the examples.
Now, this movement is a bit jerky. The head movement doesn’t work for a bunch of reasons. The main […]
On to one of the more challenging physical shots. Here is a more ‘refined rough’ of where I’d like the bird to fit in. It looks like I planned the two characters separately. That is not the case at all. This shot was planned with both characters in mind as if I were drawing […]
Recently, I was accepted into the Fjorg! Iron Animator Marathon Competition at Siggraph 2008 in LA.
I’m on a team with Valerie Morrison and Sean Coleman.
FJORG is a competition where 16 teams each work to create an animated sequence of at least 15 seconds in length to a maximum length of 45 seconds based on a […]
