First Showreel is up!

It's been a hectic couple of months but learned many things, here is a compilation of everything I've done. I will be making improvements to the animations (in particular the 3D animations) and look forward to the next semester.

Picking Objects up

This one was difficult but interesting. I enjoyed learning new techniques (i.e using constraints in maya) and experimenting with the movements of the rig. It was interesting creating polygons and seeing how I can make the rig react with the surroundings. 

To further improve this I'd make his movements more natural, perhaps moving his body slightly to indicate breathing, having him blink.. just making him look more realistic. I had to redo this one a few times cause it was getting complicated but it was simple complications in reality. I made more problems in my head than there actually were. I want to improve my sense of timing when using maya, I still find the dope sheets hard to use and same goes with the graph editor.

Maya Walk Cycle.

Animating Burt walking wasn't tooo bad but there is something I'd like to adjust given the chance to work on it again.. He has a slight 'limp' in his step. I want to make a smoother walk cycle and also try out different walks, for example a slow, lazy walk.. a feminine walk, one with a little 'hop' in his step and so on. The more I use maya the more interested I get in it and the more I want to learn but I just need to find the right pace for myself and take it at that speed. 

I'd also like to adjust the tips of Burt's toes to give his walk a bit more character. 

Ball Drops in Maya.

Using Maya I animated a ball doing a regular bounce and then one with 'character'. In all honesty Maya is a difficult software for me to understand but slowly and surely I will get there. I feel like I can improve both of them in different ways. The regular drop needs to have a smoother bounce and look more natural, same goes with the second bounce. I had more problems with the second bounce actually.. The program kept lagging a bit and then I ended up getting the timings wrong, the more I tried to fix it the more it seemed to mess up. I realised the bounce the ball makes to reach the arch is too slow and I'd like to redo this very soon and correct the timings. 

Character Positions!

With a given rig, eleven, I had to demonstrate different emotions through positions. At first I couldn't figure out how to change the positions of the individual fingers or things like how to shut the eye lids. The more I played around with the rig the more I got into it. I'd like to explore this more and try animating the eleven rig showing emotions. I think to improve the positions I could slightly exaggerate certain aspects to give more of a feel for it.. for example, the 'frightened' position, I could have had him bent further back, shrink his pupils, make his mouth drop more. 

Frightened.

Hap-hap-Happy.

'Stress sir, it's a killer'

Sleepy.

This is a short animation that we had to work on on flash. We were given a mesh up of different sounds and had to create an animation using different flash techniques. I tried to experiment with a different style than I'm used to, using more color as opposed to black and white then a dash of color. I'm not very pleased with this one but I'm glad I did something a little different than my normal self. 

I've been working on a side project since coming back home. It is based on something I used to imagine as a child.. I would listen to a song and watch the clouds and imagine to faint dancers merging in and out of the clouds, making their way through the sky. I thought I could attempt bringing that to life. I have been doing some timelapses from my home and when I have a large collection I will start editing and animating on top of it.
So far there have been some errors, but hey, trial and error always gets you to the end result. I have been doing tests using my iphone mainly, working out the time intervals and exposure needed, different angles. When I get a hold of a proper camera I will start using that instead for better quality.
I've always been interested in animations that involve real films as well and I absolutely love timelapses. Here are some things that inspire me and get me motivated all the time.

Here is the quick timelapse I did yesterday afternoon. The quality dropped in the transfer but I will get up a better quality when I have more stuff going.

I started with 10second intervals between each photo taken but I thought that was too quick so did some 5second ones. However, it was an incredibly windy and stormy day here so fingers crossed tomorrow will be better.