Here is the E4 sting I animated.. I liked the idea of it and really do wish I had a little more time to work on it. I ran out of time and so the timing just doesnt seem right towards the end, a bit sped up but nonetheless I'm still quite happy with how it turned out in the end considering everything.

We were given a short 2 week project working on an ident for the E4 channel. The first week we had to do design sheets, a storyboard and an animatic using a chosen 10 second sound clip. At the end of the first week we were told to swap our projects with someone else so in the end I had to animate someone else's idea and they animated mine. In all honesty, that was a bit unnerving but in the end I came round and started working on someone else's. 

It was difficult working on this considering the time I had.. I wanted to add more details in the tentacles, make them have a more fluid flow so to speak. There was a problem when it came to exporting the animation from flash so I ended up losing 45 seconds.. I will keep trying to export it and upload it when I can. I'd also quite like to actually animate the one I designed and enter it into the competition later on this year. I had originally planned to make it a stop motion and make the creatures out of paper mache and gears and have it set on glass layers (similar to how the animation mykonos-grandchildren was created). I thought it would be too much to ask someone else to do create it as I originally planned so just told the person to animate it in flash.

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.