Caricaturing exercise- finished rough animation POSTED AFTER BLOG SUBMISSION

This is the final rough animation, with expressions, hair, shirt and chips added




I quite like the facial animation, which is mostly covered with chips in the above version, so here's the version without chips




Few bits still need to be fixed, like few frames of the animation of his right hand are a little jerky, or the final part of the first chewing sequence is too stiff; but I will have to move on to the next project for now

Caricaturing exercise- work in progress (refined roughs) POSTED AFTER BLOG SUBMISSION

finished refining main shapes (main body to be added while animating the shirt); now moving on to facial animation

Caricaturing exercise- work in progress (animation)

work in progress, in the middle of refining basic shapes and fixed, non-flexible details; once that stage is finished, my next step would be adding facial animation, and adding the packet of chips, and then moving on to animating hair and shirt

Caricaturing exercise- rough animation

first test of animation for this project; now moving on to refining, adding details and expressions

Caricaturing exercise- thumbnails

two alternative ideas for the 'fast food' animation, quickly thumbnailed to get the grasp on proper sequence of actions, timing, main key poses and expressions

eventually I decided to use the second one, which is simpler and can be cut shorter (whole thing would be about 20-30 seconds long) and yet it contains all essential poses and movements for this exercise

Caricaturing exercise- character design

first picture is the first set of rough ideas I sketched to help me get a clearer picture of what kind of design I should look for

second page also contains some random characters I sketched searching for some appealing types, but here I finally managed to come up with a type of character I found interesting; I tried to keep some of the more interesting features found in the original real-life model, but I also wanted to keep the 3D volumes and shapes as simple as possible to make the character easy to animate; I think this design is quite successful in combining those two basic characteristics

third page is just few more sketches I did to get familiar with the character and his form

character's hair in some drawings is reversed; that's because since it's not some elaborate narrative, I decided his hair position can be decided depending on the character's position and camera view in the final animation, to make the perspective and rotating of head easier when animating.

Caricaturing exercise- reference gesture sketches

my sketches of some more interesting and less obvious poses, gestures and mannerisms I observed; I also tried to caricature models' facial features and perhaps personalities, and I'm quite happy with the result

Body mechanics (animations)

I had much more problems with animating the throwing character than I expected;
some things in all three videos, especially the issues with timing/spacing, still need to be fixed, but I had to move on to the next exercise for now

Body mechanics exercises- sketches

rough key poses for three animation exercises- throwing, hitting and jumping- animated later;
when sketching, I found the jumping sequence the most difficult to key, actually, while other two turned out quite satisfying

Walk cycles- normal and attitude walk

basic walk cycle and attitude walk; attitude walk was definitely more enjoyable to animate and I think it shows

Second year- 1st semester

The work I produced on the first semester of my second year of animation course, when we were introduced to maya; we had two assignments throughout this semester, one requiring modeling and the other one being practice of animating using the software.

ANIMATING IN MAYA

The assignment was to come up with a gag, 10-30 seconds long, and animate it in Maya. Once I got my idea polished and thumbnailed, I made a quick rough animation test to figure out the proper timing for this piece

Once I got that right, I moved on to animating in Maya, starting with setting the key poses and then inbetweening them as tight as necessary. The version below is a final one, but it still needs a few more inbetweens- it's not smoothed out, because the splined version still has some issues which would need fixing if I could continue working on this.

Character rig I used is Moom, made by Ramtin Ahmadi.

MODELING IN MAYA

We were expected to model a simple setting based on research and visual references, preferably based on a historical period. My choice was the victorian era, and theme I came up with was a private study of an astronomer who apparently discovered a new planetary system

1. concept art

After I found reference pictures of some beautiful objects from the victorian era, I decided to redesign them slightly, to match the idea better and to fit the scene in the way I wanted them to. These are some examples of my rough concept work from this stage

model of the planetary system

desk

chair

I also decided on the colours and textures of the objects I was going to place in the room; these are examples of the colour concept sketches I painted

pocket watch

model

Once I knew what I want the scene to be like, I painted a rough image of the scene to help me decide on the overall composition and the preferred camera view

2. refined designs

before I moved to the modeling stage, I had to refine the rough sketches I made before to get precise reference for shapes of the objects and for proportions between them. I cleaned-up the drawings and drew all objects from three points of view for reference during modeling, and also I drew the topdown plan of the room

top view of the room

chair

desk

model

telescope

(no perspective applied in the drawings, for these were imported into Maya and placed on planes as reference during modeling)

3. modeling, lighting, rendering

At the end of the work I was quite happy with the modeling work I did, but texturing proved to be much more difficult than I expected; then I had problems with lighting the room and as a result the final images are too dark to even see anything; I tried to fix it, but I couldn't get the grasp on the lighting and unfortunately these are the final renders

I still think the models themselves are good, so here are some screenshots with wireframe view of some more interesting models

SECOND YEAR

I'm on my second year now; posted this just to clearly separate year one and year two

First year- 2nd semester (other projects)

Silhouettes and images I made for the group project on the second semester of the first year:

First year works- 2nd semester- Cowboys

The short animation I made on my second semester of the first year of animation course

concept art- character desing:

This is the first interesting idea I got for the characters, which still needed work to make characters more appealing and easier to animate, but gave me some starting point for visual development:

some rough sketches, looking for interesting visuals and personality:

the last sketch on this page was the one I used in the final animation:

some sketches to get to know the character before animating him:

These are some sketches of the other cowboy, his design almost didn't change since I got the main idea, I just made him shorter and less lanky, and more crazy and dynamic:

Rough sketch of the town; I altered the houses slightly in the actual animation, but these helped me to get the picture of the town in general:

final animation:

I must admit I'm not very pleased with the final product, but there are still parts of it I really like, like the animation of shorter cowboy in the last scene, or the tumbleweed with the University's logo in it.

First year works- 1st semester

These are few examples of the work I did on my first semester of the first year of animation course.

-character design

-layout and background design

-animation: the assignment was to animate a cat being frightened by a ball falling from the stairs

-the assignment was to create animated sequence for any 8 second piece of music

you can see the upside-down version below:

(music: Enya, Fairytale)

-assignment was to animate a character throwing a small object:

it's not very good animation, but I uploaded it for comparison to my newer throw animation done on my second year- http://apcourseworks.blogspot.com/2010/03/body-mechanics-animations.html