Major Project: Get set...

So back at Uni now, and we're diving straight into Major Project. Lots to do, and a lot of working out to do in the initial stages. Here's what I'm thinking will be my four sections of Major Project.

1: Rigging.
    I'll be rigging two models for major project, over the course of four weeks. The first is a Fae styled humanoid, modelled by Dean Paupe (who you can catch over at Dean's Development). And the second is a Dragon, modelled by Ruth Beresford (at Finding Teapots)

2: Creature Animation
   Next up is animating some creatures for our collaborative game project. I've got a number of different animations, for various creatures to do, so should be good fun.

3: Human Body Mechanics Animation
   I'll also be animating some humanoids for the projects. This will be more realistic and straightforward, but there'll be room for exaggeration to fit in our Fairie style.

4: Dual Character Acted Scenario
   Lastly I have a personal project. I decided a dual character scenario would be best, seeing as I've not done one yet. I've not yet chosen a sound clip, but I've got a few ideas in mind.

Here's a few peeks at the beginnings of pre-production for major project.

Summer Rigging

Long time no update, but time to kick the blog back into gear for my final year at uni. Some of my avid readers (heh) will notice I've changed the name slightly, to a little more techy-riggy title. Hopefully to reflect my growing focus on rigging. Rigging and animating? I know, pretty serious business, but that's me. Jack-of-all-trades, master of some. Hopefully. Maybe.

In this interest, I rigged a character over summer, applying some more advanced rigging techniques in Maya. It was also an opportunity to use Maya for the first time, and I must say I like it a great deal, for rigging at least. The model here was provided by Ruth Beresford, who modelled it as a summer project.

 

I wanted the rig to be as flexible as possible, and unbreakable, to save me from complaints from pesky animators. This involved learning to do stretchy bones in Hypershade, which turned out to be a lot of fun. Overall, I enjoyed Maya and rigging, and I'm looking forward to doing more at uni.

Update on the fight scene

Here's it mostly blocked. Many thanks to Ruth Beresford for the awesome environment to animate in :)

And yeah, I know the lightings bad, I rushed a quick render to put up, it will look much better when I decide its as finished as its getting.

Mucking about

So I've been messing around in Max animating. I've just uploaded one shot here, a I'm not finished the block yet, and I've not rendered the shots together. Hopefully you get the idea though. Silly over the top figthing :) No plans on length or how polished it ends up because I'm mostly just playing around with it.

All done

Well, that was quite a year. Lots of stuff done and learned. The end results were mixed, I have to say, but I think I've gained a lot of valuable knowledge and insight. I now need lots of animation practise over summer :)

Here's my showreel anyway.

Week 11: FMX!

I didn't do much this week admittedly, seeing as I've been away in Germany at FMX. The conference was awesome, with some great speakers and talks. Highlights for me were the Blue Sky animation talk, and Dr. Stuart Sumida's talk on animating reptiles. We also came away with a plan to use Unity for next year's project.

Busy week ahead then, as I have a lot of catching up to do.

Week 10: Animating like crazy

Very short on time now. Especially as I'm going to the FMX conference next week, which should be great, but leaves me with little time to work. I need to get some really solid animation time in. I've been making good headway in my animations, with the walks all getting there and most of the mime pieces coming on their way.

I'm very wary of the fact that I still have to do the AnimTree, and get it running, for the ogre. This is possibly one of the more complex problems I'll have to face, seeing as its a complicated bit of UDK work, so I'm unsure how long it will take.

But overall, I think I should hit the deadline ok, maybe with some hit to the amount of work I can hand in due to the FMX trip. Here's one of the anims I'm working on now: