Animation Project

Well, the Semester has come to a close, and the animation class of '09 was able to pump out two very successful animated shorts.
Pungo Luna was the one I was involved in. The other animation, Pirate Bay turned out very nicely as well.
You may need to download quicktime in order to view the videos, but it's definitely worth the effort!

Final Project Scene Playblasts

For the group final Project, Pungo Luna, I was assigned several camera shots to animate. I will post an embedded video and then describe what's going on in the scene, just in case anyone out there hasn't read the story yet :)



In this scene, Lenny, the astronaut, has just crash-landed on a planet. At the start of scene, Lenny is picking himself up off of the floor of his ship, having just had somewhat of a rough landing. He uses the control panel to help himself up, and shakes his head to sort of clear his thoughts. He then looks at the ignition button near his steering wheel.



Lenny, pushing the ignition button.



After pushing the ignition button, Lenny looks over at the monitor, expectant to see something. He starts to tap his fingers out of anticipation when the lights cut off and the red emergency lights turn on.

Project 2: Character Animation

I had a lot of issues with my model leading up to Project 2. For one, I had to create a skeleton for this model 3 seperate times, because the pull of certain joints weren't quite working properly. Then, since I decided to model both the character's robe and his body underneath, I ran into a few issues with the body fading through the robe during certain movements like stepping. I had to spend the greater majority of the week leading up to the project due date painting weights to make certain skeleton joints have more or less pull on the model's skin. I only actually had about 2 days to animate before it was due. During those two days, I discovered that if I messed something up while animating and went to undo the action, his fingers, for some bizarre reason, would explode exponentially.
One time, I hit ctrl + z several times quickly, and his fingers turned into what looked like a set of boulders that he was holding in front of him... Strange stuff.

Anyway, below is a Youtube-hosted video of what WAS a very high quality render, however, it effectively illustrates the main details of the project.

Color Script, Pungo Luna

In class, we have two group projects coming up which everyone in the class is going to participate in. One of them is Pungo Luna, which I made a storyboard for previously, and another is a Pirates story that is currently in process of being retooled a bit. Anyway, I volunteered to be the Art Director for the Pungo Luna animation. As the first thing to be done, I was to meet with the Director-director, and come up with a solid idea for how the characters, props and settings in the animation will look, and how they will be colored. Then I had to make up a color script which people can view and use as a reference when modeling everything in Maya.

As usual, click the picture below to see a larger image.

Lipsync Exercise

For a short assignment, I had to take a pre-modeled face and animate it to an audio clip. The audio clip was taken from Army of Darkness, and while I have not seen it, I figure I ought to check it out at some point.

This assignment is a precursor to an upcoming project for this class. So keep an eye out.

Pungo Luna Story Board

For the class project, the Short Story Pungo Luna was selected as the class project for this semester. As an exercise, everyone in the class was instructed to make up a story board for Pungo Luna.
The following pictures are what I drew as a story board; click the pictures for an enlarged version.

Ball drop exercizes, storyboard picture

For the assignment this week, I had to animate 3 different types of balls rolling off of a shed and then bouncing across the ground. Also, as an extra assignment, I had to draw three frames of a storyboard of my favorite project proposal. The script for the project I proposed is located here.

The first animation is of a bowling ball, so it does not bounce much when it hits the ground.



the second animation is of a ping pong ball, which bounces high, and a lot upon hitting the ground.



The third animation is of a soccer ball, which not only bounces, but also squashes and stretches as it does so.



And last but not least, click the following picture to see the large-version of the story board I drew for my polar bear story project.

Project 1: Character Model/Rig

For project one, I was instructed to model a character, and create an underlying skeleton (a rigging) that would allow the model to be moved and manipulated through a series of joints, bones and handles. Below are several of the reference images that I drew prior to this project. Click on the images to get a larger view.






And here are some movies of the animations that I made using the character rig, plus one of a maquette that I digitized using a 3D scanner.

Rig for Character

After completeing lessons 12-17 in my Modeling and Animation Handbook, I was able to rig up my character in much a similar fashion to Leon (see post below this one). For this rig, there are many IK handles that are connected to the skeletal structure, which allow the joints to move as if controlled by muscles. My rig allows my character to walk, move his arms, hands, head, and torso individually, as well as his fingers. Keep an eye out for a walk-cycle animation, which I will be working on next. As always, click on the images below to see the actual size picture.

Rigging Practice

This assignment was to follow some instructions in our text book to build the underlying skeleton for a character named Leon. As of right now, I have the skeleton, or "Rig" more rather, set up, and ready to go. Over the course of the next few weeks I'll be learning how to connect the rig to the model, and use it to animate the character. Here are a few quick screenshots: as always, click on the screenshot to see the larger picture.

First Assignment

Well, here we are with the first assignment to turn in. First, I had to draw a ball bouncing, so I quickly sketched it out on graph paper, and scanned it in, then used Photoshop to turn it into an Animated GIF. After that, we were supposed to use a 3D modeling software to make a virtual bouncing ball.

Here they are: Click on the picture to see a full-scale image.

First Blog Post

Hello there, this is my blog for sharing the projects I work on in the course of my CSC 320, Animation, class. Check back often to see what's new.