Personal: TV Paint Practice - Leonne's Hair

I started this as a practice drawing in TV Paint a few months ago as a learning curve when I had more spare time before starting to work on Crew Projects. I had no real plan but I wanted to draw a character of mine who I had always visioned as with cloud-like and explosive hair, which I could never draw out in stills showing exactly what I meant. He was inspired from Nia Teplin from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann in this way.

Inspirational shot: Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

I animated him (without hair) in roughly a day as a test to understand TV paint as a medium before working on films. I came back to him months later (today) when I found more time and decided it was time to tackle the hair which was why I wanted to do this.
I hope to clean this up one day too as it would be a nice practice piece.

I animated his hair on 2s, I wasn't aware of how the properly animate by frame count when I fist started him(body) however. There were no key frames in this piece.

I had initially thought of using it as a lip sync practice but there was no voice clip I had planned and decided to scrap that and focus on the hair.

ANIMATION: 3D modeling 2D turn sheet

For my turn sheet I used a turn sheet I had made in my game project. I wanted to sue this because I felt it was more accurate than a new one and I had put time into the designs.

I attempted it 3 times. I used this turn sheet at first and tried boxing it out. I then got demoralised and felt lost on where I was and how to do it, I was very confused on to how to make the arms, tail, and leg I had messed up along the way so i wanted to start again.

I was not intending to model any of the clothing. 

Eventually I started again with a different turn sheet of the same batch. I got a lot further and made the arms and tail with it, but I was unsure how to duplicate the arms and mesh them together. I ran into the same issues with this and Maya had gotten stuck on a high-poly version which would not divert back to the low poly for me to edit, it also kept crashing. (I would later find out this was because I needed to delete the history and the model would go back to low-poly if I had just restarted the program. I wish I had not ran into this issue because it was easily fixed and I didn't work hard enough to fix it. I wanted to start on an easier model sheet.

Looking back it may have been best for my time management to just go with this design from the start and work with it however in the stage of making it higher-poly I found many overlapping polygons that I could not fix and I feel I learnt more from working on the 2nd model in the end. 

 I decided after making most of it it was best to go back to the 2nd and fix it as I felt I had wasted too much time restarting and was further with that one. I think I should have just stuck to one but I don't regret the learning experience of making theses, even if they're not complete. 

I got help with copying the arm through duplication and I managed to conjoin them using tools my lecturer showed me. I managed to learn how to do this, and how to extrude quickly as well as short cuts for changing it to a higher poly. 

I needed help exporting it into Mudbox and managed to fix the model with the extra vertexes in order to do so. I used Mudbox to clean up the model as I was unable to do so in Maya but this was rushed as I had wasted most of my time making multiple models. I am glad I planned out my time so I would have extra time for this. I smoothed it out and then put it back into Maya for rigging. Before rigging I wanted to try UV unwrapping and making textures. I had not had a lecture on this yet and had no idea how to do it. I managed to unwrap it with the use of an extension. I was not entirely sure of how to do it and I don't think I did it in any good way but I'm glad I had the learning experience. I had no idea how to use alpha channels and such. I rigged the model with relative ease but I found that the animation needed more time on fixing the rig for the folding of the model which I got completely stuck on and admitted I had no time to use for it. I animated it quite simply and exported it into the Gallery. I spent the remaining 5 hours I had allocated myself to place everything in the gallery, set it up to work in Unity, play test it, and make sure everything worked, testing the CD-Rom before submitting the piece. 

BTEC: Stop Motion 1

I designed a short story "Cats End" which would be animated with paper figurines in stop motion of characters that I made who were humanized cats, running through an obstacle field. I put a lot of work into the pre production side of this.

Character design work and colour scheme decisions for the main character

An animation test for what I would need to make

After designing and working on characters I worked on a rough story board

TBS: Animations final

For the last leg of the course we were in crunch hour and it seemed we were all finally pulling our collective weight. I think if we had worked at least half as hard as we did in the last week we could have achieved so much more. In the end I wasn't able to complete my animations for the game and had to leave a few out as even though they were close to finished and placeholders were ready we couldn't program them into the game. As sad as that was I'm glad it's finished and I can reflect on it now realizing the large scale of work I did do and how I can now work at a much faster pace. Team members finally helped me with the animations at the end, helping with the simplest colouring of the animations late into the night before, it wasn't much in the grand scheme of things but it was a huge help. Many of the following animations were unable to be put into the game even as a placeholder due to no programming able to be found for the requirements to make the animations happen in game.

This animation could have been in game but the programming to do it would take too long and we would have missed the deadline.

We did not know how to program a death sequence into the game.

The following were finished by other members of the team while I finished the above. Many of these were also unable to be programmed into the game, endign up with only the L/R movements, Statics, and the Hits of the Shadowwalker (the tall one). I finished a static one as an example. 

The attack animation for the Shadelings was revised many times as I could not animate how I wanted it to look due to skill sets and what I was able to do the team mates were unhappy with, this was the final one I managed to do which met halfway what I wanted but could not do and was greatly appreciated by the group.

Death animation we couldn't program in. 

Hit animation that was done quickly and then was not able to be implemented into the game.

L/R animation was used for U/D movement too. 

An up/down aniamtion that was not able to be put in due to time. 

Split animation was another attack for them. Also unused.

TBS: Animation P.2

For working on the character Somrachk's animations I had to draw walk cycles left, right, up, down, and down, draw static images for standing left and right, a death animation and an attacking animation.
I used my work from the animation assignment to help me sketch out the model walking up and down and used my work from the Odette period to help me draw a left/right walk cycle I felt I improved my walking animations from the first sprites. I found reference videos of martial arts that used dual axes and used the motion as reference.

ANIMATION: diving

I spent a lot of time and effort on this animation however I feel like I spent too much time on minor details and not on the main-subject. I should have shown more of the diving than the gloss and extra details. I started with a basic story board.

I drew out the secondary character's animation making sure it would be an even number because I knew the final animation would have 20 frames. I made sure it looped then I started on the background. Once the background was done along with the animated parts of the background (the diving board) I drew in the keyframes for the main character and animated her by adding in the tweens. I drew in the splash animation after. I lined and coloured them at the same time as drawing them as I had added such details in the story board earlier. I had planned out the main character's design before drawing so it would be consistent. I made minor changed to the animation from the story board but I added in enough detail to make a mostly rough key-frame animation from it,

ANIMATION: walking forward

I found this assignment very easy as for the main-game project I was already practicing on making animations of people walking forward. I did not have the same elasticity and freedom in that assignment and since the characters were asymmetrical I coudln't do it as fast or easily as I wanted.

Keyframes I was working on before this assignment of walking-forward (and backwards) animations for our game project.

I drew out the keyframes of the piece and filled in the tweens and then flipped it and matched up the legs so the animation would loop walking forward. I wanted to give the person a bounce in their step and a jolly look with swinging arms.

Odette P.4

Despite the animated design being favoured by the artists and designers I tried to come up with more designs that fitted more to the sole elegant style idea, I don't regret attempting a new one even though I don't feel the design worked. A lecturer prompted that we try to solidify the concept into one theme as our blood bath and over-the-top mechanic did not work with the 'subtle elegance' theme, and if we wanted to go with that theme we would have to show that theme more visually as a whole, not in small parts of the design as it has caused us to lack a focus. As a result I had a go at designing a more subtle, elegant themed 'Odette'.

I worked on a design that would be more elegant only based but have Gothic and horror themes into it, drawing a combined inspiration of Venetian masks and Plague Doctor masks. A theme of blood-roses & rotten flowers and fruit came from Plague Doctor's having had flowers and perfumes in their helmets as they believed the smell to spread the plague, and tried to cover it. I wanted to keep with the more 'subtle' theme and have heavily implied gore and death imagery without having over-the top gore and have everything be hinted by intention in the design. I designed her with the concept of the devils and demons from the Hell of our universe all being once-living people who are now an abstract concept of their own deaths.

I animated her movement in a more basic and rushed way than I did with the last Odette design to visualise and explain parts of her design in action that I had trouble explaining in conceptualisation. This concept didn't stick as we felt the design lacked practicality in movement and focused too much on the elegant theme which did not fit in with the mechanics. I feel the design itself needed more fleshing out beyond this rough design, but I do feel the themes of the design had strengths. In a way it was slow and wouldn't fit with our game mechanic as there would be no obvious way for her to move fast & keep with the designs elements, while the core mechanics relied on fast paced 'blood bath'.
We theorised that this design could be recreated into one of the bosses the real Odette would fight and brainstormed on various ways she would be defeated. The back of the head in combination with her spider legs was one less fleshed out idea, and another was removing the mask then stabbing the lungs through the chest.

I elaborated slightly on the idea adding details and changing themes of it but could not use the same basic design effectively as it would never have the wide rage of movement or fit the bloody theme we had. I made a design with a more basic subtlety and brainstormed different heads for it including an animal one. I drafted it by making a silhouette.

Eventually the entire concept of "Odette" was scrapped as we lacked focus, which became very clear to us in our presentation to get green-lit. It also became obvious that our concept was unoriginal as it was too heavily inspired by the writer's interests in the Bayonetta series to the point that no team member could contribute originally our own ideas. We were told by the lecturers it would be best for us to start from scratch and while we were unsure at first we do feel we made the right choice by doing so.