A New Leaf...

 I've thought about returning to my old student animation blog for a while, but in the age of social media and having a portfolio website, it felt a little irrelevant to do so. Yet, the yearning to continue with an animation blog for my own sense of progress continued on... And thus, here I am. 

I wanted to start documenting my progress on improving my art again. So I will do so. 

Sadly, this blog has been abandoned ever since I had a Dissertation to work on at University (which feels like a lifetime ago) so I can't document the in-between era of when I stopped posting and have began posting again now. 

Where else to begin but now.

In-between my work commitments, trying to ram my foot in the door of the industry (job hunting) and Covid-19 family related commitments, I've been focusing my growth on certain things, chiefly amongst those: Storyboarding, Background, Perspective, Anatomy, Composition and Rigging (2D). I'll go into those on individual posts. 

Sometimes I kick myself and put myself down, that I haven't been trying hard enough, that I could have used time when I was working to improve, but life takes turns we can't predict. 2020 taught me that (and many other things), and so long as I keep trying and keep driving for improvement of my self and my craft, I shouldn't fret over past time, that only wastes current time. 

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. 

T Shirts!

During my summer of 2015 I had time to work on my own and I opened up Shop online where I started selling prints, commissions and decided to move on from Society6 to start selling my shirt designs on my own in my own. I started working on designs strictly for t shirts rather than making my art fit a t-shirt later to sell. I researched into printing methods and ways to sell them in the most optimal ways. Here are two of my successful designs which I managed to print with Dye Simulation and sell many copies.I also made them into phone cases and sold a few copies.

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

BTEC: Love your Body

For a project on the them of 'Love Your Body' I created a sculpture breaking free of a physical '4th wall' of media.

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.