Dear Sweet Morpheus

We were given a character rig, the beautiful Morpheus, which we then had to put in different poses, each one showing a different emotion (hopefully you can tell what each one's aiming for). I enjoyed this as it was fascinating to see just how many controls the character had, especially on the face, where you can even move the corners of the upper eyelid. I did find it challenging to get a decent expression on his face, for example I think the one of him laughing could easily be confused for him feeling sick.... laughter or pain,,,, two completely different states but they look so similar. The mouth was also quite annoying as I couldn't really get the teeth and tongue to fit in it properly and found them quite difficult to control. I've given you different angles of my poses, simply because I'm generous like that.

Squishy On A Mission...

This task involved creating an environment using polygons, which we then had to place our little squishy ball character in and make it interact with the scenery. The ball needed to have a personality and bounce around of its own accord. The stairs could have been made better, they have a few random edges that stick out and if I did it again I would make the steps 3D as at the minute they're just flat faces, they have no thickness to them.
I'm quite annoyed as you can't see that when the ball recoils from the edge at the top of the stairs it starts to shake in fear before he jumps in the air, as the video player is too small, before I ran the file through Premiere Pro you could see it fine.
I think I've managed to give the ball a bit of character though and the good news is Maya is no longer my enemy, but it's still not a friend by a long shot.

Bouncing Balls

This is my second attempt at animating a light bouncing ball in Maya, as my first attempt was awful! This is definitely an improvement though and although it's still got maybe a bit too much squash and stretch it's definitely getting there.

This is my heavy bouncing ball, it's better than my light one and was a lot easier to do, probably because I used a minimal amount of squash and stretch.

Pirates Storyboard is Complete!!! Woohoo!!

So, as promised, here is my finished storyboard. This took me a long time and I know I'm going to have to draw a fair few more frames to be able to create my animatic, but for now I'm happy.  I did lots of thumbnailing and working out of compositions before I arrived at my final shots. The changes I was told to make were to have more people running about on the ship in the storm scenes to create a sense of chaos and to show the Captain taking over control of the steering wheel from someone else. These changes really did improve the storyboard. Next time I do a storyboard though I need to have more interesting angles, as I don't think I'm utilizing the 3D space enough.

Pirates!!

Here are some of my concept drawings for our storyboard project. We were given a choice of three scripts, I chose the one about pirates, and had to create a storyboard of at least 30 frames. I really enjoyed designing the characters and am pretty pleased with the outcomes. 

I'll post my finished storyboard in the near future.

Cartoon Take

So our latest task was to take our little cubey character from the previous 2D assignment and animate a 'cartoon take' (so basically a double take but more extreme). I found this harder than the previous one and am nowhere near as happy with it. I do however like the 'boil' method I used when I held frames for a while, as it makes the animation seem more alive and full of energy. But there are just loads of little things that could be improved upon... ah well.