Final Reflection Animation

This year has been a lot of fun so far! I have gotten better at character design, learned a lot about story structure and gotten to know the mechanics of the animating platforms better as well. I have chosen my favorite projects from the years so far and embedded them below with a little reflection to go with them.

Walking Cycle

I picked this animation to reflect on because I thought it was one of my best ones visually. The colors are really nice and even incorporated some of the skills I learned from the bouncing ball project to make a window. I became very attached to my character while working on this project.

During this project we learned how to make our own little characters be able to walk across the screen. It took me a while to decide on a character to animate, I had three options: a robot, a teddy bear and finally my dinosaur. I bounced some ideas off some friends in class and I eventually chose the dinosaur. First, we drew our characters in our sketchbooks and then scanned them into Photoshop to be colored. We divided the arms, legs and head into different layers so we would be able to animate them separately later. Once in After Effects, we set anchor points so the arms, legs and head would rotate correctly. Next, began the keyframe work. We had to be careful not to make the character look like it was gliding, to accomplish this we had to add a little pause after every step. We also had to make sure the arms and legs were alternating and that the legs were never in the same place at the same time. Once we finished this we created a background and a shadow that followed our character. I finished early so I made his eye blink and added a little more to the background. My weak spot in this project would be the slight glitch in his leg due to a keyframe placement issue. I also wish I could have made the background a little better because it looks very 2-D. However, this project really helped me understand keyframes better and how to work with timing. We also learned how to use the dodge and burn tool to make objects really pop. Overall, this project is probably my favorite from the After Effects unit.

Short Story

I choose this animation because it was one of my favorites to do. Even though I got behind and it didn't turn out the way I had originally intended, it was a lot of fun to think of my own story and see it come to life.

For our last video of the After Effects unit, we developed our own story by first analyzing Pixar short films and taking note of the structures of plot lines. Our goal was to implement everything we had learned form previous animations, such as puppet pin tool and walking cycle. I collaborated a lot with friends to give and receive ideas. Originally, my story was to be about a homeless man who lives alone outside of society. One day he goes into town for food and is mocked by everyone. He becomes very sad and starts to leave. On the way out, he sees a little homeless boy who needs help. The man wonders why he should help the boy when nobody helped him. Suddenly the man realizes that that is not the way the world should be and decides to help the boy. He takes the boy to him home in the woods and they build a tree house together. My weakness during this project came from how behind I got while sketching and coloring the scenes, so I got started on the animation very late.  From the animation point forward I had to manage my time very carefully and work quickly which meant cutting out some scenes. I had to stay after school almost every day one week to get finished. I also struggled with the size of my drawings. Some of my scenes weren't colored in a 1080x1920p canvas so the ended up looking a little stretched in the final product. If I come back to this project I would like to add sound because it might help make the message more clear. Overall I think the style of the art looks really good and I hope I can finish the story sometime.

Castle Model

A few weeks ago we began working in Maya. We have only made three projects but my castle model is my favorite. Instead of just making four towers with walls, I added in two more towers in the middle where the royal family lives.

For this project we learned how to add textures to things by using pictures we found on Google. We had to look up "seamless ______ textures" to find ones that wouldn't have a line going down the middle of them. To apply them to an object we added a Lambert and then connected a file to it. This was I bit hard for me and I ended up using a texture with a seam in it for the stone. I worked over this by shrinking the texture to make it less noticeable. Hopefully I can find a trick to finding seamless textures because it will be handy when working later.

PolyThing and Lighting

(Maya render)                                                          (Arnold render)

This is our most recent project in Maya and it was very interesting to me. We studied the different types of lighting and then implemented it into our model to showcase the details and shadows of the "Polything" we made. This project was very quick and easy, the only part that took a little bit to figure out was the order to delete the cylinders to create the holes in the sphere. My final renders were also a bit dark so I might go back and change the color of the plane to a lighter color to reflect more light and show more shadows of the Polything. The Arnold render showed the shadows and shininess of the blinn material while the Maya render doesn't. I am excited to see what else I can do with the different types of lights in other projects.