493 Fall 2022

Final Blog Post

• What were your goals this semester?

My goals this semester were to produce short animations maximum 80 frames long as well as doing more with facial movements and just generally getting more practice in. My goals this semester stemmed from not being able to allocate enough time to be able to get practice in. Other goals that i planned on were to work on my feedback since that is also a good skill to have since the better feedback I give back the better the work will be. 

• Did you achieve your goals for the semester?

I would say my goals this semester were met to an extent since I didn't really get that many animations done. Even though I didn't I worked on them consistently enough to where I was content with what they turned out to be in the end. And overall I'm still seeing improvement and efficiency in my work process. I feel like taking in the feedback of my classmates I was able to adjust my animations better since I knew what looks off about my animations instead of catching workers fatigue where I wouldn't notice something that could be obvious to others. 

• What worked and didn't?

What worked was that I was able to use my 495 class to get some more animation practice in since I was the animator in my group. It gave me a sense of what it would be like to work with a team and how the animation process fit in along with making a game at a larger scale then if one were to do it on their own. Another aspect that went pretty smoothly this semester is being able to choose what we wanted to animate because as an animator in the industry we rarely get to choose what we animate. That is left upon the producer and lead designers. 

I would say everything ran smoothly this semester other than time management learning how to balance life events with work. Another things could be that I gave myself longer breaks than needed at some points since we had to present work every two weeks rather than every week though I tried not to slack off much. 

• What would you do differently in your project?

I Wouldn't change much of what I did this semester since I felt like I had a steady work flow throughout but one thing would be that I can definitely allocate more time into reference and research since I felt like I didn't do much of it to prepare for the blocking stage of the process. Reference is one of the most important factors when it comes to animate since that is the foundation I like to build on when tackling something I've never animated before. 

Week 13

This Week I thought back on the critique we held in class and how I got feedback on the timing for the mouth movements but I would have to go back and look at the mouth shapes. SO that is what I did. I looked up a diagram of mouth shapes for animation for reference and I think I made huge improvement. I also decided to animate a camera so that the fast movements don't seem to unnatural. I also added a small screen shake at the end to keep it closer to the original reference. 

This is what It looks like.

I worked a bit more on my blocking for my soccer kick. Mainly just adding some in between to make it look a little more solid. I playblasted it in spline so i was able to get an idea of how it would look when I realized that the timing was very off so I tried to move the key poses closer to each other to get the timing better. It was an improvement but what i think i should do next is keep adding in betweens, drags and more timing adjustments. 

Week 12

This past week I started blocking a soccer kick animation only really getting around 30 frames while I work on work for the 495 class since I'm drastically behind on work. To make up some of the hours I lost I'm working on Animations for the kick I got reference on last week and the soccer kick I'm currently working on. I'm also still working on the facial movement for the I am better animation and hope to finish that by the end of this week. The soccer kick is fairly simple to start of with I want to animate the kick then add another element later where I animate A goalkeeper missing the ball and the ball going in. This idea is inspired by the world cup approaching later this month. 

Here is the reference for the soccer kick

This is the start of the blocking for the soccer kick. Its basically all poses at the moment but luckily it doesn't seem too hard to fix the timing on the launch.

This is the progress I've been doing on the IAM better animation. 

Week 11

Wanting to start a new animation I gathered reference videos on a kick to begin my blocking process. I found this really convenient video where the poses are already laid out for you and all one needs to do is set them in blocking and play with the timing of the motion. To help with the timing I gathered other similar movements to get a sense of how fast the movements should be. 

For the I am better animation I began doing the facial expressions especially blocking them since I want to get a sense of the timing for the mouth movements and where certain holds could go in the animation. I've had trouble in the past breaking the facial structure because of set up errors so I made sure to set up the eye controls and jaw controls before I began the blackout.

For my 495 class I continued to work on shorter animations that the game could use like for example once where the character bumps the flashlight when the batteries get low. 

Week 10 

This week I worked on my splining for the I am better animation. I also started blocking out the facial expressions. I want to get the facial expressions right for this one since the reference has really exaggerated poses to convey the meaning of the character when he says "I am Better". I was looking at the analytics and the reference alone got thirty thousand views so I want to get this animation to the best quality I can produce it to. Apart from that I have been working on the animations for 495 game production class. I worked on splining a crawl cycle for the enemy, a swipe attack and a few simple animations for our character model which I just got yesterday actually. From all the objectives i'm working on I thinks its good to reflect of the subjective part of the work which is that I'm enjoying working with others in a team and getting constants feedback from my classmates. Something I hope to continue to have in the work force. 

Here are my reels for this week and my work in progress. 

Week 9 

This week I worked on the two animations I showed last week. I'm progressing with my splining phase on the I am better animation. Its getting a little easier to identify what wavelength corresponds to a xyz the more I use the graph editor. This is a tool that is hard to master so I've been watching tutorials on how to better use the graph editor on YouTube and I've picked up a lot of tips. One of the tips I got from the videos were to not overthink the poses but keep in mind that they need to be exaggerated, its that sweet spot that we want to find when blocking our poses. With this tip fresh in my head I reviewed the blocked out poses that I had and only kept the ones that I thought were necessary. 

This is the progress I've made for the I am better animation.

I also worked on some animations for my 495 class. Here is a walk cycle they had me do for the monster creature going to be featured in the game. 

Week 8

This week I focused on wrapping up my blocking plus for the I AM BETTER animation. I think I managed to finish all of the key poses that I need for the basic body transitions. In stepped form you can't really see where the holds need to go so I decided to spline out what I had so far and start on doing the in between poses for smooth transitions between key pose. I'm also trying to see where I could get rid of some poses since I do admit I might've over done it in some parts. I began with the first two seconds of the spline animation and added shoulder, chest and arm movements. A problem I ran into while adjusting these joints was that the head followed the upper chest movement so I also had to adjust the neck and head joints, this is because I need the head to somewhat stay stationary since the character is supposed to be talking to a camera. 

Here is my progress for the week, main takeaway is that I need to adjust poses to get the timing right. 

Also animated this short death animation when the monster in a game kills the player. The 3D model was a student model.

Week 6

Going back to my 495 Game Production class I continued my work on my assignments for the current sprint. Part of these assignments were making an Idle animation for our character or at least blocking it out to hopefully transfer the animations at a later date once we come to a decision on our character model. This animation is supposed to captivate a calm and focused character building up suspense as the player traverses through the spooky environment. 

This is the Idle animation. 

I also continued making 2D art for the frames that are going to be put up in the game.

The assignment was broad in providing freedom of creative expression as long as it falls under the category of spooky or disturbing. At first I thought to make a monster or something of the sort but since our mansion is meant to be vintage and old I went with this as a painting.

Apart from this I am almost done with the blocking for the I am better animation. The blocking plus phase is one of the most important phases for my process and I'm making sure I have plenty of poses to help my first splining of the animation look good! After I am going to crack down on the audio and timing. 

Week 5

Reflecting on the past week, I decided to sway away from mainly animating for the meanwhile I tried to reconnect with my 2D artist skills, and funny enough I was able to Use it for my advantage of contributing to our Game making Class. 

These are two drawings that i managed to finish this past week to help contribute to our goal of making a haunted mansion. 

These two paintings where made so our programmer would make it so when the player looks at the drawing it would fade into the opposite drawing sorta like this...

Week 4

During this past week I had a chance to continue my blocking on the roll over animation of the Douglas rig that I was able to get from a 3d Maya rig website. this time I wanted to keep adding the poses that were obvious especially when the dog rolls over and there is an obvious change of direction. I took a pause on this since I kept breaking the rig and it was just not fun to work on. I am taking a break from it at this point but plan to return to it later. Meanwhile I found a clip on tik tok of this dude saying he is better and I found it extremely funny. I don't think it will be too hard to animate because its just mainly his upper body. This reference will also test my facial animation skills since a lot of the emotion conveyed in the reference comes from the outlandish facial expressions

I started to block it out and this is what i have so far. Mainly just working on getting the meaningful poses and then my next step is to block the smaller poses.

here is my reference

For my 495 class I also blocked out a couple of very simple animations 

The first one is a simple pull out an Item from the first person perspective with an example of a third person view.

The second one is an animation of a simple flick movement that shows the player that they are lighting a lighter.

We are learning the process of AGILE that helps us do a certain amount of work in two weeks avoiding the possibility of falling behind as much and wasting time on catching up. This helps with crunching and overworking in a short amount of time. Its also teaching us to expect a certain amount of work and getting it done efficiently. 

Week 3

For this week I started blocking an animation that I want to do of a dog rolling over and asking for belly rubs. for now I'm focusing on blocking out the main poses of the dog. This is my first time working with this model below you can find my reference and model that I'm using. I plan for this animation to be no more than 100-120 frames mainly focusing on 80 of really solid smooth animation. 

I'm taking roughly 4-5 seconds of this clip and trying my best to simulate the key poses of the dog's movements. Here is what I have so far for my blocking of the animation.

Week 2

For this week I focused on gathering reference for some of the animations I will be doing this semester. here are some gifs of what I plan to do.

Careful Walk cycle

Opening a Drawer/Closing a drawer

These references are for my 495 Game Production class. During the first few weeks I will continue to gather references since it takes a minute for me to get the models and rigs we will be using for the game. Meanwhile to get rid of rust, I also gathered this reference that will fit my under 80 frames constraint that I'm sticking to this semester. 

here is the link to the YouTube video. I will be blocking this one out very soon.

This is a crawl cycle that'll give me practice for a crawler animation for the haunted mansion game im working on. 

Week 1

For this semester I would like to focus on 3D animation this time working on shorter animations ranging from 40-80 frames to really practice smoothing movements out.

My expectations for this semester is to update this blog weekly with updates on how I'm progressing and what I can focus on to improve each and every animation.

I am planning to upload my personal work that I work on throughout the semester and work from 495 where it looks like I will have a lot to do since there is a shortage of animators in the class.

• short animation on a 2 week average
• See an Improvement with every critique
• improve knowledge of Maya and animation techniques
• Network and collaborate with classmates on critique day

My timeline and deadlines will depend on how much time I spend each day animating but I would like to exceed in making deadlines for 495 to help out my team as best I can.