Some animation Tidbits

Recently I have found a few animations that I really love. 

The beginning 14 seconds of this ending for Little Witch Academia caught my eye. The lineless colours flow smoothly to form some interesting shapes, starting off very simple with just the black and white and becoming bright and colourful. This feel could potentially be something I look at for my experimental project.

Another thing that I'm quite excited for is the new season of Samurai Jack. It will be interesting to see this animation looking restored and fresh. I love the mostly lineless style, like in the previous video too, and it might be something I incorporate into my future animations. It looks very well thought out, and I can imagine that the storyboards were important, so I tried to find some examples.

I have yet another playblast of my Tiger animation. I worked more on getting the correct weight through the body posture, and also added some small animation to the parts where he's stationary.

As well as this, I've started working on some digital painting for our 2D background project. I haven't got much experience with digital painting, so these are my first attempts at some trees. I need to work more on getting the tonal range in the leaves.

The artist I'm interested in and am taking inspiration from is called John Pototschnik. I really love the colours and the lighting, especially in the first image.

Experimental Animation

Yesterday I also got the chance to try a few different methods of animation using something physical things in front of me. I think using the sand has a lot of potential, although I'll need to use a finer brush to get the detail I would want in my animation. The video below shows my first test.

I have made more progress with my Tiger animation, which is shown in the videos below. I've added more movement, making the tiger stand from it's laying position although I found this was quite difficult to find a reference for and I feel I still need to work on it more. I've included secondary animation with the tail, and I think the facial expressions still work quite well with the head tilts. Some of the movements are still a bit stiff, or the body doesn't move enough at some times.

This week I've been working on the same tiger model, but this time using it to act out a scene from The Big Bang Theory. So far, I've tried out the lip sync, as shown in the video. I'm having a lot of fun with it, even if it is challenging to get some of the mouth shapes and facial expressions accurate on the tigers face instead of how they might look on a human. I still want to work more on the movements, although I think my timings are quite good.

As well as this, I've been building up my 3D environment in Maya. My wild west town is slowly coming together, and I need to start working on UV unwrapping so I'm able to apply textures. Here's a screenshot of my progress.

Here's some more progress I've made with my tiger walk. It's now at 100 frames, and I've added some more secondary animation. It was still quite difficult to get the legs moving at the correct times, although I've tried to get the correct speed by thinking about how many steps are taken over a second. I also need to focus some more on how the torso itself moves, how it go up and down and sways with the tigers movements.

I made some more progress with my 2D animated skip, which is shown in the two videos below. However I have decided to continue to focus more on my 3D animation, so more updates with that are to come in the future. I still want to work on completing the final outline in the second video, as well as include hair or clothes that would give me the chance to try follow through animation.

As well as this, we've been looking at animation backgrounds and I've been really interested in looking at this blog that was suggested to us - http://animationbackgrounds.blogspot.co.uk/

I enjoy exploring the tonal ranges of various existing backgrounds, and it's good to understand the balance of an image. I think I've managed to capture it quite well in the pictures below, although I think I could pay some more attention to where there are also highlights.

Making Decisions

This semester I initially decided to continue with my 2D animation work, attending the first session last week where we were able to study other peoples walk cycles and look at the movement in more depth. This lead to us being set a task to create a skip cycle. I worked on an initial sketch to first explore the movement, and then moved onto the version below which supplied more of a figure. It's still very simple so I will be working more to add a body and some character.

I have always been a bit on the fence about which style of animation I'd like to choose, so alongside this initial skip, I have also worked on the 3D task which was the animate a tiger for 100 frames. The video below shows my progress after only a short session of working on it. I had to study videos (such as one and two) of tigers walking to understand when each legs moved, alongside the turning of the feet and the sway of the body. I tried to include a little secondary animation too with the head and the tail, although this isn't so important until I get the primary animation to a good standard.