Monday, March 4, 2013

Biped, my old friend!

What's up everybody!

This month I decided to go back to my good old friend, the biped!!
I wanted to play around and practice my weight, body dynamics and do some different animation styles.
So instead of making a new post all the time, I will just be updating this one. That way it will be more organized and I can better archive the whole thing.

The post going to get big eventually, so come back often to see some progression.  I will do my best to add new animations daily =).

Day 1. Here we go, 1st one up, realistic animation practice (total time taken ~2hours):


Updated version:



Day 2: Some sword swinging attacks. This one took me ~ 4hours:




Day 3: Swinging on bar and jump! Around 4 hours to complete.




Day 4: Super Jump!! Took me around 3.5 hours for the animation. This time I wanted to make a small scene with motion blur =P



Day 6, I did a quick compilation of everything so far into one video, and made a few adjustments in some of the animations here and there:


Week 2, Day 1:
I am back! THIS IS SPARTA!:



To go quickly, I use the "Pose to Pose" technic. I just worry about the reading and the dynamism of the poses in the beginning and that's pretty much it.
My workflow consists of putting the character in a pose on each frame on the timebar.
For example: frame1: pose A; frame2:pose B; frame3;pose C, etc etc

This allows me to avoid getting distracted by timing and what not. Once I have a solid pose, my animation just flows from it into the next one, that includes the weight transfers and all the basic foundations. Only when I have the complete set, of whatever is I am animating, I then start my timing tweaking by taking all the poses and scaling them along the timebar.
This workflow works well for all sort of action animations that don't necessary need to follow a sound in particular.



Friday, March 1, 2013

11 second club February - Final Render!

At last! I have completed it! This months 11 second club animation. Woohooo!
Here what the final render gives. I hope you like it =)



Peace and love!

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

11 second club - February 2013 Blocking WIP 04

Here is my blocking that is (almost) ready for linear. I did some adjustments here and there, added a few blinks in the eyes. Now he rubs his ear a little bit after switching the phone. I feel that it gives him a more natural state after holding the phone for quite a while on the right side.

Here's how it looks right now:



Okay tomorrow linear pass all day and spline the next + render tests. Gogogo!! 3 Days left.
Peace and love =)

Monday, February 25, 2013

11 second club - February 2013 Blocking WIP 03

I am updating my progress on the 11 second club animation I was working on.
After getting some feedback from friends and my animation comrades, I re-adjusted some things.

I have pushed the blocking of the body and the lips. 3 days left till the end of the competition. I will try to add the blinks tomorrow and move to linear.
Here's how it looks so far:


Time for some little sleep. Peace!

Saturday, February 16, 2013

11 second club - Blocking WIP 02

What's up y'all,

Here's my animation advancement of the 11 second club February 2013 competition.
I did some basic mouth shapes and worked on some of the poses. I also added some extra in-betweens in this blocking.



On my next step, I plan to add more in-between poses and solidify further the lipsyncing.Then move on to add some eye blinks and work more on the eyebrows.
Work work !

Peace and love!

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Acting and Animation - 11 second club February 2013 attempt

Hello everyone!

First post of 2013, yay!!!
So here I am updating what has been going. I had a great new year start. Right after New Years feasts and celebrations, I landed a small contract to work at Red Barrels for a short time as a cinematic/trigger events animator on "Outlast". I have learned some new tricks and it was definitely a good experience.

But we are here for the good old animation stuff right? So here's what I have been working on lately:

I wanted to try out for this months 11second club animation contest. And here's what I have so far:


I started by listening to the sound over and over to see what ideas would match well with this little dialogue.
So what I came up with is a guy sitting in a park, on a bench, talking on his cell with his dad. Pretty basic right haha. I wanted to concentrate on the hand gestures and make it feel like he is talking with someone.

I filmed myself quite a few times, while listening to the sound, and while just simply acting out, without anything playing in the background. I took the best parts and put them together:





After a while, I could clearly see in my head what I wanted to have, so I skipped the thumbnailing part and went straight ahead into 3Ds max, blocking out my first animation pass. Here's how it looks so far:






Stay tuned  if your interested, to check out how this piece advances =).

Peace and love!

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Continuum - The Full game !

At long last! Here it is, our full game that we worked on for the past months. It is complete and ready to be played!

Here is the trailer for the game following by the download link for the executable. Enjoy!




The full game can be downloded from here:
Continuum - PC Full Game

We have also made a quick website for Continuum that you can find over here:
http://continuum-nad2012.blogspot.ca/

Note that there are a few bugs  here and there and if the game crashes at some point, please don't rage quit haha.  Enjoy!

Peace and love.