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2010-10-12T18:56:00.001-07:00

My Animation

2009-09-14T02:42:00.000-07:00

Autodesk, the makers of the software I use to animate with, came to our school last year to interview students and faculty about their software. The video was released online a few months ago. After many forgetful occurrences as well as good 'ol fashioned procrastination I finally got around to writing up a blog post linking to the finished video. My friend and I appear in the video as do my teachers Chuck and Dana. Despite the fact that I look like a nerd on video it was fun getting a little press. Double-click the video to go straight to the Youtube page. HD videos tend to get chopped in half when I embed them here.

This is one of the animation exercises from Chuck Grieb's special studies animation class at Cal State Fullerton. This was a fun one and I only wish I had more time to throw it through a few more polishing passes. I love the jump on this one as leaps and jumps used to be a challenge for me. The only bit of the animation that I like more than the jump is the second little jump at the end as the character's reaction to the late high striker puck. I approached the timing on this one a littler differently than I normally do. I usually use my metronome and meticulously time out the action. Per a really cool article from Animation Mentor's Tips and Tricks blog I decided to write a first person script of the scene and read it matching the intonation and inflections of my voice to the desired timing of the scene. I recorded myself reading a few takes, picked the best one, and threw it into Traxx. I then used the waveform in the timeline as a general guideline for where I was going to place my key poses. It almost felt like cheating, but then again animation is all about cheating as long as it helps the shot work. Except for you video game animators, you guys can't cheat all that much with the infernal 360 degree player controlled camera. Let me know what you think on this one as there are indeed a few timing issues here and there.

Did this one in an hour cause I was itching to do something with this rig. Blocking took about 20 minutes and the rest of the time was spent finessing the timing and the secondary action as well as follow-through. I got this rig from my special studies teacher and it is by far the most solid T-Rex rig I've ever worked with. It's not exactly a T-Rex. It kind of looks like the secret love child of a Carnotaur and a Rex. I imagine he got a lot of flack for that stubby tail in high school. I'll be honest in saying that the T-Rex is my favorite dinosaur, my most favorite creature to draw, and my most favorite creature to animate. There's just something so dynamic to what is essentially a mouth with legs. Maybe it's the lack of functional arms or the reliance on a tail as a ballast. Whatever it is this creature has always had an appealing form and set of mechanics for me. This will be the first of a series I plan to do with different creatures. I intend to take a different creature and pit it in a scene with a relatively simple object. I figured a simple set up like this would make for some fun creature behavior material in my demo reel. What would a T-Rex do with a beach ball anyway?

This shot was never part of my original storyboards. It was an idea that came to me while watching Terminator Salvation. The climax of that movie shows a battle between two protagonists and the new T-800. There are several shots of the T-800's point of view. At this stage in the animation I had been really rolling over one of my teacher's critiques in my head. His critique was that he wasn't getting enough shots of the soldier and therefore there wasn't very much in terms of relation to the character. Since the soldier is this young, ignorant, and over-confident student of combat I thought it would be interesting to include a shot of the soldier gloating over his initial attack of the creature. Based on what I saw in Terminator Salvation I thought it would be even more interesting to shoot this scene from the creature's POV. What you will not see in this shot as it's a playblast is the alternating depth of field. In the final render this will show the creature's dazed state after taking a hard hit to the head. He is basically struggling to regain focus on his attacker and while doing so sees this dark and alternating blurry figure mocking his current state.

Both these shots were blocked and just about completed earlier this week. They are two very shot, to the point shots. This is the story point where the creature has done enough investigating, has seen the true intentions of this new intruder, and has decided to do something a bit more bold than stalking around. I'll be posting the final polished version of the jump below soon.

These dialogue tests were done earlier this year and I really wanted to explore as much as I could as these were going to be my first attempts at dialogue animation. This first one is just animation of a character's head that I found on Highend3d.com. The facial rig was extensive enough to allow for some really nice expressions and I used a sound bite from "Army of Darkness" since the character gave a weird Bruce Campbell vibe. My first pass was very timid in that the lip sync animation barely covered the dialogue. I decided to go over it a few more times and I was able to include the mouth movements necessary to cover the chewing and spit in the dialogue. I also took the opportunity to throw some stretch into the lower jaw when the character delivers the line "Blow".

After feeling more confident I decided to do another dialogue test using a full bodied character. I first acted out the scene and thumbnailed the major key poses. I ended up animating straight ahead in spline mode as I really wanted to gun for a spontaneous feel to the overall performance while using my thumbnails as guidelines. I used another line from "Army of Darkness" and really enjoyed interpreting the feelings of frustration and fear behind the dialogue.

This was an early animation test I did while teaching myself the animation system in Maya. This was yet another free rig available on Highend3d.com and I thought it would be really fun to mismatch the character a bit. After watching my Shetland Sheepdog, Lexi, and her mannerisms during play or when promising her the "park" or a "cookie" I was able to capture the performance I was looking for. When saying a word a dog knows, especially if that work is "park" or "cookie", they have a tendency to tilt their head as if trying to fully understand what is being said to them. This was a mannerism I really wanted to capture in the animation.

I've done many walk cycles before. As an aspiring creature animator one of my favorite things to do is watch Animal Planet or the Discovery Channel and watch the small ticks and behaviors of the featured animals. Walk cycles can be pretty boring if done to a formulaic tee, so for this T-Rex walk cycle I really wanted to capture the feeling that this animal was being shot by a National Geographic camera crew. One thing I've learned from my ILM mentor that I will always keep in the easy to reach recesses of my brain is that there is a difference between a walk and a walk. It's easy to animate a walk and capture all the proper body mechanics, but what I wanted to do here was inject some character. I wanted the T-Rex to be mentally preoccupied with something else while lumbering along. I've seen a T-Rex hunt and attack, all courtesy of ILM's work on Jurassic Park, but I thought it would be interesting to animate a T-Rex during his off-time. What if a camera crew caught a T-Rex between feedings with nothing better to do? This was the question I kept asking myself while animating the walk.

This is an excerpt from a final film I'm currently working on in school. This shot proved to be really challenging and it took me a couple of takes to get right. I first approached the sequence with a straight ahead mentality and the animation was energetic, but lacked the finer logistics of a planned pose-to-pose approach. I went back to the drawing board with this shot and decided that the best way to capture all the niceties of the poses in a large jump was to animate those key poses in stepped mode with flat tangents. Doing this really helped me nail the poses and the timing. Once I was happy with both of those aspects, I converted my keys to clamped mode and after some fine tuning I came up with the shot posted above. One of the most challenging aspects of the shot was not so much animating the creature that's there, but animating a character that isn't seen at all; gravity. With some really sharp advice from my 3D animation teacher I was able to tweak the translate Y values in the graph editor to reflect a soft upside down U. By weighting, freeing, and in some cases breaking the tangents, I was able to achieve the energetic launch, the slow losing battle with gravity, and the exponential acceleration towards the landing. This shot really drove home the importance of combining a pose-to-pose with a straight ahead approach and I've become much more efficient at planning and executing a shot.

This was a fun little final project from back in my intro to 3D animation class. We were allowed to choose what it was we wanted to do for our final. What I wanted to really explore was animating with an IK/FK switch to convey effort and weight. To keep things simple I decided that a guy trying to push a box was going to be a perfect set up for what it was I wanted to explore. I built a simple bi-pedal rig with IK/FK switches for the arms and legs. One of the interesting aspects I learned from animating this sequence was that keying a subtle transition from IK to FK or vice versa over a length of 4 to 6 frames really allowed for seamless transitions. When I initially made the mistake of keying an IK/FK switch over one frame I noticed all kinds of jerkiness problems with the animation. This was a fun little project and I really enjoyed throwing some subtle overlapping action in the arms as well as the Looney Tunes nod at the end.

This is the one walk cycle I am most proud of. Since the rig we were animating with at school for our assigned walk cycle was impossible to animate convincingly, I decided to teach myself how to animate a walk during the following summer. I watched the Digital Tutors video on walk cycles and made a trip to the nearby park to non-chalantly follow people around and get a good idea of the timing in a person's walk. The rig that was provided in the Digital Tutor's DVD was an amazing rig to animate with and it allowed for some really dynamic body mechanics. After hammering away at Maya for a good solid two hours I was able to get the walk cycle posted above. I really like the timing on this one and am grateful to Richard Williams' Animator's Survival Guide book for all of the valuable info on walks.

What's an animation portfolio without a tried and true ball bounce? This was done in my intro class in about a half hour. Little did I know then that the graph editor for this exercise was going to be a big inspiration booster for the creature jump above.

Special thanks to my 3D animation teacher at Cal State Fullerton, Chuck Grieb. I also want to throw a huge line of gratitude to my ILM mentors, Shawn Kelly and Charles Alleneck. Also, a huge shout of thanks to my family and friends. All of them have provided input and suggestions on my work through the past several months that I have found invaluable. All of them have also been extraordinarily patient with me most especially during those times when I seemingly disappear into the netherworld of the Maya viewports.

EvilAnimator

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My Animation