Moom rig

 

Exclamation

This was a very quick scale that I did in After Effects based off of the inductions. It reminds me of the emoticons in Animal Crossing, and how the exclamation mark quickly appears and then fades out a little more gradually. 

Shadow Lion Walk Cycle

This is my shadow walk for Felix as a lion. I think that at points, the limbs can look kind of humane, but I think that the overall movement was good, which was shown better in the sketch layer when you could see that the head was turning clearer and where the limbs crossed.

In this, I had to flip the panels and reverse the panning movement of the background in After Effects, because of the highlights on the nails being the wrong way if I had just simply flipped them. 

2D walk cycles

Looping my background in after effects. I found this quite easy, using tabs under the edges of the canvas to help as a guideline for the looping. I am not overly keen on the one very thin panel in the wall where it loops.

I started off using the 3D stop motion walk cycle as a base for Carlson, as the critique made it look like he was stomping, and that was how I wanted Carlson to walk. Despite, I don't think this works. He needs to be more hunched, with his head low to exaggerate his furrowed brow. He also needs to swing his body more so he looks less like a block,

I think the exaggeration in this helps to assert Carlson's dominant character. I also think that the cartoonist style of the walk helps to show the child like imagination of Jay and how he probably imagines Carlson and his emotions like in a cartoon such as Looney Tunes. 

Practicing walk cycles with TV Paint

I am not too confident in pose to pose, so instead of doing 24 frames and narrowing this down to 4 frames, I worked from 4 to 24. To improve all of my outcomes, I would have had them all move in place instead of moving across the screen. I think that this would have been simpler in helping me understand the movement for my character walk cycle which needed to be stationary for my animation. 

4fps Walk Cycle

8fps Walk Cycle

12fps Walk Cycle

24fps Walk Cycle

Character wise, I think there should be a better secondary action on the ears as they are quite thin on the ends and I think they should have bounced a little more. I am happy with how this worked on the apron though, especially when it flicked up. 

MAYA Clock (My chosen object): Notes, plus references

Notes:

• To make the clock handle: use the side view, draw a curve, snapping points to the grid using X. Make sure one end is snapped to the centre point. Insert a circle from the "cruves/surfaces" menu, in the perspective view; this will create a circle around the centre point and will act as the face of the shape. Select both the circle and the curve, then go in. to the surfaces drop down and use extrude. The other extrude options won't work. MAKE SURE TO FILL IN THE FACES ON THE ENDS, the shape will be hollow. 

Left is using the method above (points were tweaked in the final product to flatten the ends and get rid o the point in the middle). Right is just using Bend from the Curves dropdown on a cylinder. 

• Filling holes: Use the edge selection tool to select all edges around the gap you want to fill. Then use, Mesh - Fill Hole

• Making the nuts and bolts and other six sided shapes, I changed the amount of polygons on the edges of a cylinder to six.

• Mesh - Booleans - Difference  My best friend for making shapes that I otherwise couldn't think of how to do. Used mostly on the details in the back of the clock, making holes for the dials and the battery plate.

In a later file which I made for the texturing and lighting - I realised that I could create a glass cover, and so that polygon was added later. 

• Glass: I used the texture blinn with a slight transparency and colouring it to black. I then clicked on the polygon and went in to the 'Attribute Editor' - Arnold dropdown tab - and deselected 'Opaque'

MAYA Truck Demo

• Skydome light yellow

• Maya direction lights, no skydome: got rid of the background colour which created a better surrounding light, but the setting is not very visible, and so there are very little shadows. 

• Skydome plus HDRI: Using a free to download HDRI based off of a naturally lit artist workshop. The light came strongly form one direction, and the shadows were very strong at any other angle. 

•  HDRI plus orange temperature: I thought that the change to a similarly coloured flooring had helped the exposure levels on the previous tests - and so I thought using the orange end of the temperature spectrum might help exaggerate the texture, but it did the opposite, blending in the texture to the light using the glossy shine. Positively, the increase in temperature neutralised the angle of the lighting by distancing the background. 

• HDRI plus blue temperature: I think the blue balances out the strong exposure in the other images, which makes it look much clearer. The more washed out colours are not like the reference image, which is what I was previously aiming for - however the glossy lighting helps to make this still look like a child's toy, and not a block of wood. I also think that the blue background helps in the image of this being a boy's toy in his bedroom.