Extended - Wrap up of the project

I am now ready to hand in my animation. I feel dissappointed with myself for not properly finishing it but i felt like developing my skills more in the areas i want to specialise in is more important. The main reason i didnt finish my project is because i didnt really have any idea what i was doing and had to teach myself everything so obviously this took a long time. As a result of this however, i have learnt alot from this project. The part i'm most unhappy with is the animation, i have tried hard to research and teach myself how to animate well but unfortually i just need alot more practice than the time i have got for this project. Idealy i would have just focused on the pre-vis and modelling and texturing and lighting and got someone else to animate my scenes but unfortunately there isnt anyone willing to take upon this task. Overall i am dissappointed with the quality of my work, however i'm proud of my progress over this project. I need alot more practice and need to learn alot more to improve the quality of my work.

Extended - Helping to animate

I helped animate a scene for YiXing Luka and Guys animation. I did this mainly because i really wanted to do some 2d animation one day and so i animated one of their scenes.

From doing this i actually learnt alot. I learnt that every movement is just a variation on a bouncing ball. I'd heard this before from research but it never really sank in untill i was animating this scene.

Modelling practice - 2

I learnt alot about fabric also from doing this study. I am not happy with the result because i feel the forms are quite messy. Despite this though i'm happy that i was able to realise this and alot of other mistakes i have make whilst doing this because it shows my knowledge of modelling is improving.

 

 

Modelling Practice - 1

For one of the live briefs i decided not to do a competition brief but instead use this brief to improve my modelling skills which is much more relevent to what i want to do and my specialised practice.

From this i learnt alot. I learnt more about posing, anatomy and detailing in zbrush.

I started by blocking out the general shapes of the design because i think this is the most important stage.

After this i refined the shapes and then started to focus on the details

Game - Link

This is the link to our game

Projection mapping - overall

Overall i enjoyed the brief mostly because, working with YiXing and Luke was very easy and i got to practice my animation skills.

Projection mapping - my individual part

My individual part of the animation was the animation. I tried my best to get something out of this brief. Therefore i used it to try and improve my animaiton skills. I learned more about tv paint and how to use it. More importantly though i learnt about making decicionsin shots to more them more interesting. For example i could have just made the scene very boring and straight forward but i created some opportunities in the animation to make it abit more interesting.

Projection mapping Ideas

We each came up with ideas and discussed with each other to find out which idea we should do, we also discussed this with Jimmy to find out what he wanted.

We settled on an idea of a snowman coming out of a present and then melting.

Projection mapping research

For the projection mapping brief i knew the theme was christmas and the limitations were that it had to be projected on a building with a window or something in the middle. Therefore we had to design our animation around this.

Game

For one of the live briefs me, YiXing and Luka made a game for a game jam challenge on itch.io called the heart jam. We only had 72 hours to complete the game.

To plan the game we met up and discussed our ideas for the game, we decided on a game about an austronaut in space who needs to collect oxygen and avoid monsters.

To make the game we all met at my house and we all helped make the game.

The main thing i took away from this project was the potential for making games in the future as it is alot of fun and perhaps in the future i could use my modelling/rigging skills to help with a game project.

https://itch.io/jam/heartjam/rate/238747


 

YCN Dogs trust brief

I cant say much about the ideas because Jay and Tess came up with them. All i did in this brief was modelling the dogs. I started by blocking the biggest and most important shapes and worked my way into the more detailed shapes

I wanted to use this as an opportunity to practice my modelling skills. Also to use xgen hair abit more. 

In the end i created four dogs in total, all slighty different breeds.

Projection mapping - Summary

working with YiXing and Luke was good, everything went fine.

I did the animating and YiXing and Luke did the colouring and cleanup. As this was a very small brief there wasnt really much point splitting up the animation work.

I would say it was easy to work for a client but this didnt really feel like client work.

During the project i realised that i really enjoyed using tv paint to animate with.

Extended - Environments

Environment modelling:

-Research
For the environment modelling i had alot of trouble because i'v never really modelled an environment so i did alot of research. This research consisted of photographs i took on my way to uni of trees and plants and screenshots from films such as tangled.
 
I made some rough concepts of the environment in pre-production so these helped alot when it came to modelling the environments.



-Modelling
I started modelling by blocking out all of the shapes and making sure they all worked together nicely. I then started to refine the shapes and then later refine the forms further through the use of displacement maps.





I decided to make two seperate environments for the different scenes as this was an easier way to fine tune the details without effectng the look of the envionment from a different angle.









These are the Final environments: