Head Turns

Our first test was to do some head turns, here I did the study and then also completed a head turn of my own character.

I found that the head turn was quite hard to get my head around (pun intended).

Here is my test: 

And here is my character head turn:

Horse/Dog/Cat Run

The run of the four legged creatures was actually my most fun. I think in particular because I was beginning to get better at my line work and understanding the capabilities of flash. I decided to have more fun and add more to the original designs than I have with others.
These to me, are my best works yet.

Dog (semi cat hybrid):

Cat (with secondary motion of the bell):

Horse (Centaur - Mixed horse with my Character)

Lip Sync

Oh my lord, this was a toughy!
The first time I did this, my mouth came out way to fast, as I had animated every single phoneme in the voice. Unfortunately at 24 FPS that comes out looking like a really bad rapper.
After talking to Vaughn he suggested stringing out specific starting phonemes more. I think the end result turned out MUCH better than the first.

This GIF however is a bit fast - (It speed up?) compared to the actual file..
I am unsure why.

Jumping/Lifting

I looked at the jump sequences that were given to us as reference, but found them to be rather boring (Sorry Vaughn) But I did come up with a jumping roll, it isn't the greatest but i'm fairly proud of it! :P

Running Jump Sequence.

Lift Sequence:

Frame that I worked from.

I was really happy with my lift sequence - the added shadow, particularly to the bottom of the rock, helps give a sense of grounding and deepens that idea of being lifted. As its lifted the shadow gets smaller and weaker.

Run Cycles

For run cycles I really wanted to try capture a sense of secondary movement in my character, as he is a larger lad, I wanted to get the movement of his belly particularly to move in conjunction with his steps. As he comes up, so does his belly, and he comes down etc etc.

Side Run:

Front Run - Robot!

I decided to go with a robot, I had quite honestly had enough of my character and felt like spicing things up a little.

Walk Cycles

Man this one was hard! Getting my character to walk in three concepts was no easy task, and unfortunately each cycle has a different walk pattern.. Annoying but I was unsure on how to appropriately fix this.

Test Walk Cycle:

Front Walk

Side Walk

3/4 Walk

The 3/4 Walk was by far the hardest. And literally blew my mind!

Bird Flight

Bird flight was an interesting one, with the movement of the wings, and getting the tail to move in proper conjunction with the body.

My first attempt was a side view, which I then added a second bird and a surprise ending.
A real tear jerker!

My front view I tried to add another object to offset the movement of the bird, but also to get an understanding of how the movement of one object affects the movement of another.

Bouncy Ball

This one I had lots of fun with, originally I was really unsure about what to do to make this ball unique, until I had the fun idea to burst somebodies bubble!

Freehand Drawing

Added some shadows to give the ball grounding.

POP!

I decided to give the ball an almost 'balloon' effect when it hits the spike. Which zooms around the room before coming to rest fully deflated.

Ease In/Pendulum

More motion studies dealing with how we can trick the eye to give a sense of physical realism in terms of gravity etc using frame distance to give a sense of 'speed'.

Pendulum:

Ease in - Ease out:

I find it interesting how just the adjustment of distance apart per frame can give a sense of accleration or slowing down.

Final Pose

After all the phases, it was time for me to create my final pose. My final pose was selected from one of the five that I created and taken to a 'new level'. For this I decided to add colour, but also add the character into a scene. This scene in my mind had to give credence to the back story of the character as well. As such I chose to create a 'dojo' scene.

Colour Pose

This was the pose I selected from my list, mainly for the flow of action and expression. I also rendered the clothing and added colour to this final pose to give it a more animated and animation feel. the Skintone colour I found online via google. This allowed me to colour pick a reasonably nice skin tone inside Photoshop.

Final Pose with Scene

My final pose with the scene I painted. This scene is meant to represent a dojo or martial arts gym which he practices in. I also added the shadow to give him a sense of 'grounding' within the image, as he is a cutout from another file.

I am overall very happy with the final result!

Character turn around

Well, this has been the hardest thing for me so far in Animation. The turn around's really started to do my head in, in particular the 3/4 turns. I think in general however I managed to figure them out fairly well. My character really feels like it is coming to life. I actually had begun my Turn around before my poses, but I did not finish my turn around until after my poses, majorly due to the nature of getting it as accurate as possible!

Kung Fu Panda was my main influence for my poses, but also my character's physical features.

Turn around Sheet

Final Turn around Animated

Poses Sheet

I was really unsure how to pose my character, so I searched some martal art poses, and found this useful image from Mavinga.com. These became my resource, however I still had to compete with the fact my character is not your 'average' martial artists, but rather a rather fat one. Because of this I had to do a lot of trial and error sketches underneath the character to which I later removed.

Reference Images

My final poses

Overall I was very happy with the final pose, I get a feeling of flow and movement from my character and I believe overall I worked out the intricacies of these poses with his belly being the major defining factor.

Assignment One - Height and Body Design

Now that I have achieved the face that I want, it was time to turn my attention to the height, which unfortunately caused me some grief!

Height Chart

I decided to go with a 6 head design, as 7 seemed far to lanky and disproportionate, and 4 seemed far to childish in design.

I also worked after that on looking at the angle of the body or "posture". This changed somewhat later on as I found that for his back story having such a shockingly bad posture made little to no sense.

Silhouette

At the end of that class, I had some spare time to work on some silhouettes, which gave me a more fair idea of how I wanted my character to look and move. This helped me exponentially with deciding that my original posture was terrible! 

Assignment One - Emotion Sheet

So, Its been a bit too long since I last updated this blog, so bare with me!
Assignment one has been very interesting, using concepts that I have learned in my classes to create my own specific character design.

One of the first requirements was to create an emotion sheet for our little characters. Originally I had designed another face to use, but decided against using it as it didn't appeal to me or my background in which I wanted to go with for the character.

Emotion Sheet

Overall I am happy with the design - It is as I imagined it, I also think the emotions are obvious enough to most people as to what expression is being posed.

I obviously need to work on my line art, as it is fairly messy!

Attack on Titan - Shingeki no Kyojin

Possibly one of my favourite anime's of all time, is the series called Attack on Titan. It is a Japanese show based on giant Titans who attack the last stronghold of man. It is based on a Manga / Comic series.

• The first episode debuted April 6, 2013.
• The Manga was written by Hajime Isayama, the Anime series was created by Tetsuro Araki
• The Studio was called Wit Studio Production I.G
• Won the Kondansha Manga Award in 2011. 
• Was nominated for the  4th annual Manga Taisho award
• Second highest selling Manga series of 2013
• 30 million volumes sold
• The Anime series won during the Newtype Anime Awards - Best script, Best director, Best soundtrack, Best theme song, top female character and Title of the Year.
• It received the award of best TV animation at the 2013 Animation Kobe Awards.
• The Colours and style are bold and intense, there is a lot of technical drawing, particularly background scenes. Nothing is simple about the style, yet the style is beautifully done, and really encaptures you into the scene and story. The animations are smooth, and unique, no one animation is overplayed, and each titan has its own 'personality' as such.
• The dark side of Attack on Titan appeals to me, plus the amazing visuals, story line and plot. The animations are so smooth and the background painting is so effortlessly done, it really adds to the vibe and feel of the show. The soundtrack and audio for the series is superb and fits really well within the show's theme.

My Animation Inspirations!

First and foremost, my favourite animation has to be the simple, yet very effective and widely renowned in the gaming community, CarbotAnimations.

Carbot creates parody animations normally featuring 1-2 minutes in length weekly based on popular video games, such as Starcraft, World of Warcraft and Diablo.

Some information about CarbotAnimation

• His first episode debuted on Youtube two years ago. Since then he has produced 108 animations between 1 to 2 minutes in length.
• CarbotAnimations are created by one man, Jonathan Burton. 
• He has his own Studio called CarbotAnimations, but was recently hired for his works by Blizzard Entertainment, to create more animations for their games.
• It has not been nominated for any awards, due to the nature of his work, and his audience. All his works are currently online and featured almost exclusively on Youtube. He does however have 442,000 subscribers. With his most popular video seeing over 2 million views, and many of his 108 averaging over 1 million.
• Carbot's intended style is simplistic, but based around comedy and parody. He takes well known issues in gaming, and turns them into something funny that many or all people can relate to. Carbot animates frame by frame using Adobe Flash, and has even provided some 'how to' guides on his workflow.  His animations are simple, yet flow extremely well. His sense of movement, audio and timing is simply perfect.
• Carbot's animations appeal to me, because they are something I can relate to as a gamer. Not only this, but they are simple yet extremely effective. He shows that one man can create great and successful animations by using some humour and putting in the time.

Here he has done a parody of the Trailer for Blizzards latest Diablo III expansion : Reaper of Souls.

Carbots Animation

Blizzards Actual Trailer