CAGD 493 Animation Portfolio (Semester Two):

Week 13:

Coming to a close soon, school is getting near the end. I worked on some animations for 495 and also focused a bit on my 545 class. Also wrapped up some rigging assignments recently, but can’t show work for that. Here’s the 545 stuff that I worked on:

Week 12:

This week, I worked on my 495 animations. I got to work on my clumsy intro and I worked to get the loop working. I still want to get a figure-eight pattern going in the COG, and I’m currently working on that with a locator and a motion path. Here’s what I have on that:

I also am currently working on 545 shots and another 495 animation for the joker intro and victory animation.

Week 11:

This week, I worked on my 545 shots. I implemented the background that same gave us and I also put in some lighting to my later shots. I need to implement the earlier background for the rest of my team and make an fbx with lighting so we have consistencies across the board. After this we need audio and it’ll just be polishing up our shots from here on out. Here’s my second pass compilation:

Week 10:

This week, I continued my blockout on my rubber shot. I ran into some overposing issues so I decided to cut back on the amount of poses when my character bites into the scallop. I decided to add that later when I fix the timing on the animation. I also am realizing (watching back) that I posed out the poses with arm and leg movement but neglected the spine in a lot of them, so I’ll have to adjust them the further I move on with my animation.

I also worked on some animations for 495. The first victory animation was my original idea for a clumsy character in Builder’s Brawl, but after some review and suggestions, I made the second victory animations. This is one of the animations that might play after the player who controls the clumsy character wins.

 

Week 9:

This week I continued working on things for 495, 545, and I did a small amount of touching up on continuing blocking my Rubber shot. I spent most of my time fixing up my shots for 545, as I haven’t done a lot with them this past couple weeks. I’m starting to go into the labs more on my free time, so hopefully that’ll translate into the amount of work that I get done for these next crucial couple of weeks. Here’s Rubber:

Week 8:

This week I worked on some 495 work. I had to rework my whole animation for the arms because they bugged out. I wasn’t able to quick fix them or use Euler filter so I had to reanimate the arms in fk. I got stuck for a while and finally figured out that the problem was my Euler filter. I fixed the arms and I got a new Push updated:

I also had to fix a little bit of the jump animation, but I got it working. Sam thinks I do nothing all day but I don’t think he understands that I can’t throw a 90% complete animation on Trello, and I had to spend almost 2 class periods reworking an animation that I already finished before, I hope that this is our last update to the rig or I think I’m going to stop reworking my animations, we should’ve had this figured out earlier on. Here’s my jump:

Week 7:

This week I didn’t manage to complete a lot of many things. Most of my time this week was allotted to rigging and completing work for my 545 class. I got some work done in 495, but I’ve been somewhat drained from the amount of work I’ve been putting into all my classes only for it not particularly further me as an animator. Oh well, once again I digress. Here’s my blocking progress from last week since I never got around to posting it:

I want to get this blocked out in it’s entirety so I have enough time to actually put polish work into it. That’s all for this week.

Week 6:

This week I continued working on animations for 495. I also started my blockout of my new Rubber scene while implementing the video within the scene. Unfortunately, I don’t currently have access to the files for the blockout so it’s progress will be a mystery until I reveal my progress next week. I continued transferring animations from the concept to the new rig. We’ve had about 4 or 5 different rigs, and each time I reference I’m not too sure why we have so many different rigs. It wouldn’t work in game and we need to determine how to get an IK controller onto the model (or else a couple of us will have to redo our IK animations and make them FK). This makes it harder because animations that are meant to be done in IK shouldn’t be done in FK. It’s difficult to emulate one with the other and the animation itself can come out looking wrong.

Anyway, here’s the push animation:

I also ran into a lot of issues with the new rig and a lot of this week was focused on working with our rigger to break the rig and try to get problems fixed. They have since been mostly fixed as of earlier today, but here’s one of the many problems that I ran into with the new rig:

It unintentionally created some really fun animations, but it’s ultimately impossible to work with and my work was put on hold.

Week 5:

This week I re-recorded my reference for my Rubber assignment. It took a lot of time to get the reference near perfect. There was always something wrong with my acting in the different shots that I couldn’t ever get it right. I finally did something almost passable and workable after 48 different takes and almost 22 minutes of straight recording and acting out an 8 second clip.

I also as always did stuff for 495. I wish I had more time to balance actual animation progress with life things, but for now I’m stuck doing the same repetitive things and my skills aren’t growing as an animator (545 and 495 included). Here’s a push and an updated idle that I worked on:

They’re both okay as animations, nothing really exciting or even portfolio worthy. I’m trying my best to move forward on animations that I actually will use in my career demo reel but I keep getting sucked into the monotony that is this program.

 

Week 4:

This week I continued working on my 495 assignments. I’ve been busy doing things this week so I didn’t even have a chance to film a reference for 493, and I’m a little upset about it. Between classes and extracurricular activities, I’ve been lacking and I need to start honing in on my progress in 493 if I’m going to find a job after I graduate.

Anyways, I digress. Here is a third victory concept I made for the game Builder’s Brawl:

We also finally got our character model rigged! I did a quick little idle for the game (although after revision and taking Sam’s notes, I’ll have to do a different style of idle that has to do more with rotating/swaying than breathing).

That’s most of what I’ve done this week, disregarding my other classwork. I hope to punch it in overdrive because realizing that it’s week 5 I really haven’t accomplished much.

Week 3:

This week I continued working on my 495 work. I made two victory animations as visualization concepts and then a quick little push visualization concept.

The push is the first among these, but it’s very rudimentary. I just wanted to have a quick visual to show what the final animation might look like.

Here’s the first victory pose. In the final animation I would tweak the jump timing (speed/spin/height) and definitely would tweak the final pose, it’s not really a strong pose and it needs work. Other than that I’m pretty happy with how the camera work turned out.

The second victory pose is basically just a pose-to-pose shift of leaning against the victory flag. It’s nothing special, but I’d like to figure out some possible camera work for that.

Finally, as the actual piece that I’m doing for 493, I’m animating a bit from Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen. I think this piece will be fun to animate and I’m excited to tackle this for the next few weeks. Hopefully I’ll finish this and then move on to another dialogue/exaggerative piece of animation.

Week 2:

This week we kicked off a lot of our animation work in 495. It’s still all just concept at this point, but I’m excited for the real deal when we get our rigs up and running. Unfortunately, time has been flying and I did very little personal animation work, but I did put some work into my 495 blocked animations.

This first animation (shove) is a mechanic for the game I’m working on. This is just a rough concept blocked out on one of the body mech rigs so the team can visualize what it might look like.

After the push assignment, I was assigned to a victory animation. I plan on having three separate victory animations done over the course of the next 2 weeks and I’ll also begin working on my “Rubber” character animation this coming week. Here’s the beginning of my semi blocked/splined victory animation:

I’m not sure why it’s a weird aspect ratio, but it doesn’t really matter because it’s not finished and the timing isn’t right anyway. It’s just there to show my progress. I’m excited to see what’s in store for me this semester, and can’t wait to get the ball rolling.

Week 1:

This semester I want to hone my animation skills even further. I’d like to do more than one animation this semester so I plan on doing two facial animations in addition to a highly exaggerated overlap-esque animation. I’ll finish my Gordon Ramsay animation that I started last semester, and then I’ll carry on with two other fun animations that I can use in my portfolio. I also made a new calendar for this semester to organize myself a bit. Now that I don’t work at Denny’s, I have a lot more free time and a much more flexible schedule (since now I work for Lyft and I can drive whenever I want/need to).

I left the spaces where I have free time blank so they can be changed to whatever I need to do (and so that they don’t cluster my calendar too much).