Final Year Blog // Annnnnnd we're back
Blocking is a “Pose-to-pose” style animation, it would typically be used to help the animator get a general idea of what the timing will be like within the piece. When creating an animation, it’s recommended that you work on the key poses first. Then fill in the blanks after. Below is my attempt at it.
When creating my animation I used the following videos as reference.
So today we presented our Crystal Egg World trailer. Must say we’re fairly pleased about how it turned out as we all worked pretty hard on it. We worked well as a team!
We also had our projects switched around, now we’re working on building history and culture in our world through a game. We have to make some sort of sport or a game that the inhabitants will play. We need to think about how this game came to be and how it will be played.
That was a pretty busy one but we’ve finally got it done and out of the way. Today we were working on finishing up the title sequence and putting the rest of the trailer together.
A few days ago we stopped of at the continental market and found a stand selling crystals and stones. We thought we’d pick one up for research and photo opportunities for the project. Today we brought it in, along with the pre-made crystals the previous group made and took photos. We got a sheet of acetate and drew on it with different coloured whiteboard markers, then placed a torch underneath to project the colour. We then placed the crystals on top of the light to illuminate the crystals. Below are the results!
I also tried applying the textures I made to the models Rebecca and Phoebe made, but for whatever reason they wouldn’t hold on to the model so any time we imported it, it would just come out gray. From here because of timing we had to make the decision to make it one solid colour, giving the world a monochromatic feel. It would have been nice to have the textures but the scenes do look pretty good with the solid colours.
Once we had it pieced together I attempted to merge Caitlin’s music piece with my own and succeeded! It was pretty coincidental that Caitlin’s piece ended on the note that mine began on, so it was pretty simple to merge the two.
Today i worked on texturing the character’s Rebecca and Phoebe made, I exported them from Sculptris and saved them as .obj’s and then imported them into photoshop. From there I could paint directly onto the model.
After seeing Rebecca and Phoebe’s models, we decided that Maya might be the best suited direction for this assignment. Phoebe has been experimenting more with animating camera movements in Maya and seems to have got it down to a tee. I think we could easily accomplish what we’re looking for if we continue with Maya! We also think this because the stop motion animation we tried out didn’t turn out quite the way we wanted. It was only an experiment though so we’re not to bothered.
Recently Phoebe and Rebecca have been experimenting a lot with Sculptris and Maya and we’re beginning to think that this might be the direction we will be taking the animation. I began to play about with sculptris as well and this is what I came up with.
Today Alec looked at our Moving Arm animation, as always he gave us feedback on how to improve on it which was pretty helpful as i’m starting to figure out Maya.
When creating this animation, I re-read over what Secondary Action secondary action is.
“A Secondary Action is an action that results directly from another action.” Source: https://www.evl.uic.edu/ralph/508S99/secondar.html
We dedicated most of our time today to designing typography for our world and the soundtrack.
I looked at the xmen: first class sound track for inspiration. I decided to use the bass line in “Not That Sort of Bank” (video above) and then stuck to a simple chord progression. I also used the Condensator amp setting in garage band and used a pitch shifting pedal in order to create ambient and ominous sounds. Caitlin also created a piece of music so once we finished our pieces we worked out how we could merge them.
When creating the typography I looked at different crystal formations and how tessellations could be put together to make a font.
Image source: http://www.adventure-caves.com/images/Cristales_cueva_de_Naica
Image source: https://www.pinterest.com/nickiemillard/my-magickal-world-of-crystals/
Image source: http://www.grasshopper3d.com/group/kangaroo/forum/topics/origami-tesselation-variable-folding
The projects have been switched around again! Sadly Even and I have been separated after working with each other from Week Zero. Sad times indeed… But i’m with a new team now and after talking we seem to have well rounded team! Phoebe seems to be great at modelling and camera movements in Maya, same with Rebecca! Rebecca’s watercolour art is amazing as well. Caítlin is a great talent for photography, typography and music so overall this is a great team to be working with and I look forward to seeing what we come up with.
So for the trailer for our world we’ve been going through various ideas. We’re thinking that we might make a map, and have the camera pan over it. Then when the camera reaches a key location it will transition into the maya made location, then fade back to the map and move to another point where we’ll have another area of the map made in maya. We’ll look at the game of thrones intro for influence.
We’ve also been thinking of looking at video game intros for inspiration like a scene from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I felt that we should look at this one because it gives of the same feel that the last group tried to convey in their animatic.
Once we had things finished up and the drawings inked, they were sent to me to edit together. I used Final Cut Pro to put all the drawings together, and had them transition into each other smoothly after checking the planned timing of each slide. Below is the final piece.
Once i finished editing the version above, I had quite a bit off time leftover so I decided to try and apply colour to our animatic. I say “try” because I only got so far into it when final cut pro decided to crash on me… I lost all of it because i was stupid and save as I moved along! Ah well… I was able to salvage the first few scenes of it so here’s a demo of what it could have been!
So this week Alec had us animate a ball moving around an obstacle course. Our group got together and Emily proposed the idea of making our course a pin-ball machine. We all really liked the idea so this is what we decided to continue with. We all drew up some course layouts and in the end combined them all into one piece.
When designing it we looked at various pinball machine designs, we tried keeping all the key elements in it while keeping it as simple as possible keeping in mind I was going to have to model it in Maya.
Once I had made the course in Maya, I sent it to the rest of the team to animate. Here’s what I came up with.
Jack Creaner 
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