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Work-In-Progress

2011-05-09T18:57:00.001-04:00

NEW POST!

2011-04-04T23:36:00.001-04:00

I have like two minutes to spare! Plus, I just had an energy drink... *devious smile* HA

Anyway, here's what I've been making and working with for the last TWO and a HALF months. It's the 3D version of myself, only better looking :)

We modeled, textured, and rigged them from early January to early March, and the last few weeks we've been using them to animate our Lip Sync project. I don't remember if I've talked about that much at all. I'll post mine up here sometime in the next few months ;) OR you can check my facebook because I think I just posted it... can't remember. Rambling!!

So now we're spending the rest of the semester doing another 15-20 second animation, but this time with two characters. This is the first time we're animating a scene with two. It's gonna be fun! So I'm planning that right now and that's why I made these two pages. I posted them on my school forum for Computer Animation so if any other juniors want to use my rig for this next assignment they can email me and I'll send it to them. I have to find a guy who's character I want to work with, that also looks like it would exist in the same world. The teachers told us today that if we have to have a character of the opposite sex for this project. Again, sounds fun!

Spring Semester

2011-02-10T02:25:00.000-05:00

So I've been a bit naughty and have been neglecting my posting duties. But in my defense I've been a VERY busy young lady. It's been super fun though so I can't complain lol even though my last post was basically just me venting about blah blah blah.

So what have I been busy with?! Well, glad you asked...

This semester I have the lovely Animation Pre-Production class, which is the class where I come up with senior thesis that I'll be working on all next year. The pressure is on! We pitched 5 stories the first day of class and the faculty picked one, and we're working on that for the first 6 weeks. Then right before spring break we have a full-faculty critique where we show our character, environment, and prop designs along with our minute and a half animatic. It either passes or fails. After spring break we then work on a different story for another 6 weeks, and then it's the same process where it either fails or passes. One of the two stories needs to pass in order to move on to senior year.

Then in animation class we're currently working on modeling our self-caricatures and rigging them before we work on our lipsync animation. The caricature I did of myself I've previously posted is now in 3D! And it looks awesome if I do say so myself...

Soon, probably during spring break, I'll be able to post A LOT of work. Right now I'm just stressed with all my homework and also trying to put together a portfolio and resume so I can apply for a summer internship this summer at an animation studio.

CrAzY TiMeS

2010-11-07T00:54:00.003-04:00

I should probably be working on homework right now, but sometimes you just need to vent and let all your frustrations out. Like right now, I'm so stressed I can barely think straight. It's like the CA department faculty go together and had a meeting on "how can we make our students more stressed?" lol

I have a major assignment due for each class within two days of each other, and it's starting to get real difficult to manage my time between each project. In CA we have the Push/Pull, which I haven't had time to work on my animation because of problems with my Maya file. I finally got that figured out though, so tomorrow I'll spend about 12 hours in the labs working on it, then come back to my room and work on it some more before class starts at 8:30am Monday. For DFA we're doing an environment value painting, and here's a little preview of that:

I'm not too worried about this project as I am the others. My DFA class is the only CA class where I'm actually getting good grades. I think that's probably because I've always been good at drawing, it's sort of my comfort zone and doesn't take much effort. It's more natural.

My One-Minute Story animatic for Concept class is something I'm worried about and have been stressing about for a week now. We could come up with just about any story we wanted to do for this project, so I came up with a love story between a zombie and a human girl. It wasn't the greatest, but it was funny and witty. But..... my teacher didn't like it and suggested that I either make the story more creative or start from scratch. AFTER I had already been working on it for about two weeks. I've been pretty brain dead for awhile now and nothing I came up with was better, so I started from scratch. All that work I put into the story is just trash now, and I have to have a working animatic by Tuesday at 12:30. There's even more pressure because Karen and Billy (the other two Concept teachers), are also coming to our class to critique our work. I'm really nervous because I only finalized my story yesterday. I'm not going to be sleeping very much in the next couple weeks.

All I know, is that I need some motivation right about now. I don't mean to complain, but it's hard when you haven't had free time to just relax in over a month. I actually took a little time to try and have some fun on Halloween, but it just stressed me out more afterward.

LipSync Character Design

2010-11-06T23:53:00.005-04:00

Our last assignment in DFA was to draw a caricature of our self. We had a couple class sessions where we went through everybody in the class and we all drew each other for ten minutes at a time. Below I have some drawings of my classmates I did

Here are some drawings that my classmates did of me

The next few pages are just some experimentation I did with face shapes before moving on to trying to make it look more like me

For the turnaround, the 3/4ths view had to be in an "attitude" pose, so I did some quick poses before picking the one I liked best

This is the line drawing for my caricature

I did a quick color study for this assignment, I had a tough time deciding if I wanted to go with blonde or dark hair. It's kind of funny, the new teachers I have this year have no idea that I'm actually a blonde :)

I finally decided to go with my new hair because it's more unique with the blonde sections I have, it'll be fun to make later on

Before moving on to doing a fun-on color painting of the 3/4ths drawing, I did a value painting. That's means just shades of gray.

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This is the final with color
(click the picture to enlarge)

I really liked the way this turned out, and when I get free time I want to fix a couple things. I would have gotten an A instead of an A- if I had time to make a few tweaks. Like adding a specular highlight on the eyes, fixing the fingers in the drawing, and working a little more on painting over the lines in the hands. The whole point of the color painting was to see a preview of how it will look in 3D, to see the volume.

The last assignment we have in Concept is to take this caricature we developed in DFA and create a 15 second story animatic. We're going to come up with a story situation, write a script, and then record our voices in the sound room.

THEN... next semester we take our design and our story, and we're going to animate it in our CA class. So come April 2011, you're gonna see me on the big screen :D

The Witness

2010-11-06T23:01:00.000-04:00

The Witness project for my Concept Development class involved your character to witness something. I came up with this idea that it'd be funny if a vampire turned to ash and was then vacuumed up. This is what that turned into:

Pose Test

2010-11-06T22:48:00.000-04:00

I just wanted to give you guys a taste of what the early stages of animation tend to look like. This is a pose test of my Push/Pull animation exercise, and it's basically just blocking in the camera shot and the poses for your character. Even now I've made a ton of changes to the poses since then.

This is my natural animation which is due before Thanksgiving break, and then after break we do an exaggerated version of this project.

Over Thanksgiving break I'm also planning on doing a 3D render of my character and I'll post that here too cause I really like Pete :)

Point A to Point B

2010-11-06T22:42:00.000-04:00

So in concept class our second animatic we had to do was called Point A to Point B where we have a character, wait, get this............ go from point A...... to point B.

I was busy focusing on CA so I really didn't have many good ideas and decided to do a piece on a mouse in a maze. Here's my final story:

The Door

2010-09-27T04:51:00.009-04:00

In Concept Development class this semester we're going to be doing a series of short, about 30 seconds long, animatics. The first one we did was called "The Door," in which we have a character find a door and interact with it. The purpose of this wasn't so much about the door, but rather the emotion and the action points.

In fact, Ringling has a connection with FST (Florida Studio Theathre) in Sarasota. Once for every Concept project we do our entire class drives down there and we act out our stories. If it's possible, sometimes professional actors will act them out too.

Here's a link to a collage of the reference video I got at FST for my story: Door Reference

Make sure the sound is on, it makes the story even more awesome!

My story is about a young mermaid, Cindy, so stumbles upon a door while out exploring one day. When she gets to it, she's in complete awe and tries to open it, but the handle won't budge. A bit frustrated, she shoulder rams it, it swooshes open, and she falls through.... landing with a slap and a splash on hard ground. We see that she has fallen in a butcher shop, just in time to see a fish murdered. When she looks up she sees Dave, and he's dreeeeamy. They make goo-goo eyes and she bats her lashes to lure him to her, at which she pulls out her own cleaver.

Waiting . . .

2010-09-27T04:37:00.005-04:00

So this was probably the most fun thing I've worked on so far this semester. We had to come up with a scenario where Artie is waiting for someone or something. I decided to make him a girl, Emily, and have her waiting for the results of a pregnancy test. Enough said :)

I do have a few problems though, mostly about the pregnancy test in her hands being a bit jittery. This is also a rendered version I did real quick, instead of a quick playblast like the Silhouette or Walk Cycle, so the lighting isn't the best it could be.

Silhouette

2010-09-27T04:35:00.002-04:00

This was our second animation exercise for the semester, and we were give a week and a half in order to finish it. Basically, we were given a list of six words to choose from; we were to then choose from three of those six words and create a story. I came up with a story about Artie being bored at a bar when all of a sudden he sees a pretty lady and tries to flirt with her. She ends up slapping him and he's completely bewildered. The main purpose of this assignment was to work on poses and to make a clear silhouette.

It's OKAY, not my best. I definitely ran out of time on this one, not to mention my homework in my other classes was piling on.

Finding Hidden Characters

2010-09-27T03:42:00.001-04:00

In my DFA (Drawing for Animators) class we've been spending the last month using different methods in order to create original characters, unique characters. Ultimately, we're supposed to end the project with a design for a character for the Push/Pull assignment, which we will animate in our CA class the rest of the semester.

The first technique that Jon, my DFA teacher, had us do was draw random silhouettes. Just use the tablet and draw them in Adobe Photoshop or Corel Painter, not trying to make any recognizable thing.

After doing that, we had to pick a few of our favorite shapes and do three variations for each using the same silhouette. As you can see from the drawing below, I got some pretty funky-looking things from the same shape.

Then, we pick our two favorite and create a final design. At this point we're allowed to "break" from the silhouette shape if it's needed to make a more appealing character, etc. Here are my final silhouettes:

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The second technique we used were to collect photographs, from online and taking some ourselves, of textures. Just anything where we see a design hidden inside. The first image is just a collage of some of the textures I found, the ones on the right being from online and the ones on the left ones I took with my phone.

Then we had to draw over a few of the textures to see any designs we could

We were supposed to then choose two of the designs we came up with to make into final characters, but I didn't really like anything that I came up with so I did a few more extra ones. I came up with these two designs in the end.

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The final technique we used was to draw doodles, just use the tablet and scribble around.

We basically did the exact same thing as before then, drawing over our doodles.

I only really like my camel so I chose that as one of my two to finalize. The other one I also did extra, like in the textures. Here's what I came up with:

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Here are my finals all put together :)

The last part of this assignment was to pick one of your final character designs for your Push/Pull character. Since we're going to be animating them, it had to be a biped character, which only really left two of my designs to choose from. I ended up picking both of them ;) I used the body shape from my cat-like character, and put some of the design from the little guy in the bottom left corner on him.

Here's my Push/Pull final character! :D

TADA! And it only took a little over a month...

Another School Year

2010-09-27T00:54:00.001-04:00

It's been six weeks since the 2010-2011 school year started, and I'm already exhausted. I was lucky enough that this year I'm living in the Bayou Village apartments with my three roommates; Erica, Tarrah, and Kayla. It's been fun living with them, not to mention having a kitchen is AWESOME! I don't have to eat microwavable foods now if I don't want to :D

Here are some photos of my apartment and my room.

Movin-in process

Finished room

Walk Cycle

2010-09-27T00:42:00.015-04:00

So our first CA (computer animation) assignment was to do a walk cycle that portrays a personality, and we were given one week to do it. The character's name is Artie, and he was given to us by our teacher to use for the first three assignments. I just went in and gave him a different look by turning him into a mime (I redid the textures and modeled a pie and hat).

It was a bit odd working in Maya again after so many months away, so it took me a bit to get re-accustomed, but I think I managed okay. I'm fairly happy with my walk, but I wish it was more "snappy" instead of being so evenly timed. The hand is a little too fluid too lol

Figure Homework

2010-05-10T19:44:00.001-04:00

Here are my pages from my Intermediate Figure class I took last semester. Some of the pages I'll have to make sure I save for my senior portfolio.

Editing Techniques

2010-03-26T23:45:00.000-04:00

So in concept class we were split into groups to develop stories for our animatics. My group came up with the story of this old guy named Hank who lives in the desert all alone with only his cacti. There's been a drought for a long time, but then one day a giant container falls from the clouds and smashes most of his cacti crop. Inside the container was water, and so he brings his last cactus with him when he decides to trek across the desert to the mountains to climb into the clouds and find where that source of water came from. When he does make it up there he discovers there are these "cloud suckers" that have been harvesting all of the rain water from the clouds and collecting it, which has caused the drought.

We then learned film editing techniques and had to use them to make short animatics about a section of the stories we made. The first is contrast, which I used to show that there's been a drought -- Contrast Animatic

My motif animatic has a bit to be desired but it's okay. I wanted to use repetition of the feet to kind of show Hank getting ready for his, but I don't think I showed the feet enough -- Motif Animatic

Simultaneity is basically two events or scenes taking place at the same time, that eventually converge. In this case I did Hank climbing the mountain and the cloud sucker -- Simultaneity Animatic

Last, there's symbolism. I tried to come up with something to symbolize Hank and the cloud sucker's eventual encounter and chose a mouse and a scorpion. The only thing I wish I would have done was have the mouse trying to take food from the scorpion so that it's more of a survival thing -- Symbolism Animatic

Robie the Robot

2010-03-26T22:25:00.000-04:00

So for our next animation assignment we had to model Robie the Robot Banker in NURBS, which (in case you don't know) are basically primitive shapes that you can manipulate. That's the best I can describe them, but they're a pain in the ass to model sometimes. Anyway, Robie is awesome, he looks like this if you haven't seen him before:

We weren't really given all that much time to make him, but he really isn't that difficult. The problems that I kept running into were tools not wanting to work. Most of the time if you wanted to do something to a piece of NURB geometry, like cut it or something, you'd have to do it twice because it wouldn't work on the first try. The boolean tool kicked my ass but I finally conquered it!

Robie Turnaround

So here's what I was able to do. There a couple things that I would like to change like lightening the background a bit so it's not so dark in the corners, fixing the shadows so they're more soft around the edges, and change the ramp shader on the eyes because it's a bit weird right now.

Animation Quadfecta

2010-03-26T22:06:00.000-04:00

We started off the spring with a couple of animation exercises using a character rig that the teacher gave us to work with so we didn't have to go through all the hassle of modeling and rigging; we could just get into the work that way.

The exercises included doing a finger point, a walk, a head turn, and a take. Here's what I did, although the only one I really like is the take at the end, the rest are kind of "eh, nothing special." I didn't get too good a grade on these either.

Quadfecta

Months of Neglect

2010-03-26T21:56:00.000-04:00

Its been almost five whole months since I've updated my blog. I meant to during winter break but it just never happened, then I got busy with school and told myself I'd do it over spring break. Then it never happened. I'm here now though and taking time out of my busy schedule to finally update and put some new work on here. Part of the reason why I haven't had time is because I'm overloading this semester, so I have 6 classes (18 credits). I barely have time to do much else other than work. I'm never overloading again because I've had to do too many all-nighters this semester because my animation and concept classes are on the same day, and they're the most work and the hardest. Lucky me! lol

I think that I put up pretty much everything from last semester, so I'll put some of my work up from the first half of the spring term. This weekend I'm going to be scanning in a bunch of my recent figure drawings so I'll be posting those as well.

GO SEE HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON!

Ravens

2009-11-03T12:59:00.004-05:00

Here is the third section of my concept assignment where the goal is the create depth and use dynamic staging in our animatic. Here is the raven assignment where a raven hits a flower pot off of a ledge, which hits a man walking down the street:

FIRST PASS

SECOND PASS
I was told that my shots were good and there was plenty of depth, but my story wasn't as clear, so I did this idea, but it's not as dynamic as before

Trailers

2009-11-01T13:02:00.009-05:00

Some trailers for movies I'm looking forward to seeing during winter break :D

Avatar - December 18th
This is a new trailer that just came out

Princess and the Frog - December 11th

2012 - November 13th
Here is the second trailer, and HERE is an exclusive clip of the film

Primitive Theater

2009-10-26T19:05:00.010-04:00

So our second assignment was due last Friday, the Primitive Theater. I'm feeling okay with it because it's definitely better than my ball bounce so I can tell that I'm improving. I wish we had another week with it so that I could fix my lighting, which I hardly had any time to finish, and just tweak it a bit more... maybe make the characters more saturated so they stand out from their environment more. Overall I'm liking the motion, and I think I'm getting the hang of how to create overlapping motion in 3D.

Anyway, here it is is: PRIMITIVE THEATER

Enjoy! :)

Lots of Homwork

2009-10-26T18:46:00.006-04:00

My latest Concept homework:

We've been doing projects that deal with creating depth and using dynamic staging. The first project was a story involving frogs; one is playing a banjo poorly, someone throws a tomato at him, and he jumps and dodges it. There are all these rules yada yada yada about only having 5 shots (so only 4 cuts), etc.

Here are my FROGS

The second assignment I just turned in today and it has two parts. The story involved rats playing pool, where one chalks his cue stick loudly causing the other to miss his shot. The first part of the project was to do an animatic using photographs you take.

Here is my PHOTO ANIMATIC

The second part was then to take those photos and use them as reference for drawing your own rat animatic of the same story.

Here are my RODENTS

Enjoy!!

Animatic In Progress

2009-10-08T18:58:00.001-04:00

So here's my ALMOST finished animatic for Concept Development class. I still need to work on the audio, add some background music to set the mood, and do another pass on the drawing to add more entertainment.

Watch Video Here

Here's the revised version when I added a couple more drawings and sound
Watch Video Here

AVATAR

2009-10-04T16:25:00.009-04:00

So... this movie looks absolutely AMAZE-A-ZING to me! It comes out on December 18th this year, so I'll be home by then and I can watch it with everyone. I shall be dragging my friends to the theater to see this, and I won't take NO for an answer! The movie Avatar is directed/created by James Cameron, and apparently it's his first film in 12 years (since Titanic came out in 1997).

The premise of the story follows a former Marine, Jake Sully, who was paralyzed in combat on Earth. He has been selected to participate in the Avatar program, which will let him be able to walk. He travels to Pandora, an alien jungle moon filled unbelievable creatures. It is also home to the Na'vi, a humanoid race that lives in harmony with their world. But the humans are stretching farther into their world in search of valuable minerals, and forcing them to defend their existence. Jake has been unwittingly recruited to become a spy for the humans, since humans cannot breathe the air on Pandora, they have genetically bred human-Na'vi hybrids known as Avatars. They are living bodies controlled by a human "driver" by linking the driver's mind to their Avatar body. Yet, in true James Cameron fashion, he has turned it into a love story :) Jake meets a young Na'vi female, Neytiri, and begins to fall in love. So he then finds himself caught between the military forces of Earth, and the Na'vi.

Trailer Here