Finally done with the animation. It actually got finished today, and a bit of the beginning of the animation got changed in the last minute. This is why it isn’t of the same quality as the rest, so I’m not happy with it at all! I’m fairly happy about how the rest turned out though.
Also I just used perspective view very quickly, to render, so the angles don’t really work that well.
It’s been quite a while since I animated, and it’s horrifying to look at that block turn into a rough.
This is the stage where I’m starting to see the end of the tunnel. The main animation is there, but still lacks something.
I started to do the lipsync with phonemes, but it took too much time, so I started doing jaw movement instead. This sped up the process significantly, and made it less like a chore. I tweaked the mouth afterward, to form the phonemes.
The dynamic facial expressions aren’t there at the moment, but I have put in a sad look on him, to help me “feel” the character more.
This is the stage in between block and rough, simply because I made the block half-finished before I made it into the rough animation.
The timing is getting fixed and the poses tweaked a bit. I tried to experiment a bit with the lipsync, but decided I should delay it until I started closing in to the clean animation. I am not too sure about the animation and poses in the beginning here, but there should be time to fix it.
I started on the animation by blocking out the key poses, and tend to use quite some time at this stage. This is important, because I want the exaggerated poses to follow through to the final product.
My inspirations have been Invader Zim, with it’s economical animation and hysterical characters, and the stereotypical Dr. Frankenstein-scientist type we all know and love.
Here’s an .avi-file of the block-in-progress (Max wouldn’t render to .mov for some reason):
When the voice actor(James Harris) sessions were over, I started creating a very rough and quick animatic of how I wanted the final animation to be. The camera is supposed to go closer in on the scientist, as he gets more and more intense and frustrated. It was made in Photoshop and Premiere.
I have been working hard to finish the previz and presentation, which I presented this friday.
The previz was based on the animatic, but with clearer camera moves.
The presentation was terrible. Sure, they liked the previz, but they didn’t have much faith in me pulling it off.
So I will have to try and convince them to let me continue. I’m thinking of removing one of the shots (shot 2), meaning one less matte painting. The lava, that they mentioned, might just be based on stock footage with a lot of fumes covering the view.
There’s some convincing to do Friday this week. I’ll have to prove that I can make a matte painting and some camera tracking.
Some simple geometry will be modeled, based on a Pete Draper tutorial on how to create a volcano. I will then set up a camera, render and paint over the render in Photoshop, and project it back onto the geometry in 3D Studio Max.
The same thing will be done for the rest of the shots.
about me
I’m a 25 year old norwegian male student, currently residing in Middlesbrough, UK
My goal is to get a bachelor degree in Digital Character Animation at Teesside University, and get into the industry as an animator or concept artist(when I’m good enough).
This blog is here partially to push myself to become a better artist.
