Pantomime Animation

Class 4, Intro to acting is a wrap. We had two shots this term, a pantomime and dialog. The dialog shot carries over into the next class but here is the pantomime shot. Comments and crits are welcome.

Idle, Ready, Fire!

I've been working on states and behaviors for game characters. I really like working with this character I created because it is easier to imagine him as a soldier since he really looks like one and is not a generic model acting like a soldier. But anyway here he is; Idle and breathing transition Ready and breathing transition and then firing the rifle.

He's Alive!

It's my creation, hehehe!...ahem...well, now that I have finally finished the rig for my Gun Trooper character I can start crafting all sorts of animations with it. This is a ready/idle state that will be used as a jumping off point for other actions.

Swordmaster Stu

This is a body mechanics test that I animated in class 3 at Animation Mentor. The sword formation is actually put together from a couple of different reference videos that I found on the web. I combined what I thought was the best parts from both into something new.

The Stu rig is provided by Animation Mentor

Animation Demo Reel

Here is my latest animation work

I also have secondary skills in modeling, rigging and drawing, please see my past blog posts for more.

Rigging

It's another week and I've completed another project. It's not an animation shot but, I've learned a lot from rigging characters that is useful in understanding how to use rigs better for my animation shots. So here is a pic of a character I modeled and rigged. Of course, the model was already completed some time ago, it was just the character rig that was completed.

To see the geometery deformation better here's a shot without the joints and control curves.

Quadruped Run Cycle

It's a new week and I have a new animation cycle, this time I made an attempt at a quadruped run cycle.

All animation was done by me, the rig was provided by crcjax via creativecrash.com

Kila Walk Cycle

Another week has gone by and that means another animation test. This time I worked on a female character walk cycle.

The female character rig was created by Anthony Ward.

Attack!

Here is my second animation test with the Grae Character, for some reason, I can't seem to find the IK switch so I have been animating it in FK which seems to be more of a challenge...but that's animation.

Also, here's a version of the run cycle that I did, now with textures!

All the animation was done by me, the Grae character was created by Anthony Ward.

Game Character Animation

Now that I am on a semester break from AM, I decided to work on some animation for games to keep up my skills. The following animation is a run cycle for a game character created by Anthony Ward.

Back in action, AM class 2

So, we're back at it again at Animation Mentor and aleady about 1/3 of the way through the semester already. My new mentor is Dimos Vrysellas, a super talented and friendly guy who has worked for Dreamworks, Reel FX, Nelvana, and many other studios.

I have really taken a liking to his workflow for animating a shot, which is a blend of traditional and CG methods. Basically, this method stresses the blocking phase of animation by putting all your overlap, arcs, paths, etc. before moving into the graph editor. By doing this, we get to spend more time posing out the character or 'drawing poses' rather than working with spline curves, which is not very stimulating.

Here is a rough pass on my first shot of class 2, the shot called for 'Ballie' to jump over a gap. My goal for this shot was to improve my workflow and focus on the physicality of the jump.

While shooting reference for this I had the idea for Ballies 'story', he's a secret agent infiltrating an enemy position, so that is the idea behind the acting. As for my next shot, we have many options to choose from including Parkour, which looks super fun but I'm saving that for later, I chose to animate a simple dance move. There probably is no need to explain because this image will sum it up:

to be continued...