This gallery contains 1 photo.
I’m very much immersed with the technical side of animation a lot of the time and I was never someone who drew a lot (part of why I like CG so much!) but I notice that a lot of … Continue reading
2D studies
Gallery
Category Archives: Animation Tests
Blurp bhMultiples test
I animated this quick shot in an hour or so to test out my bh_Multiples script to see how the workflow works in practice (vimeo.com/149532518). Not totally successful but I learned a couple of things doing it and it was fun to do. It also gave me some ideas for how to improve the script.
iAnimate shots 2015
These are shots I animated while studying with iAnimate this year. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot while working on them. Big thanks to my awesome teacher Ted Ty and to all at iAnimate. Hope you enjoy them!
A common mistake when animating walkcycles..
Looking back at some older walkcycles I’ve animated a few years back the other day, I noticed I kept seeing the same mistake and I’ve seen it in other walkcycles from beginner animators too. So I thought I’d make a video discussing it. Hope it helps!
Selfie of the Living Dead
Even zombies are getting in on the social media thing..
A quick and fun shot I animated to celebrate Halloween 2015.
The rig is from Sony, a free character from Hotel Transylvania they released last year.
Champagne Simulation – Maya Bifrost.
One of the fun parts of my job is that I get to wear a lot of hats sometimes, this time I’m learning about liquid simulation using Mayas Bifrost system so that I can simulate a character drinking champagne in a short I’m working on for a client.The plane you see moving is a Bifrost ‘Killplane’ I animated to delete the particles as they leave the top of the glass so that it looks like the character is drinking them.
It took a while to get a handle on the settings in Bifrost but I’m very impressed with how fast it is, definitely a great addition to Maya for this kind of work.
To finish this off I cached the simulation out to Alembic and retimed it (I slowed the glass animation down by half to make collisions work better) using a MEL tool I wrote. The finished cache will be sent to C4D for my client to render.
Super Beard – Desktop Edition
I’ve got critters living on my desk… quick test of the camera tracker in C4D.
Character rigs from iAnimate, animated in Maya and exported to C4D for lining up with the camera and quick render. Rather than going deep into the compositing side of things I added a couple of disks to the scene as contact shadows and animated those so that they follow the characters and change size as one of them jumps.
Laban Study – featuring Blurp
A study piece I animated back in 2012 when our teacher at iAnimate taught us about applying the Laban principles of movement to our characters. I learn best by doing so I put this together to try to better understand the concepts. I’m sure I could animate it better now but I think most of them are reasonably successful in illustrating the different kinds of motion I was trying to grasp.
Turnaround animation test
I attended a masterclass with Kyle Balda (ILM, Pixar) over the weekend and he demonstrated his approach to animation which uses a layered method rather than working pose to pose. I’ve only ever used that method for walk and run cycles so I was curious to try it out with something different. A very simple test but I learned something from it that I’m sure will come in handy for more complex shots.
Musical Walks #2 – Funk
Another music-inspired walk cycle test, this time with the great Jupiter rig from iAnimate. For reference I used the 2d ‘attitude walk’ in Eric Goldberg’s book Character Animation Crash Course. Tricky to push the poses as much as the 2d version with a 3d rig but a lot of fun to try. Just to make it more of a challenge I tried to make it look at least decent from all angles rather than just one fixed view. I had some fun with the music too, a good excuse to blow the dust off my wah pedal 🙂