To go forward you have to learn from the past

I was looking through my old uni work again today from 2005 and omg some of it makes me cringe. especially my short film. soooo much floaty animation with poor posing and dodgy animation.
Granted during the last 6 months of my uni course I was doing a law unit, modelling,rigging,texturing and animating 2 game characters and then there was my short film that went for minute and a half where I did everything from modelling 2 characters setting up two facial rigs including the character rig as well as animating and sorting out dialogue.

Was a very hectic and busy 6 months where I dont think I got very much sleep and a lot of animations especially those in my short film where rushed out in a day or even a few hrs.
Looking back at it I wish I had have chosen a more simple idea that involved one character in a room trying to get something off the top shelf that he cant reach. but being a young animator I was aiming for the sky.

Anyway figured I would put up a few of my animation exercises and animations from uni. I wish I had all my early ones in 2d and even simple ones using balls and flour sacks but unfortunately have no idea where those files are or if I even have them anymore.

Here's my showreel that I had at the end of my 2 year uni course. Dont ask my why it has linkin park as the soundtrack :P


The lumberjack: This was a game character for a game that a bunch of friends where making at uni. This character was really rushed but looking back it the animations came out pretty well considering I spent less than a day animating all of these. I still think the death animation is my favorite.
Looking back the arms could have used a lot more work. but then again this whole set of animations was really only at first pass. could have used more time.

I had so much fun setting up this facial rig :)

I like to push the prammmmaloooooott

Heres a few screenshots

Late night Ball update

So its after 3am I have been working on a realistic bowling ball drop.
It's slowing getting there. There are still timing issues especially witth last couple of bounces feel a bit unnatural.

I used some awesome reference off of youtube
The only difference with this one is that it moves sideways instead of staying on the spot. I could have just made mine go sideways as well but figured that would be too easy.
I think thats why my bowling ball is feeling a little off though seeing as that reference footage has a bit of the energy being dispersed to the side.


I also worked out how to get video's playing on a plane in max (wasnt hard :P)

Once again any critique or feedback is welcome, however seeing as no one is following this blog I doubt ill get any. Hello *echoes*. Ill prob post a bunch of ball animations up on 11 second club for some feedback once i've given them all another pass.

anyway Im off to bed. Looking forward to getting in some more ball animations tomorrow will probably try some sideways bounces because they are more fun :)

A bouncing ball animation

Here's the bouncing ball animation I was working on this afternoon. Think it turned out OK. It still needs a bit of polish. especially on the squash and stretch impact frames as I was having some issues with scale in regards to rotation.

The biggest issue I had this afternoon was trying to find a working Frame counter for 3d studio max (OMG it took forever) finally found a script. It doesnt look pretty but does the job.

I also spent about 40 mins trying to work out where to upload my video's and how to embed them in this blog. I finally got everything working and the quicktime controls showing so yay.


Anyway here is my animation. any feedback is welcome. I'll hopefully get a few more ball animations done this weekend. and maybe some posing

A busy yet surprisingly productive week.

So it's been about 5 days since my last blog update. I should really try to keep this blog updated but this has been a really busy week. done overtime a couple of nights this week with Age of conan pushing new dungeons and faction revamps to live.

Also I have a new blog yay. figured I would split up the level design one and the animation one :)

Either way I have still managed to stay surprisingly constructive. I have been watching animation lectures on the basics of timing and spacing and giving characters weight. As well as workflow.
I'm feeling a lot more confident about planning out my animations now instead of just rushing into them which is what I used to do and would generally result in a giant mess.

I've also been slowly reading through Ed Hooks - Acting for animators, I've had this book for years but havent properly ever read it through. It's an amazing book and I would really recommend it to anyone who is into character animation. It has really gotten me thinking in a brand new way when it comes to what my characters are doing on screen and why they are doing it.

I'll summarize a few of the main things ive taken from the book so far.

1. ) Always remember what your character is coming from, what was your character doing before the scene what will he be doing afterwards.
2. ) There are 3 kinds of conflict, conflict with self, with situation and with other characters. Those are your obstacles.
3. ) A scene is a negotiation of conflict.
4. ) Be wary of overacting. 

I also bought a sketch book and a small notebook and have been trying to get some basic drawing done and taking notes of ideas whenever I can. My drawing is still pretty bad at the moment and I hope to slowly work on it on the side and get it up to a semi decent level where I can atleast do poses and concept out ideas.

Free Rigs for Maya and Max 
 I found a site called www.creativecrash.com that is amazing it has a treasure trove of free rigged ready to animate characters for 3d studio max and maya  (I really need to learn animation in maya some time soon )



Plans for this weekend
This weekend my plan is to continue on with my basics and focus on timing and spacing, what better to do that with than the good ol bouncing balls. 


I found this awesome free rig setup that includes a bunch of pre-rigged balls and models of different types from bowling balls to basketballs
http://www.creativecrash.com/3dsmax/downloads/character-rigs/c/simple-ball-rig-v--2

My plan is to spend atleast 15 or so hrs this weekend getting some ball animation done. as I didnt get a lot of actual animating done during last week as was too busy reading up on theory and watching lectures :P

Acting it out, timing and spacing

Read an interesting article tonight.
http://www.11secondclub.com/helpful_hints/acting_it_out/
Addressed the importance of acting out your animations in front of a camera before starting to animate to get ideas on poses. which is something that I have tried in the past but havent really ever given enough time to. I think to much of the time we are so keen to get into the animation itself we dont spend enough time actually acting it out and coming up with interesting poses.

I also found the section on indicating very interesting. (Indicating is where when someone says they are hungry the do something like rub there tummy or when someone is talking about the sky they point to the sky) After reading this article I realised just how much indication is poorly used in animation. I myself can think of numerous times during uni where I couldn't think of what to do with a characters hands and would have them use blatant indication.

Besides that watched an interesting lecture on timing and spacing and think its going to be my main focus over the next week or 2 :)

Another interesting webinar on timing and spacing can be found here on animation mentor which is pretty awesome that I watched tonight http://www.animationmentor.com/webinar/replay/2010-timing-and-spacing-in-animation-explained.html

Balloons!!!!!

Had a productive day today :)
After doing a few bouncing ball animations reading a bunch of animation articles I wanted to make something pretty :P

I found this awesome website that has a bunch of tutorials on it that are simply amazing.
I made a balloon which was way easier than i first thought it would be

http://www.polygonblog.com/3d-birthday-balloons-in-3ds-max
Tutorial for people interested


It's in a tiny res because i didnt have time to wait 12 hrs to render it :P
It turned out okay but could have looked better if i spent longer placing balloons correctly


I think the single balloon looks awesome. I'm definetly going to have to think of a reason to use a lot of balloons in an animation or a level at some point :P

Bouncing Balls

So I spent yesterday afternoon reading some very interesting articles on
http://www.11secondclub.com/resources/ There are so many good resources there. Am going to aim to read atleast 1 of those articles each day. I've also started reading through animation book Acting For animator's. I've owned this book for the last 3 years however have never fully read through it so am also going to be aiming at getting through a chapter of that each day. It has some really awesome concepts and idea's when it comes to animating.

In terms of actual animation I spent bit of yesterday and all of today prowling the net for various tutorials. I came across http://www.bauervision.com which has an extensive set of video tutorials and free rigs I figured I might as well start back at the basics and have been going through the good ol bouncing ball tutorials. I've been remebering a lot of stuff as well as new stuff especially about the curve editor.



I also found a number of Z brush and 3d s max modelling tutorials that i'm keen to try out at some point. so many things to do :P