BUILDING A KETTLE - MAYA EXERCISE

In the first week of term, we built kettles using Maya. The idea was for us to use our imagination and creativity to make basic kettle, and then to use that base model to make kettles with more interesting characteristics. 

After building the base, the main tools I used to create the form was the extrude tool. 

When zooming in to the model, there were a few problems in the mesh that were causing unwanted results externally. Going up close and deleting the face or edge that was causing it was how I solved the problem. 

My final result

CREATING A CHARACTER - DRAWING FROM LIFE

We did a life drawing exercise during week 2 in which we drew each other instead of drawing a naked model like we had done during the first year. The idea behind this was so that we could try and open up a little bit and break away from the regular usual style that we draw with. Below are my sketches of Agbons, Shae, Harriet and Edgar.

CREATING A CHARACTER - CONCEPT 

The character I originally came up with to prepare for modelling was Ferahl, pictured below. She is half wolf, half human and is always up to no good. I ended up going for a totally different character. Something more interesting and unique.  

PLANT CREATURE

I began by sketching out some faces. I knew I wanted to do a plant/human hybrid creatures so I started there. 

This is the main face I decided on so I finalised it and worked on its body.

I did a shot of a key scene that the character would go through during the animation. I liked the idea of a plant creature doing some gardening so I'm going to expand on that idea. 

SCENE THUMBNAILS

Below are some thumbnails of key scenes that will take place during the animation. 

The first scene takes place in the house of the character. He is sitting on his sofa watching TV. When its time for him to get to work, he gets up and grabs his spray bottle then leaves the room. 

A more detailed shot of the character in his house

Below are the shots in which a bend in the story occurs. The character is picking fruit off the trees and notices that one of them has a whole inside. He looks around and sees what is responsible for it.

ANI107 - CHARACTER PERFORMANCE

FINAL PIECE

Below is the finished clip for my character performance animation. Overall I found the process to be quite challenging despite having experience in lip syncing and character work in the past. What made this difficult was that the dialogue I was animating to was very natural and life-like. As in, it was not scripted or acted out like movie dialogues are. It was just a recording of two people having a conversation and as such, the speed of speech and conversational stutters were hard to tackle. 

I'm also really bad at both drawing hands and animating hands, which proved to be a bit of a road block. Having the character have his hand on the side of his face with a phone in his hand was not easy but I pulled through in the end.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofl1JGGy9gc

DEVELOPMENT

I will be animating to a sound clip from a podcast called "Hey Ash! Wat'cha Playin'?" In the audio, Anthony Burch is telling his sister Ashley Burch about a time he was working in Blockbuster and started crying during one of his lunch breaks. I always found the clip hilarious and the way the Anthony described what had happened with such detail and expression that I could imagine exactly how it played out. I thought it would be perfect to animate to. 

It's only the first 30-35 seconds that i will be animating but there is a lot of fast speech that will prove challenging to animate. It is also a phone conversation so Anthony will have his phone to his ear the whole time. This will add a welcome difficulty to it, not only because I am terrible at drawing hands but because I will have to animate secondary animations with a character who has his hand on the side of his face the whole time. But all this is fine as I want to push myself and do things I haven't done before.

Below is an animation I did last year where there is a lot of lip syncing. I've been using it for a bit of a referencing and to also see where my mistakes where and how I could improve. 

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Going back to the fact that I'm not very good at drawing hands, I grabbed a collection of pictures of people talking on the phone and decided to draw them, just for a bit of practice. I know that I want to be using different camera angles so I would have to get used to drawing them from a variety of positions. 

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When designing the character who would be acting over the audio, I decided to model him after the actual Anthony Burch. I did this so that I could use his actual face as reference for the words he spoke. There are loads of videos of him on the internet because he used to be a Video Game Journalist on Destructoid.com and had made a series of videos called rev rants in which he would single out a gaming topic and rant about it. 

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What I had in mind was that the entire animation would take place in the kitchen. Anthony will be talking on the phone and using the kitchen props to assist in his expressions. Opening cupboards, holding a bowl, maybe pouring a glass of milk. I want to make the conversation look as natural as possible. I took some photos of my kitchen and used them as reference. The pictures below will be more or less the same shots I will be using. 

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ANIMATIC

ANIMATED SCENES

WATCH YOUR STEP - FINAL PERSONALITY WALK

I had a lot of trouble with making the Animo turn the corners the way I had drafted it out. I wasn't sure how to give and take between having his center area/hips rotating and his whole body rotating. I had made his right leg twist and lead the turn but it still wasn't looking like I wanted. Most of my time was spent completing the second walk cycle because I thought the corner turning would be easy. The second walk cycle turned out to be more of a jog than a fast walk like I had planned, which I intended to fix but once I began to struggle with the corner turning I tried to focus on that instead. 

I think I kind of hindered my own learning by giving Animo the kind of walk I gave him because I found it difficult to envision how a person walking like that would turn a corner. In the end, I recorded myself walking like he does and turning a corner like he might have but I didn't find it helpful. It actually made it slightly more frustrating/confusing for me. 

Although I like the walk I made, it could still be improved a lot further as I admittedly didn't spend enough time trying to tweak it. Also, I both could and should have done more tests, not with just Animo but with the ball and tail as well. It would have helped me notice certain things much earlier on which would have prevented me from struggling in some of the places I did within this project. Overall, I'm not really satisfied with the final result but it's taught me how important it is with Maya to plan ahead and do things in the correct order, otherwise those mistakes will come back to haunt you.

Below is a revised storyboard with annotations.