Face posing

Just messing around with some face posing, going to do a dialogue shot next so I am doing some testing. Here is the first one.

3d turnaround scene test

This is a pretty good representation of what the final render will look like.

War, what?

I'm thinking about doing a war scene with some good realistic human body mechanics.  Here is a test render of one the characters.

Appeal

What is appeal in animation?


       This post isnt very planned, its more of me just going through this in my head struggling to figure this appeal thing out.  So I will apologize for the lack of structure.

    As some of you may know I have been working on creating a new demo reel by the end of this year.  It has been about six weeks and I have created 2 new shots around 13 seconds each.  They can be found Here  and Here  It is now time to start with something new.  I am either going to do a new comedic dialogue, or a pantomime acting/ body mechanics shot. I want this new shot to be very appealing, what does that mean for animation?  Well...

    It is hard to describe it because it is something you feel.  Animation is composed of many things, good posing, silhouette, staging, timing, lighting, and editing to name a few.  I believe that a shot with appeal has all of the above in it working together.  It is this harmony that I believe to create appeal.  It is like a smoothy.  You have many ingredients that work together but if one of the m is missing something doesn't taste right, its hard to put your finger on it but something is not right.

    I think the  best way to figure appeal out is to look at a shot with a lot of appeal, what a revolutionary idea!  So the animation I chose is the opening animation(which Im sure is by design) of Dave Logans Animation reel  here is the link to his reel.Daves reel

    That was just awesome, right? 
    Lets figure out why.

    First off it is a great piece of dialogue, a good dynamic line, with some audio hits that the animator can use to ground the animation.

   There is very clear posing and silhouette.  Examples below.

     As the pictures above show.  the lighting he has create has very intentionally lit the character so that there isn't a very distracting background, and really clears up the silhouette.  White character on black background.

    Look at those mouth and eye shapes.  They are all working together and it is very clear in what the character is thinking and also his attitude is.  It is this clarity that I am striving for every animation.    Another thing, it isn't very long, the whole shot is around ten seconds.  So you dont lose the attention of the audience.

  I can go on forever analyzing this great piece of animation but creating this post has and really breaking down this shot has helped me figure out how important posing is for our animations.  and how much posing effects the appeal

I must get back to work now. 

Lip sync Pass

Here is a lip sync pass brought pretty far.  My mentor Sean Sexton told me about this workflow, animate lips to get mechanics working, then move to the blocking, and start to refine whole animation until polished.  Here is the lip sync

Layouts

Here are 2 different layouts for my shot.
Layout 1
Layout 2
I like the second one more..I think it is a simpler.

Suggestions?

New Dialogue Shot

        So I have been studying a lot of rending techniques for Maya and Mental Ray but I have also been looking for some new dialogue for a new shot I will be working on.  I have posted THIS video which has ten different audio clips that I have chosen to narrow down.  I have chosen number 2.

I have also created the male character using Bishop 2.0
Behold, David!!!

Rendering Tests and New Reel

Hello again, I changed the order and finessed some animation on my demo reel, here is newest update.  DemoReel

Down below are two rendering tests, The top one is a SSS shader by ninja animator Brad Kinley.  The other is some modifications to the regular bishop shader.  I really like the SSS shader!!

Check out Brads awesome blog and short Bandito here :BradKinleyAnimation

Business Cards

I also designed some business cards.   

Riot Games Test animation

Hello, Its been a while and I've got an excuse. 

          A few weeks back I got an email from a recruiter from Riot Games asking me to do two animation tests. One was a walk cycle, and the other was a 3-5 second attack where my character had to jump in the air and perform a landing attack. They gave me 2 weeks to finish it but only 20 hours to actually animate. Also, because it is game animation I had to animate from all sides and also at 30 frames per second. 2 things I have never done before.

       Things I learned is that animating from all sides(not just the primary camera)is well worth it.   I will never take any short cuts again. and 30 frames per second is no big deal either because I spend a lot of my time in the graph editor.

 Here is a link to the walk cycle. 
 Walk Test
 Here is the link to the attack.
Attack

I hope you enjoy the test.  On to other matters, like packing for the AM graduation!!

11secondclub Part_3

Here is some more progress..I need to animate the eyes in both shots and continue polishing.

11secondClub Part2

Here we have the first shot about 80 percent there..

11second June (Lip Sync)

I am trying a new workflow my mentor Sean Sexton showed me. One of the cool things is that you get the "hard part" of all the mechanics of the lip sync before I start blocking out the poses. Now later on in the workflow I can really work and sculpt the mouth shapes but still have the working mechanics. No more fighting for the appealing shapes while getting correct mouth shapes.

Old AM work

Here is my first lip syc assignment I ever did.  Audio is from The School of Rock.  I did some polishing and rendered it out in a simple manner.  Im not sure if I will use it on my demo reel.. Click Here to View

Hello Internet

  As you can see in my "About Me"  I am a character animator from Louisiana.  I have created this blog to organize my online portfolio and to give updates about my journey I am embarking on in the animation industry.