Animation Refinement

Smoothing things out

I was late today but in the time I had at class I smoothed out some of the arm movements because they were a bit extreme for an idle animation. It made the swinging of the arms as the NPC looked both ways. I'm currently working on relaxing the hands. 

Jerwin and I tried the legs with IK but with the time we have left it would be too hard to stabilize the feet and we may as well leave the legs be. 

Idle animation

Character Animation

Large NPC looking around

The goal is to have a nice subtle animation of the man looking around vaguely threatening.

I didn't finish the standing animation today but I animated a lot of the core. I'm learning about keeping things small but trying to put as much character into the animation as possible.

Idle Animation - Research

List of thing that need to be animated

Background Character

• walk cycle, 1 for each
• idle animation
• smoking
• drinking
• sitting down
• looking around
• looking frightened

Resource Links

• idle animation tips
• 10 best animation tips and tricks
• 10 killer tips for better character animation

Self Reflection

Today I got my grade for Assessment 2: Environmental Game Asset Summative (20%). I'm disappointed in my final grade being a B- (66%). Whilst I did "good work overall", I feel as though I could've done better. I stand by my decision to use nurbs because I wanted the player to walk around the signs and I don't like it when you see the edge of a sprite in a 3D game, I always find it a bit world breaking personally. The polycount was definitely too high, I completely forgot to reduce the polycount which is something to keep in mind for the next time I model. Always keep things optimized.

The concept art was not polished enough. I'm struggling to find a balance with concept art, a common problem in my portfolio is that it looks too illustrative. Next time I do concept art for a project I should search out concept art of games in a similar vein as the project I'm doing at present so that my standard is what's necessary. A challenge was rendering neon tubes, I was unsure how to show this. I understand that concept art is focused on conveying ideas and materials, I didn't do this effectively because I drew for very low poly and untextured. 

Ultimately, the thing to take away from this is that everything could potentially contribute to your portfolio, so it's worth making something as nice as you can and going that extra mile. 

To begin Thinking

Today we had a lecture from Dane about using this term to make a brief for a transdisciplanary piece of animation/X. I am so excited, and I have begun thinking about ideas.

The following is what I scribbled during the lecture. I'll post scans of it tomorrow if I get a chance.

Anima Sculpt//cinema//ampitheatre paper mache
Start white with outlines like anim layout get proressively more final. Play with life vs death
Cinema, or theatre? I like modern tech. Sound architecture. Cinema on wheels?

So there, that's the garbled mess I made with very strong visuals happening in my head of layout art becoming finalized animation in a gradient but represented in an architectural format. I think I would love to end up with a sculptural piece. I am very intrigued by the offer to show animation with something in stasis.

I ran the idea past Dane and there was much confusion between us, but I found the most understandable idea that I conveyed was "Interpretation of Spaces as an animator vs others".

I'm currently working on some lotus blossom charts. The idea is to have either a huge blossom. Or, what I'm currently doing which is creating separate ones for different disciplines such as animation space, architectural space, landscape space. I want to look at all different types of spaces whether they're geographic or lesser scale. I don't want to limit myself initially with kinds of spaces so I'm gonna be exploring all kinds but I believe for simplicity I will be dealing with physical spaces that are tangible such as cities, countries, chairs etc. Rather than abstract concepts such as spaces in thought, mental planes, spiritual spaces, spaces on a page, spaces in language because I think I would fall directly into untranslatable yet interesting and deeply experimental thought processes.

So yeah, first thoughts, second week of term 3. First time thinking about our assignment!