Professional Development FMP

Over the past few months and weeks I have been neglectful in updating this blog of mine and displaying the content that I have produced. These are some of the things I have been working on as I have been working on my final major project and other well as other exercises.

This scene that is beginning to take shape in these images is the penultimate scene in my animation where the protagonist discovers the secret of the mountain and reverses the destruction that was threatening the village.

 

 

These images below depict the contents of the opening scene, minus the protagonist. I experimented a little with the sculpting tool within MAYA and found it to be quite simple to create effective-looking rock formations.

Here we get a scope of the hero’s quest ahead of him as he reaches the last peak before the mountain and is truly tested.

Filling the gaps was tricky to work with by simply using the tools that the sculpt menu had to offer so I individually picked each of the misplaced vertices and aligned them to the adjoining plane to a position that looked appropriate.

There is still much work to be completed within these scenes but I am currently pleased with how they are progressing.

Here we have my character model for animating the character within the 3D environment.

Determining my future Stakeholders

Today we have been tasked with discovering our potential stakeholders whom may take interest in our up-and-coming careers in the animation field.

In order to do this we’d have to be honest with ourselves and determine what we are interested in, what we are skilled in and where we can improve our abilities within the spectrum of roles that is required within an animation production team.

My main interest, in regards to animation, is 2D character design and animation. It intrigues me so, that a person is capable of creating a person in any environment, at any perspective. With hope and a lot of practice I should be at that stage in the next couple of years, if not before. It’s also been a childhood dream to make some cartoons, I have the opportunity now, let’s do it!

 

Presentation reflection

After having just presented my FMP presentation I feel a little disappointed in myself. I felt that some of the elements I produced for it were of a decent quality but what I lacked was quantity and variety. The asset I am most proud of in my presentation was my script and how thorough I was in my descriptions of in-frame content.

However, my self-indulged pride ends there as the rest of my content was much too thin and unsubstantial in comparison to my script.

I am lacking in:

• character/environment/design development
• concept art
• colour swatches and experimentation
• story art
• strong storyboard
• stakeholders
• research
• portfolio material

It feels like the wind has been taken out of my sails but I KNOW that I will make my final project to the best of my abilities.

The beginning of the end – FMP Log line

Perhaps somewhat misleading in the title, I was referring to the beginning of my last year here at Uni. Not long now before I finally depart the academic world and get me one of those careers I’ve heard such great things about.

To the point, the start of the planning stage for my final major project is upon me and we have been tasked as an exercise to come up with a narrative than can be condensed into an appealing log line.

I intend to make my project a film and have produced the log line;

‘To save his village; one man journeys to the mountain’

Setting is the first visual area I want to get locked down. To come up with an environment for the story to unfold in, grasp an understanding of the said eco-system and how it would respond to actions of inhabitants (people, animals) or how the presence of its contents (extreme weather/temperature/obstacles e.g. rocks, trees) could affect those within it’s environment.

The first step

The first day of our new module ‘professional development’ went well, I feel that will aid and assure me as we progresses through the final year and finally go out into the working world with an ambitious career objective.

To start us off we simply started with the topic of, displaying our work, as artists in the modern world via an effective medium. Our own website. On these we discussed multiple ways that would make it easy to share our work with the employing world.

Being able to look and see job requests like this on demand and what is required of the person to be hired will help me greatly in understanding what aspects of my abilities are in need of adjusting and training.

3D Environment – Resit

Here is a number of screenshots I took during the production process, everything went smoothly and I was confident in my ability to create the environment.

It was going well. Until I viewed what I had produced in the rendered viewport. I thought I was creating one of my best pieces of work, it likely still is, although for some reason the lighting and surfaces of the objects I had created and applied images to were altered, the surfaces were much brighter and appeared faded in comparison to the standard shaded perspective view in MAYA. I discovered this late into the production and decided that with all I had produced starting from scratch was out of the question and so I exported what I had produced in Playblast as it was the only way I could maintain its likeness to the original appearance

Narrative Animation

Here I have created my final piece for my narrative animation module in my digital animation course. It didn’t go quite as planned. Even though compared to my last animation I withheld grand ideas that would require a lot of work, I just wasn’t able to manage my time successfully. I felt so confident I would be able to produce something of fantastic quality, I feel as though I’ve let myself down.

Though in saying all this, watching the video gave me a good laugh.

Enjoy

Character Animation Assessment

Here is an animation I created for my first assessment in my Character Animation module. Here I have not created my own rig, instead due to poor time management and organisation.

Although the rig is not my own I spent a lot of time understanding it’s structure and how to manoeuvre it through the space in MAYA. I feel I was able to capture the movement relatively well.

Ship in the rain

Here in toon boom harmony I have created a rain animation using particle software that allows multiple droplets of rain to fall into frame from the top of the image, along side other particles programmed to splash, giving the appearance of unsettled water.

This was achieved through the settings of a number of nodes which can be viewed in either ‘composite’ or ‘node view’ in the window menu tab. Through these options we were able to apply images to the moving particles that became the rain and was able to direct this ‘gravity particle’ to fall in a way that resembles rain.

with the ripples, a premade animation was attached to the particles that became the ripples and a lifespan of the particles to appear and disappear were assigned to the duration of the ripple’s animation.

Particles

In todays narrative lesson we learned how to manipulate particles through their emission (source) planar (direction/control) and kill/age (end stage/final fate)

It was quite interesting and has opened up a range of possibilities for my upcoming animation.