Olympics Project - Volunteer Group Project

It was difficult working on this project while keeping up in my classes, but it was a RIDICULOUSLY awesome experience. I think the more group projects you work on, the better. I just learned so much in such a short period of time. I also got to meet and work with lots of great people outside my class, and we all got to struggle together to work on this while keeping up in our 5 week terms. It was really awesome.

The project was to come up with an animated short on the theme Olympics, that will be screened for a children's charity event. Our main character is a little girl who's inspired by the Olympics events she sees on the TV and she imagines herself in the Olympic games as she plays in her backyard. There are a lot of excellent artists who worked on the concept art (and their stuff seriously looks amazing), but I couldn't help myself to try too! Here are some rough paintings I did while the real artists in the group did their thing. Hahaha:

And quick story thumbs to help out our story artist:

scratchy thumbs thinking about olympics events:

Then I did some texture tests. The art direction out of short called for a 2D painterly look for a 3D animation (which was super interesting to me), so I modeled out some stuff super quickly in Maya and painted them using Photoshop. Then it was a matter of playing with lighting and changing up the dials for the shaders to figure out what matched what they were looking for.

First attempt:

There's also a dreamscape segment, so I did another test for that (with direction from a teacher who suggested using planes in Maya with painted brush strokes we can do in Photoshop):

Then I continued to test, by modeling out stuff quickly and texturing them, getting feedback from teachers and peers (who were working super hard on other aspects of the animated short). Unfortunately these stills don't include the super beautiful background mattes that my peer painted for the project.

Video of the backyard (really newbie motion-sickness inducing camera movements that I did with the idea that our art directors would just scrub through. Hahaha. My mistake. I just wanted to show what some views could potentially look like from the animatic we had). Because we had planes, each shot's backyard had to be catered to the camera angle.

and dreamscape progress:

I accidentally turned off the visibility of the dome, so it turned out black, which I thought looked cool, so I kept the render.

Then I was asked to do a styles sheet, which made me think, "What does that look like?" So with feedback and examples from my teachers and peers:

Elaborated more on dreamscape sequence:

Accidental render that I kept. Has an athlete that my peers were working on. It's satisfying when you see assets move down the pipeline and how we're all working simultaneously on the project. Lots of care went into the characters that everyone (except myself I guess. haha) worked on in terms of modeling, rigging, texturing, and animating.

Here's some renders of the transition between the dreamscape and backyard. I just made a render of the dreamscape and applied it to a dome in a new scene with the backyard.

Haha. I ghettoishly modeled a teddy bear in seriously 1 min (made a sphere and used sculpt geometry to pull out a head and arms. Then just two more spheres for eyes) and it ended up surviving until the final render! Probably because I kept him small and unobtrusive. I made him cuter for the final frame where he's lying down on the floor like a defeated athlete (will grab render from school if I remember).

Anyway, WHAT AN AWESOME EXPERIENCE! I had so much fun! It was also crazy fast. 1-2 months to do everything from story pitch to render. I also think it's the best when you have the chance to experiment and try to do something you've never done before. You learn so much that way!

Animation 2

Ahhh. This class was interesting. A lot of hard work, and in the end, everything still needs infinitely more work! Plus I was working on a side volunteer project that required a ton of time (will post that in a little bit). Anyway, 5 weeks to storyboard a story idea that will fit in 12 secs, create an animatic, do lots of video reference, make a walk cycle specific to the personality of the character, and then do the actual animation finally (which required a lot of time because I think I was changing key poses after each critique all the way up until the last day, and really struggling to polish).

Getting timing down, hitting the right beats, and fitting everything into the frames allotted was difficult. It was a crazy 5 weeks! I can't imagine how quick professional animators have to be in the industry. So much in awe of them! Animation is something that really requires a lot of time and practice to do well, and then you're still learning new things for a lifetime I'd think to become a better animator. Then of course, there are naturally talented people who can get it right away and instantly know how to portray the personalities of the characters so clearly. <--jealous.

After pitching our story with a storyboard, we created an animatic (or I guess it's called a moving storyboard) really quickly. Here's mine. I had the guy with food in his teeth, but I changed it in my actual animation to having tissue bits on his face from shaving nicks.

Then we did video refs and tried to cut it down to the 12 secs max. Hahahha. I have a version with the girl with food bits in his teeth so I put chunks of seaweed on my teeth to film. Then I faced a mirror during recording where I can actually look at myself in a mirror behind the camera to try to make it more genuine. Then I changed it to lipstick so I really smeared it on. I looked quite like a monster for all my video reference. But NO SHAME NO SHAME! Animating gives you an opportunity to be animated and uninhibited I think. Anyway, I had a volunteer help me out with the boy part, so I don't want to embarrass him and post it on here.

Here's my walk for the girl. (For our animations, we used the Morpheus Rig, which is really fun and excellent! Thank you Josh Burton! I'm sure lots of aspiring animators are very grateful to him.) My girl character is girly and confident, so I gave her lots of hip action, a forward chest, and muted down arm swing (after I looked at some model walks).

Here's a stepped earlier version of my animation. I ran out of frames for cushions and overshoot, so I had to cut a lot out later. I liked the part where she looked to the side and back, but it wasn't necessary for the story, so OUT IT WENT.

Final version (or at least what I had to turn in by the deadline). STILL needs SO MUCH WORK.

Rigging

I rigged my musk ox from modeling 2. Pretty fun to make it come alive. Also very complex. I'd like to rig a human realistically and practice corrective blend shapes. That would be the most useful! My musk ox rig is still a little broken... Rigging is definitely something you really have to explore and experiment on your own in order to understand it completely. Otherwise, it's just following directions, and what's the point in that?