Back to Maya

     Ahhh, Maya, Maya! I am back to 3D animation and I have missed it a bit :P Since now we have been developing a sweet project at school, called Commercial Project. The project is about plastic pollution, it comes from an NGO we are working with called Plastic Change.  At the moment the pre-production is over so we are back to our usual assignments while the Graphic artists are modeling the characters and sets for the commercial. Good luck to them as they need it.

This week we welcomed our new teacher Kevin Koch, he is an experienced animator, check out his  Demo reel  and his blog Syncrolux.

     Our 2 week assignment was to make a Monologue piece, so we can practice some lip sync. It was a tricky assignment and after a long break from not animating I forgot how my good workflow was. It was a bit of a hassle when I remembered that I work mostly with spline even from the beginning. Also I had to change in the last day one of the key posses, which could be avoided from the beginning. Even though everything was a nice exercise, would have liked to focus more on lip sync, which the time didn't allow. Luckily we have a polishing week, I guess I might polish the lipsync and also clean some 2D animation.

Here is the result :)

     The Test or Exam, which sounds official, was basically an animation scene. We had to do a ball kick and a reaction to what's happening to the ball.
     We wrote a story about the character and we shoot reference. I think the exercise went well and I have learned something. And that something is to continue trying and changing with the chance of not coming back or not getting the OK result you already had; and very important do not forget about breathing.If you don't breath things are getting tensed and you get a headache, therefor work is not productive.
Also I learned that sound gives a lot of life to a shot where you character breaths.

This is a Pre Monologue warm-up, we did it in one day. I tought I share it because it's funny.

canDies:

Blog
http://steve-animates.blogspot.dk/2013_01_01_archive.html - a great blog filled with thoughts from Steven Hawthorne

http://www.navone.org/HTML/Tutorial_DashTake2.htm - facial animation tutorial of Dash from Incredibles

Resourses
http://www.romanim.com/norman_database.php - Norman customized rig

Animation 3D
http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/september12/entry/RY3uah - such a beautiful scene

http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/november10/winner  - creative

Animation Stop-motion
https://vimeo.com/195379908 Monkey from Kubo and Two strings