Robitcon 2012

A Merry belated Christmas and a Happy early New Year! A friend of mine was sending his brother to Otakon as a Christmas present and asked me to draw something to commemorate this event (and further surprise his brother). He wanted something crazy. We have a running joke in which I refer to his brother as a robit (robot) so we decided on a picture of his brother as a robit (robot) at Otakon. I went for a caricature style by combining a realistic head and a cartoon body, and paired it up with a Japanese advertisement-type style for the background. (He wanted something crazy so I gave him crazy!) Sooo happy to use my facial drawing skills for something outside of the classroom! Below you can see the steps I took to complete the finished piece:

Step 1: Draw out the Robit!

Step 2: Bring into Flash and fancy it up digitally!

Step 3: Awesome final image! The top reads "Robo Alex is here!" and the bottom reads "Large random kanji!" (Yes I know they aren't all kanji, there's a bunch of kana there too, but really, it's not supposed to make sense lol)

This project was a lot of fun to do. I'll have to do more in the future!

Hot Dogs

"I just want to lie on the beach and eat hot dogs. That's all I ever wanted."

Okay, maybe not me personally, but if you've ever seen the beach episode of The Office, Kevin admits tp this very fact. The last assignment for Naturalistic Animation was to do a lip sync. Something subtle based off live action (basically you can use anything as long as your clip didn't come from a cartoon.) As I was looking for a rig to use, I knew I needed something that would look natural with Kevin's deep voice. As soon as I saw this one (a custom Norman rig you can find on the resource page of the 11 Second Club's website) I said "YES. LUCHADOR." And so while other people used normal rigs in normal situations, I decided to make my animation about a down-and-out luchador who just wants to eat hot dogs. I'm special like that. I build the ring myself, and Mike showed me how to make blendshapes to deform/animate the ring so I could give it that something extra. Success! The youtube version loses some picture quality, but this is my favorite assignment to date. Enjoy!

Past and Future, Shot 5

You'll notice that my videos have switched from Vimeo over to Youtube. One day as I was looking at some of my past work, I realized that Vimeo had decided to cut the endings off of all of my animations. ALL OF THEM. It wasn't like that before, I swear! And so I am now posting my videos on Youtube. It takes a little longer for me to upload them, but you get to see the whole video so I think it's worth it. I'll start transferring my older stuff over at some point, but for right now please enjoy seeing my newest works in their entirety.




This quarter, along with taking my usual 3 classes, I also helped out on an undergraduate senior film.  Directed by Joy Hua, "Past and Future" is the story of a little girl who is torn between, well, the past and the future, but she eventually learns to enjoy living in the present.  I'm not sure if Joy ever posted her full video anywhere; if I find it I'll certainly link to it here.  In any case, this is the scene I worked on. (Note that I only did character animation.)

Gimbal vs. Local, Stepped vs. Spline: An Animation Revelation

I thought I'd take some time to share with you guys an important lesson I learned recently about how my mind processes CG animation. For the past several quarters that I've been at SCAD, I was taught to 1.) always work with Gimbal rotations and 2.) work in stepped mode until it's basically all animated and then switch over to spline, plateau, etc. On my last assignment for naturalistic (which isn't posted at the moment) I was doing just that -- I blocked everything out perfectly and was about to switch over to spline when what should happen? ALL OF MY TIMING WAS GONE. I'm sure you've all been there, that feeling of "Where did my beautiful animation go??" as you notice all your curves fighting against your every attempt at controlling them. It's like you have to reanimate everything to get it back to what you thought it would look like originally. It made me dislike CG animation, it frustrated me that much.

The problem was that my mind simply could not process that big of a change. I struggled to fix every little curve but the graph editor always seemed to win. My animation just didn't look the way I wanted it to anymore. I didn't understand it.

Then one day when I was presenting my work, I told that to my professor, that the stepped - spline leap was just incomprehensible. He told me to do something I never thought of doing: "Don't work on stepped. Work on linear, it'll force you to put the pauses in. And use local rotations, your arms will work better."

Don't work on stepped? I thought you HAD to work on stepped. That seemed to be what they did in all the classes, tutorials, industry videos.... I never thought to try anything else.

The next animation I started, I didn't use stepped. I worked right on spline from the get go (I prefer it to linear) and set my rotations to local. WHAT A DIFFERENCE.

Suddenly I could see my timing as it was happening. I could adjust things as I went, and the graph editor became my friend as it helped me along the way rather than overwhelming me at the end. And local rotations removed the possibility of Gimbal lock. It was amazing. Things made sense!!

I'm not recommending this technique for everyone. Some people work best blocking things in stepped and using Gimbal rotations. I guess the point I want to make is, don't think you have to animate the way everyone else does. Do what works for you! My technique may be different, but it makes sense to me, and it's brought life back into my animations.

Now then, back to work!!

3D Rotoscope Dancer

No, this has no connection to my past rotoscope project from Drawing in Motion. (Maybe it's my 17 years of dance classes catching up with me, that I'm just naturally drawn to study that type of movement? Maybe?) This was an exercise for my 3D Naturalistic Animation class. We had to find a video of a professional athlete and make our character act exactly as they do -- then adjust it so it looks natural to the character. I found a video online of this amazingly talented dancer and knew I had to use it. Who can bend like that? Honestly? Anyway, this file is pretty much done, though I would like to come back later in the quarter and tweak it some more if I can. You know, look at it again with fresh eyes. I'm not sure why this one didn't come up widescreen because that's how I saved it... oh well, something to look into I suppose.

The Lost Cartoony File -- Mocking Dwight

I was sitting in the computer lab, waiting for one of my newer assignments to convert to a .mov file, when I decided to go through my blog. It was then that I noticed that - gasp! - I never put up one of my cartoony assignments from last winter. And so here it is. Better late (very, very late) then never, right?

You'll notice that it isn't quite as glamorous as my other projects, and by that I mean it's totally a playblast and not rendered out at all. Well there is funny story behind that -- right after I made this playblast, my network decided to corrupt all of my actual maya files. POOF! GONE! This little video is all that's left. So all you SCAD people reading this, NEVER LET YOUR HOME DRIVE ENTER THE RED. EVER. EVERRRRRRR. *eh hem*

And so I ask you to excuse it's appearance. I wish I could have finished it like I had planned -- added more natural hand movements and other things to make it all polished and spiffy looking. But I AM happy with some of the subtle movements I managed to portray on the character in the background, like his little shrug and nose twitch. So let's just focus on that, shall we?

Soooo, yeah. Please enjoy "Mocking Dwight", the Lost Cartoony File.

Dwight Speech from Nicole Van Luvender on Vimeo.

SCAD, The Final Chapter

Hello everyone! I must apologize (yet again) for my lack of posts. I am finally back in Savannah for my last quarter at SCAD. As sad as it will be to leave, right now I am more focused on how awesome this quarter is going to be. I am currently taking Naturalistic Animation (which is a bit tricky for me so far, but I like that I'm pushing myself in a new direction) and a portfolio class (hurray for a more professional website and business cards -- coming soon!) and, best of all, 3D Collaborative Project, where I'll be directing my first ever student film!! We just nailed down the story and will be working on storyboards next. I won't say too much about it now as the quarter just started, but it looks like it's going to be really amazing. Together, Mike (who came up with the initial concept for the story), Miho, Jillian, and I have 10 weeks to crank out a masterpiece. Let's do this!