Caterpillar_Penguin

Alright! Caterpillar_Penguin is finally done. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have never animated in After Effects before. Okay, I've done some motion graphic-type stuff, but never any character animation. C_P is not a complex animation. It's a building block, a stepping stone while I figure out the strengths and weaknesses of 2.5D AE animations. Having said that, I also must say that I learned SO MUCH from this project. For those of you who are also new to this type of animation, let me share a bit of advice: After Effects lets you have multiple compositions within your project -- Use them! And plan the length of your actions accordingly. (Though it's generally better (and easier) to have to cut something shorter than not have enough to work with.) If you're creating things in other programs, export them as Illustrator or Photoshop files, if possible. They will come out cleaner and give you greater flexibility. And don't be afraid of the pin tool... it's pretty awesome when you get to know it.

I'm very excited to move onto a new project -- I've been plotting one in my head for the past day or so. Now that I know what I can and cannot do (or rather, what is simple and what is the really, really long way to do what should have been simple) I'm planning on moving onto more of a puppet-type animation. The working title is called "The Magician." Stay tuned for updates. =D

P.S.
You may have been wondering why I chose a caterpillar and a penguin for this project. I knew I wanted to play with the segmented body of the caterpillar and well, the penguin just kind of happened. Besides, the irregular is generally much more entertaining than the ordinary, don't you think?

P.S.S.
Yay, Vimeo is working wonderfully again! Hurray for smooth, non-glitchy videos. ^__^

Silver Needle Fashion Show: Fashionation

I started digging through some of my old graphic design work and found some pieces I had designed for Marist's Silver Needle Fashion Show during my junior year of undergrad. The theme was "Fashionation" which is why each image has a globe somewhere in it. These three were my favorite of the group. I think they came out rather well, so I figured I would share them with the masses. Nothing like a little blast from the past, right?

Catepillar Penguin Preview

Hello all! Wow, sorry for the delay in updates. Let's just say that 2012 hasn't exactly gotten off on the right foot. Things are calming down a bit now, I think, so I'm slowly trying to get myself back into the swing of things.

I do love my laptop and the privacy of being able to work in my room, but unfortunately Maya makes it cry in a sort of "WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME??" type of way. But luckily this little ole' lappy CAN handle the Adobe Creative Suite, so I've decided to try and teach myself how to animate in After Effects. I've started a simple project and I've already learned so much. I had no idea how similar After Effects and Maya are! I mean, I've worked in AE many times, but usually it was for basic graphic movement or for editing animatics and the like (by the way, I've since learned that Premiere is much better for animatics). I never realized it had such 3D capabilities, a graph editor, the ability to add lights, cameras.... How did I not know this?? Excitement! Now I just need to figure out what I'm doing. ^__^;

This image shows the basic concept of the short I'm working on. The goal is to gain a better understanding of the puppet tool, cameras and lighting, and overall character animation. I'll post the final short whenever it's finished.

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!!