In the Summer Time..

Hi Again,

I've been busy lately sorting out my imminent move to Cardiff so things have been a little slow on the blog front. As of next month though I will be in my new place - hopefully unpacking the pc first to get on with animation!

Lately, "Project Dragon" has slowed to a crawl as I've been focussing my attention on my personal projects. I will make some starts on turning the animations into a film very soon though so watch this space!

As for my personal projects, I've been animating a 2 person dialogue piece on 3DMax which is proving quite long and challenging at 350 frames. I'm finding that limiting the frame number to say frames 0 - 50 and then blocking those before continuing to the next part quite helpful. I'll hopefully be posting the full blocked out version up soon.

For my other personal project, which is the main one I've been working on lately, I've been creating a set of creature animations on Maya. Now, this is my first time using Maya so it's very challenging to say the least, still I'm happy with all I've managed to complete so far and should be posting one of the completed cycles on here as soon as I've figured out how to render videos!

 Rhett rig by: noxlabs.com

As you can see I'm using the non-commercial rig of Rhett the Clydesdale which is so fun to use. It can be found here: http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/rhett-the-clydesdale if you would also like to play with it or challenge yourself to get a nice horse gallop cycle going.



Second Try!

What with the deadline for the project fast looming I completely forgot I even had a blog.. Oops..

Personally things aren't going so well but the animation is getting back onto track now finally. Deadline is officially this friday but i'll hopefully be getting mitigating and get to hand in a little later.

Which takes a load off the mind...

On the film directing front though, things are coming together smoothly. I've found that writing lists of who's doing what and which element they are doing as well as how far along they are very helpful. (Example being: Sean; Animation; Man walking; Almost done) Although using tables makes this alot neater and easier.

I also find with deadlines looming that things tend to go a  bit pear-shaped on the organisation front, which is one of the worst things that can happen. It leads to rushing and panicking (trust me I know). To counter this I find that doing a daily list of tasks to complete helps. Although it must be warned that you can only do so much in one day and to make these lists reasonable achievable goals or you'll get more stressed and worked up!

I'm currently trying to finish the run cycle on this guy. Only have the back legs done so far but getting there!

Pre-Viz Finished!

Finished the pre-viz for Project:Dragon finally. Got to animate badly and let things slide along the floor and get good marks for it! :D

I passed the pre-viz files with all the cameras already set up onto the animators who can then use the camera moves and work from the terrible animation. They just add their decent animations and DO NOT touch the camera at all and hey presto.

The Knight foot glitch is being fixed and the file being passed onto the animators that need it later on then it's full steam ahead until June for me when the deadline for this Project is.

The beginning

Finally started up a blog yay! Everyone else had them so high time I had one myself. Hopefully be posting fairly regularly. It'll mostly be uni work and some personal animation stuff.