George Quelch - VFX

This was my experimental animation project. I worked on it with Tim Lewis from my course to produce 3 short pieces of animation and 1 one minute piece. We weren't allowed to use any computers until the editing stage, this is what we produced. Our final piece was a zloetrope that used 3D clay and plasticine models instead of drawn animation. We had some trouble filming it and ended up using more of a stopframe technique to make it work but it still turned out ok. I think for it to work 100% like a zoetrope it would have to be designed differently to accommodate the models and depth they have and size they are. Final Piece: Experimental Tests:

Yet more Maya practice! I do want to start making these a bit more ambitious with these, maybe try out some longer or more complicated animation. These are good practice but I need to push myself more to go further. I have a plan for a bog project over our 3 week break that I will take right from storyboards, to animatic to a final animation, hopefully it will be around the 20 to 30 second mark when it is finished but that might be slightly ambitious. For some reason the pelvis part of the rig disappeared in the jump video, I have no idea why honestly but I decided to just roll with it.

Here is the revised version of the task: Original Post: This is our latest task, one character lifting another over a wall. This was a 3 week task but because of other modules running alongside this one I only managed to take advantage of 2 of them. I am pleased with the result though, I attempted to do something basic but to do it well, there are a few jerky moments where the rigs are switching between IK and FK however I'm pleased with the overall result. The main part of this was animating with the constraints, I put a lot of practice in when we were first told about constraints and I think that did help. The move I did was pretty simple, there is a bit of rotation in there but not a lot and that did make it easier to keep track of. I'm not 100% happy with the short bit of walk, I think the steps are just a bit to close together and that makes it look slightly unusual but it wasn't the main focus for me. I also managed to put in some of what I...

These are 2 Alternative lighting setups I have been experimenting with after watching some tutorial work I'm pretty pleased with the 2nd image, it is just tutorial work with a quite simple set I put together, but I learnt a lot from the tutorial about lighting using Mental Ray and now I can take that into my own work. I feel that both images aren't the highest quality, I would need to set the accuracy in Maya to be higher to totally remove the noise and the blotches caused by the setup.

This week I tried a few different things. Our current task is to do character interaction between two of the Body Mech Pack. I also took a look at some graduate showreels online for inspiration and something to aim for.  I attempted another stretch which is a different style but I think it is a bit better than the first attempt . The character interaction task involves two characters working with each other, so this needs constraints, to work towards this I made the animation with the baby for a bit of fun and practice, managing the constraints will be quite difficult so I need to get more used to the process. Rendering the last one in which the character falls over was difficult. There was a lot of very quick movement, I wanted the character to look cartoony so the motion had to be fast but this made it pretty hard to watch, adding motion blur to the render helped a lot with this though. I also got it a lot more practice with the Mery rig, th...

This week I attempted both of the tasks set for the other 3D group, this was a weight shift and a stretch. The weight shift I found pretty straight forward, looking at myself doing it in a mirror and just thinking about my stance to figure it out and, although its simple, I'm pleased with the result. The bigger task was the stretch, I found this a lot more challenging, because this was slightly longer I worked by the key poses blocking workflow. I found this helped to me to get nice poses, however I had a lot of difficulty with the timing and getting between the poses nicely. In the end i figured this could have been due to the poses just not being natural enough for a stretch (I didn't do any referencing for this piece) I got it looking fairly nice in the end by playing with timing more on some of the poses and limb movement. The rendering for the scene was pretty basic, I knew I wanted to have the shadow of the window falling onto the character in bed and I ...