George Quelch - VFX

I watched a tutorial today on Digital Tutors about animating workflows. I learnt a lot about different ways to animate, good uses for motion trails, using selection sets and just tips for using the interface better. I rendered the animation this time too, I want to get more practice and rendering and lighting so I'm going back to animating a scene then lighting and rendering it. I'm quite pleased with this all except for the left arm, when it hits the ground. The process I learned was much quicker, I now know a few techniques to save some time. Considering this is only about an 2 hours work, I am pleased with it.

Just a quick bit of animation here. I'm not pleased with the turn, I didn't think about the inbetweens as much as I should have so the spin looks kinda odd. I'm more happy with the actual run though.

Ok, this evening I set out to improve my animation, mainly my posing. And to start that I'm practicing drawing, a lot! I want to improve drawing poses, and finding good strong poses to take into my animation. The quicker and better I can draw them, the more time I save in Maya messing around trying to find the right poses. These are in the order that I drew them, starting from the first. As I went along I tried to get across more what the character was feeling. I think I could improve my Maya posing by being able to get more emotion across in just the pose. I looked a lot at drawings by other animators in this same style, they are so free flowing and good at getting the pose and emotion across, but remain simple and easy to draw. By the end of the evening I was saying "this emotion now" and drawing poses until I found one that got it across in some way.

Final Update And finally here is the finished render! I'm quite pleased with how this turned out, its not my best animation, but I definitely learnt a lot about posing from the progression I had. I need to spend more time in the drawing page getting some really interesting ideas down, not necessarily perfect poses but just interesting shapes to start from in Maya. The render itself is slightly odd, I render it in Mental Ray but the characters turned out surprisingly shiny. ---------------- I've (quite late on) decided to do this months 11 Second Club. The clip is from Hot Fuzz. I think I'll be able to get it done over the next two weeks when we have far fewer lectures. I'll be updating this post with work in progress as I go, I'll also eventually post it on the 11 Second Club Forums for feedback on there. And now here is the 11 Second Club post! W.I.P. #1 W.I.P. #2 W.I.P. #3 Got the basic lip sync in now, I've focused on...

I think today I've started a new little project for myself, to work through as many emotions as I have time for with a short little animation. I'll probably work through them all with rigs I'm familiar with, possibly I'll try some new ones, although I am now pretty familiar and do like using the Max rig,  found here . Anyway here is a work in progress for surprised! I'll be posting follow ups on this via updates to this blog post (rather than a new one every time) W.I.P #1

This semester we are working on another group project. Using audio clips from the BBC's listening project. The group I am in all like working in 3D or after effects, so I think we could produce a really good looking result by the end of the project. We have chosen an audio clip to work from which is of a man talking to his daughter about the Piper Alpha oil accident. Out idea for the animation to go along with this clip involves 3D typography. Above is some of the testing work I have put in to the project. We are still working to pick a style but I think a full 3D model will be the way forward, rather than the 2D style I tested. Alongside these animation tests I have been working on a script to streamline text creation in Maya. The default tool gives you a lot of control over the font, but becomes a hassle to use over and over, I am hoping to make it a quicker process to add text to our Maya scene when it comes to that time. I am hoping for th...

One of my decisions at the end of last term was to really get going with programming. It was something I wanted to look into last year, and I did but I reached a point with Python where I didn't have any direction and it tailed off. After an inspiring lecture on the history and future of computing and how programming has developed I decided to take a look at MEL (Maya Embedded Language) This talks directly to Maya and the nice thing about it is that all actions in Maya are listed in the script editor, so you can look at what Maya is doing in MEL commands at any time. Python also can talk to Maya but with MEL I felt like I had a lot more drive, I have also been able to integrate it into projects at University. What I have been working on so far was building base knowledge of the common commands using online tutorials, now I've got a big old book from the biliary to work through some more interesting scripts. I will post some o...

It has been such a long time since I've posted anything! In that time I've had a Christmas break now I'm back to work all refreshed. Hand ins were the first to get done and dusted before we move on to 2nd semester. Below are my 3 finished visual effects videos and a breakdown making of video combining the processes I used for all of them. A report of my process for each of these shots was handed in as well. To sum it up I'm pleased with what I managed to create this semester, but I feel the shots have a lack of direction and focus, which makes them seem 'studenty' This is something I would like to work on, improving composition, thinking about what the shot is trying to achieve. I think what I have made works on the effects level, having done no effects before I kept it quite basic but I have learnt a huge amount about using Nuke, and will be looking for opportunities to work with VFX again, although I don't think this type of compositing work ...