George Quelch - VFX

This week we were introduced to the well know free Mery Rig, it is close to a professional rig, made in a cartoony Pixar style. It's fully featured and capable of a lot of animation. For this piece of animation I really tried to stick to the block through animation process, really trying to nail the timing and then to tweak the animation speed using the graph editor more than relying on the dope sheet to change timing and speed of poses.  I found this made it much easier to change parts of the animation, for example I decided to add a bit of delay before she pushes the box, this would have been much harder if I was still working how I did originally. Here is the final render:

I've decided to group together some of my posts now into these hopefully weekly ones, that'll just contain anything I've worked on over the last week, I'll probably keep these fairly regularly or whenever I feel I have enough work to post, for bigger projects I'll still give them a whole post. This week I started to practice a bit with the new rigs ahead of starting the next semester work in 3D, 2 weeks of stop motion have been good and I will do more stop motion but now it is time to go back to 3D which I am really looking forward to. This flex was just a little testing of the rig I did to get used to it. The second thing I attempted was this character knocking over boxes, I really wanted to make this character look angry, after I had done something that I thought was ok I went back over it to make some of the poses more exaggerated and tried to give him more of an aggressive stance, like the character was really angry and his rea...

This is my stick throw test, I was unable to finish it to as far as i wanted because the Maya file corrupted however I thought I would still upload my progress with it. The first two files don't use any reference, after I finished the first one I decided to shoot reference footage, I then used this to copy key positions into Maya and re-create the the movement. I wish I was able to finish it however I have already started moving onto doing other little pieces of animation.

This was my first experiment with lightning and HDR lighting in Maya using Mental Ray. I have wanted to experiment with different lighting since we were taught basic lighting and rendering in our Maya sessions, this was also a good opportunity to look at texturing again, although I only stuck to procedural textures this time. This was my first attempt, using only directional and area lights, the effect is ok but the room is still to dark over all. There were also some weird spots of light on the left side of the image, I think these were caused by the objects in the scene not having any thickness. The two attempts below are both using HDR image lighting, the top one still has the directional lights from before turned on, which was probably a mistake, but i do like the lighting on the left which was caused by the HDR. This gave the nicest result, this was a combination of the HDR and a few lights on the interior, I think it is the best lit of ...

This is my first few exercises in stop motion. I wanted to use the puppets a few times to get used to them. The task this week was to make just a basic walk. I had never done any kind of stop motion animation before but I quite enjoyed it. I expected it to be difficult and it was. One thing I didn't think about was "crawl" which is where the puppets clothes move when you are posing it, which leaves you with a windy effect, this can be useful sometimes but it usually isn't what you want. All of the motion is very jumpy, we were told to shoot on two's at least for our first attempts but I think the movements I was making between frames were just to big. I Think in my next session with it I'll aim to make smaller more precise movements, whilst trying to create more overlap in movements. In the last clip I attempted a camera move, I found early on I was moving the camera far to quickly to make it smooth, if I try it again ill have to make the mov...

A bit of a late post with this one but here is my first group project, working with a few people from my course to come up with short film idea, then take it through early planning and storyboarding, to filming, editing and effects. I'm pretty pleased with the outcome, I worked the camera and played my part in editing and the sound design. The whole process really opened my eyes to how difficult shooting, even for a short, really is. The amount of planning and preponderation that goes into feature length productions is astounding. I was surprised at how much we needed our planning, and how much more I wish we had done.  I have found that I really enjoy operating cameras, there is just something about the job that I really like doing, and I hope I'll get more opportunities to do it now this project is over . For a first attempt at any film project, I think we did a decent job.

I set my self the challenge over our two week break, between the first and second semester of year one at university, to do one piece of animation every day.  This idea came from The Brothers McLeod, whose animation "365" I saw at Bradford Film Festival last November, in which they did one second of animation every day for a year to produce their short film, which can be bought here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/365film/83062918 Being a 3D animator I took up the challenge working in Maya with rigs downloaded from Creative Crash. Because I wanted to practice more animation with cycles, most of the clips ended up being more than a second in the final video, some also just went on for longer than I had anticipated. The project was good practice and I noticed that the first animation I did took far longer than the final piece. Some days the animation is much less ambitious than others but I think there is a nice balance between...