Industry Exercise 2
A brief explanation of the brief:
So below are the excercises in this term and what percentage towards the grade they amount to:
Exercise 3 (Tutorial)-60% of grade
Exercise 2 (Production Schedule)-20% of grade
Individual Reflective Journal-20% of grade
Tutorial Exercise:
This exercise is the majority of the grade so obviously i'm gonna spend most of my time on this, whatever i choose to do a tutorial on, it must be technical and informative, i think if i can get someone with very little knowledge on the programme to successfully complete this tutorial then i have made it a success, another thing i was thinking about was to make something different, something we haven't seen in a tutorial before but to make things a bit easier, thats a long shot so i'm not going to dedicate my whole time to figuring out what that is but its something to think about! i also have to link it to alex's project (mixing live action and visual effects together) so i've got to think about what i can do there! above all i also want something that will be beneficial to my showreel and something that i will find useful in the future!
Production Schedule:
This is the online production schedule we are going to use a programme called "shotgun" basically what this exercise teaches us is organisation and its preparing us for meeting deadlines in industry, time keeping i feel personally has always been my weakness so this should be interesting! but if i get it done asap and keep on top of everything i SHOULD be fine! but its staying in the zone thats going to be the problem, the environments project started off brilliantly but after the christmas holidays myself and my group just lost focus.
Individual Reflective journal:
The reflective journal will be kept separately on another page on this blog, but this is pretty straight forward just to show what problems i've had, how i've overcome them and how i got where i am on my project etc this is the one i'm least worried about as i've had loads of practise with keeping a journal in previous projects so i know exactly how to do it!
I've thought long and hard about what tutorial i am going to be doing for this project, i wanted something that had enough information online so that i could research and look at the best approach, but also i wanted something that i could learn to do myself and discover my own easy methods, My original idea was to do camera splines (i chose to do this because i have no idea what it is!) however, researching this online had't shed any light on the subject! So then i decided to choose to do a tutorial on how to animate quadrupeds i've never actually animated a four legged animal and its something i should probably get used to doing if i want to pursue a career as a character animator!
So i thought i do some visual research, i thought youtube was a good place to start and maybe some analysis on why the animals are animated that way!
This Deer isnt the most fluid of animations i've seen but i'd say the actual movement is all there, i think its important to note that because its a deer its very elegant which is why the legs are so close together, there are more steps but they are smaller, whereas if the animal was something a bit larger and heavier the steps would be more distant and clumsy!
This is the online production schedule we are going to use a programme called "shotgun" basically what this exercise teaches us is organisation and its preparing us for meeting deadlines in industry, time keeping i feel personally has always been my weakness so this should be interesting! but if i get it done asap and keep on top of everything i SHOULD be fine! but its staying in the zone thats going to be the problem, the environments project started off brilliantly but after the christmas holidays myself and my group just lost focus.
Individual Reflective journal:
The reflective journal will be kept separately on another page on this blog, but this is pretty straight forward just to show what problems i've had, how i've overcome them and how i got where i am on my project etc this is the one i'm least worried about as i've had loads of practise with keeping a journal in previous projects so i know exactly how to do it!
I've thought long and hard about what tutorial i am going to be doing for this project, i wanted something that had enough information online so that i could research and look at the best approach, but also i wanted something that i could learn to do myself and discover my own easy methods, My original idea was to do camera splines (i chose to do this because i have no idea what it is!) however, researching this online had't shed any light on the subject! So then i decided to choose to do a tutorial on how to animate quadrupeds i've never actually animated a four legged animal and its something i should probably get used to doing if i want to pursue a career as a character animator!
So i thought i do some visual research, i thought youtube was a good place to start and maybe some analysis on why the animals are animated that way!
This Deer isnt the most fluid of animations i've seen but i'd say the actual movement is all there, i think its important to note that because its a deer its very elegant which is why the legs are so close together, there are more steps but they are smaller, whereas if the animal was something a bit larger and heavier the steps would be more distant and clumsy!
The squirrel tends to jump more as apposed to actual running, as soon as the two front paws touch the floor, the back paws are sprung up into the air but its also important to not that when they both meet at the floor they are closed in!
Its well known in the animation world that a horses gallop is supposed to be one of the hardest things to animate, and you can see why, none of the legs touch the floor at the same time, if im to do a tutorial on a horse gallop there a big chance i'd go mad, but theres no denying it would look good on my showreel!
Okay!:
I think before i go any further i should try and find myself a good sturdy rig which would be simple enough so that anyone can understand it, including myself, i have to remember that i am doing a tutorial and what might seem simple to me may not be to others reading the tutorial, so it has to be as simple as possible!
There are loads of rigs on www.creativecrash.com but most of them are expensive and i'm assuming the people following my tutorial may not have money as well as myself! but unfortunately as far as free rigs go, there's hardly any, let alone a decent rig, so i've decided to use the Nico rig, the controls are fairly simple my only problem with the rig, which may cause complications with the people following the tutorial is that there's a lot of controls! but we don't necessarily have to use all of them and i could also draw up a diagram and label the controlls for the viewers to look at before the tutorial!
Okay so this is a recording of me playing with the controls, on the Nico rig, it was also a chance for me to try a new bit of software called "Ishowu" its software that allows you to record what your doing on the screen, unfortunately i couldn't find free recording software so this is a free trial hence the water mark! if i am going to use video for my tutorial then i think maybe i should think about an alternative free piece of software!
Soooo, when looking at this rig obviously because the character is made up we are going to have to compare it to other animals so that it looks natural and organic enough! i personally think he could potentially walk like a dog or lion! so thats what i'm going to look at now!
Notice how the lion walks by first moving his right back leg, and following with his front right leg, then his left back leg, and then his front left leg, this video will be easy to breakdown into easy steps for my tutorial
This lion is a lot heavier than the last one, most of the movement in this video comes from the shoulders and the head, but the legs also have a pattern, the two right legs move one slightly after the other, and then the left legs do the same.
I couldn't find any real decent footage of a dog walk so i found an animated dog walk which was easy to analyse but looked organic enough!
the pattern in this walk is fairly sraight forward it goes front left leg,back right leg,front right leg, back left leg, its almost a diagonal pattern!
PLAN OF MY WALK CYCLE HERE!
Other peoples tutorials:
http://www.idleworm.com/how/anm/02w/walk1.shtml
This tutorial was just a standard walk cycle but i liked it because it was layered out very neatly and explained thoroughly, there are only a few short stages but its explained very well.
http://www.anticz.com/Walks.htm
this tutorial is very well explained but i found it very hard to stay focused, i think the colour and the layout kinda strained my eyes, although the description and explanation of the tutorial is key, obviously appearance has its effects on the reader
Problems i've had with this tutorial:
Personally i found it really hard to stay motivated when it came to writing this tutorial as it had its repetitive stages and i'd say thats been the big problem, i also had a problem with the Nico rig halfway through, the leg controls jumped every so often when trying to keyframe making it very hard to get the exact pose down, but that is no ones fault but my own as i obviously didn't check out the rig thoroughly enough, i had also personally hoped to create an original tutorial that would be very simple to follow and i felt as though i didn't quite capture that!
