Illustration & Animation

The next scene I was tasked with creating was titled 'the businessman strop'. This scene is a continuation of the scene before it where a home stock hoarder was about to make a deal in taking the home with another stock holder and he was taken and flicked away by ominous admin hands. The scene itself consists of the main character observing what just happen and then taking the deal himself to buy the house

This scene was fun to make as it was an opportunity to use the skill of blur. Blur isn't the easiest skill for me to use so it was a bit troubling to do but not impossible. I started with the movement of the main character since he has the most movement. I animated the head, body and eyes on separate layers as to not make more unnecessary work for myself when changing the positions. There were a few changes I made to the original like slowing down the boil of the main characters eyes and making sure the size of the eye's remained consistent.

The Stock holder was rather simple to animate as he only has a head movement and a hand shake

We were assigned into 5 different groups for another live project, and the theme this time was campaigning to put let homes back on the market and making them more affordable for people unable to get any homes due to them being stocked up for other uses.

In my group I was tasked with the design and animation for 2 scenes. One scene consisting of scrolling on a phone screen and another being an agreement by handshake.

In the phone screen scene, it needed to have scrolling on a social media site while a notification pops up telling the main character that there's a house available to buy from a house finder app.

I made the assets of the phone, the social media page, and the notification on clip studio paint. I did originally use photoshop but I found the complexities of finding and/or using some of the tools annoying so I kept to familiarity in clip to efficiently make the assets

The social media page is a long strip which I loosely based off of the ui of X (aka Twitter). I separated the strip into 4 parts just incase it would take up too much space (mb wise) but it didn't prove to be an issue so I kept it as is

I based the phone screen off of my own phones ui and then I threw the phone with a transparent screen and background into TVPaint to animate the hand movement over the phone.

I at first based the hand movement off of the reference of my own hand movement but it didn't quite fit the consistency of the whole animation, so I simplified it a lot more to fit and fattened the hand out a bit

For the character design I had them closely resemble the appearance of the client as they will be the voice of the animation and I thought it'd be fitting to have it feel like an introduction to them and what they offer

The design itself is to look friendly and welcoming

When it came to storyboarding the animation, I kept it quite simple in just adding expressions where I saw fit according to the script I was given

Here is one of the animations I've been commissioned to create for a therapy/counselling company in order to complete the remaining 10 hours required for my creative industry module

The time it took to create this placeholder alone has exceeded the 10 hours I needed to complete my required hours by almost 2 days, and I still have a few more animations to make in order to complete this commission

This animation mostly consists of talking and I have my voice as a placeholder along with interesting actions to match what's being said to make the animation visually interesting to watch rather than just being talked at

The start of the year felt quite overwhelming with how many immediate things there were to do at once between all the modules

The biggest struggle for me comes from my creative industry module since I entered that module in a difficult position of needing to complete the remaining 10 hours of my required 100 hours of industry experience on the back of originally not being sure if my 90 hours even counted considering I completed those 90 hours in a different manner to how I was expected; Not to mention that almost half of those hours went into a discontinued commission project so I'm not entirely sure how my report is going to go

I got used to the other 2 tasks of the other module quite quickly and I enjoy putting my time into the practical tasks of my final project and the live project

Here's the whole thing complete with sound and cleaned up

As I suspected the consistency with the art styles is noticeable but not drastically different enough to be messy

I really enjoyed working in a group and as I knew from theory and now practically, it really does make the work progress a lot quicker when working in a group, when everyone is in a good workflow with each other, it causes less stress, things get done in good timing, and many fixes and adjustments and ideas can flow with multiple heads at once

Scene 3-2 was another scene I finished off animating, coloured, and cleaned up

This scene, 3-1, was a scene I animated over, did the in-between's for and cleaned up

I think it turned out well, my only concern was keeping the consistency with the art style in how it looks with the other scenes that I didn't animate

I animated the scene in TVPaint and then threw it into after effects to add a background

I was in charge of making the first scene amalgamation (scenes 1-1 to 1-3) and I even go to create my own character, which is the one you see in the shot, in my group leaders art style

Here is the animatic for the project. I helped create the basis of the animatic and it was passed onto another member who added sound and cleaned it up a bit

by this point in making the project, I would say I was at the peak of my revived skills in after effects

The live project, in terms of an educational environment, was new for me

I have had clients before in a freelance setting but never had a team or worked in a team to do the work

All of us had to come up with a pitch idea for a tree planting charity within a 2ish day period along with everyone else and the clients would choose which pitch ideas they liked out of 5 groups of us

For my pitch idea, I tried to make it simple as I usually do. It was a little difficult to come up with a good idea and my layout of my storyboard did not look as neat as this does now, but I tried my best

I had experience in leading a group project before in college for a synoptic project but I didn't have experience being led in a project, so I was ultimately fine if my project didn't get picked, which it didn't

At last here is the rendered turntable for Delta

the camera movement could've been a little better but I don't really know how to smooth nurb curves outside of the preview for it, hence why the camera movement shakes ever so slightly

linking cameras to a nurb curve was something I learnt to do back in college which was very handy because I didn't know how else to do the camera movement and have access to change the view and any other adjustments as such

Here is the rendered test animation for and idle pose on Delta

I used the Orc Idle pose on mixamo because it fit Delta quite well. It makes Delta feel like a dominant character and the hand movement adds to that so much as well as making him look creepy

before I post the 3D animated movement, here is the 3D version of Delta's turnaround both in a idle pose and an A pose

Here is Delta fully textured and I must say, I was very happy with the end result. My very first successful character model completed

Now I was pretty much done here but I wanted to animate it. Granted I've never rigged a model before and I was also informed of a 'cheat code' being the website mixamo that rigs and animates for you with stock animations, I put my model straight into that and let mixamo work it's magic

The big worry I had after texturing was that maya wouldn't be able to read the textures I put on it and that everything would look pink. Turns out that when it came to linking the arnold textures together, there was a few more links and steps that I don't currently remember that I missed out the last time I tried to texture a model causing it to appear pink in the first place (thanks to my modulator Marleen)