Layth NKL Rose - Year 1 Animation Journal

My Animation Year 1 poster!

This is my Year 1 showreel.

I used a track from Bensound that I manually sped up to better fit what I thought was the nature of the reel.

Using Adobe After Effects for motion graphics turned out helping a lot during the creation of this, as Adobe Premiere has a lot of similarities it shares.

While it’s functional, I feel there are some awkward pans at times, especially at 0:12 where I couldn’t figure out how to prevent the screen from appearing black at certain parts. Also, I feel I tried to cram too much work in a limited space of time. I could have most probably remedied this if I had spent more time on this, but I had made the decision to do this reel last when it came to all my work because I wanted to include everything in a coherent way. I feel if I had managed to finish the bulk of my work earlier and given myself enough time to work on this, I could have created something better.

This is my experimentation reel for my Mystery Box.

This is my final Mystery Box Animation.

Overall I like how it turned out, the lighting, box, key poses and expressions on the max rig are all things I am a fan of. Considering all the complications and trouble I ran into while creating this, I am happy that there are things I like about it.

However, I do believe there are some criticisms that could be said. While the neutral expression of the rig, while it is talking on the phone, is very fitting for the mundane feeling I was trying to envoke, the walk cycle at the beginning is too stiff and robotic for my liking. I also feel that while the pose is done well, the rig balancing on one leg after walking backwards could be held for slightly longer and would have also benefited from some follow through (maybe his body swaying slightly from the weight all being put on that leg). I also think the key pose of his reaction to the contents of the box could have been held for longer. The excited walking/talking after spinning on the spot is also faster than I would like. Finally, I feel his landing after his jump isn’t as well executed as I would have hoped.

My main issues with the final result mostly seem to be tied to the speed/timing of the animation. When I played the animation back while working on it in Maya, the speed seemed to be slower than the final product after rendering. This difference is something I will have to consider in the future. Also, the overall timing of certain movements is something I will have to work on. I believe the way to going about this would to make better use of the graph editor.

This is my lip sync.

I am happy with how it turned out. 

It was originally created just for practice before I decided to continue with it for my actual lip sync, which is why the line work looks quite crude initially. I tried to keep the same sketchy lines throughout as to keep it visually consistent but they is a slight change. 

When trying to apply follow-through to the hair I feel as though I overdid it at times. Also there are some points where the head movement is faster or slower than I would like but I think that it does it’s job well, especially since it’s a rough animation.

These are composited images featuring my 3D model of Sninky that I created with Adobe After Effects.

It was interesting to use Adobe After Effects for something other than motion graphics and this helped to let me see more of the program along with it’s range of functionality. I wanted to create image of Sninkys showing him at a variety of sizes and distances away from the camera as to have a lot of variation despite the fact his model is not rigged for movement.

This is my finished 3D turnaround of Sninky.

There appears to be something wrong with the beginning of the turn, but I have already rendered and do not have enough time to correct it.

The model was very challenging to create, but I truly did learn a lot during its creation and I am genuinely happy with how it turned out.

Almost entirely due to the struggles behind its creation I feel I have learned how to 3D model and have become somewhat competent with the craft, which I am very happy about. If I ever have to 3D model something again I feel I will go into the project significantly more confident as I was when I went into this one and I feel that I would have a much easier time. One of the reasons I believe this so strongly is because after finishing my model I was able to guide someone in my class with the creation of her model due to the skills I had built when creating mine.

I am currently working on finishing all my projects.

We had an employability lecture this week which was very interesting and informative. After that, we were briefed on our Showreel project. It sounds extremely interesting and a very fitting thing to end the year with, I am looking forward to it.

We had a lesson on how to create our creature models in Maya earlier this week. It was very helpful and I am looking forward to this project. I personally feel I want to create a character turn around to better help me during the creation process of my creature, so that’s what I’m going to do. My clay model of my creature is also coming along well, I’ve implemented the idea of having him hold a penny.

This is my design development for my fantastical creature for our 3D modelling project.

I started with the initial idea of wanting to create an imp-like creature that was visibly malnourished and starving. To express this in the design I decided to have parts of his skeleton such as his ribcage show through his skin and researched the skeletal structures of humans and human-like creatures such as apes. Another reason for reference apes is that I wanted him to move on all fours despite having a human-like body that looks bipedal.

I also liked the idea of his skin being pitch black and becoming translucent when light is shone upon him. I didn’t know if it would be possible to express this feature when creating the model but I still decided to play with the idea. A part of playing with idea involved playing around with giving him a thematic light bulb shaped tail or having a light blub shape structure that glowed through his head.

The idea of him becoming difficult to see in different lighting also reminded me of chameleons, so I attempted to play around and see if I could make him any more reptilian. I was not a fan of the visual appearance of chameleon feet, but I decided to mix them with human hands in order to create a human-shaped hand with pointed fingers. If I had to identify why I ended up giving him 3 fingers (not including the thumb) instead of 4, it would probably be because of cartoons such as Mickey Mouse, I didn’t actively include any such reference my development because it was a subconscious decision rather than an active one I thought about.

Even though I was attached to the initial idea of him being an imp creature with horns, I eventually decided to replace the horns with features that would actually be evolutionarily beneficial. So I ended up opting to give him big ears, I gave him rat ears in order to reflect his scavenger nature. I also ended up basing his tail on the tails of rats to further this connection.

We were briefed on our character model project this week. I for one am very excited for it and am pleasantly surprised by its content. I was under the impression we would be designing creatures in our second year but it turns out we get to do them this year. We also created clay models of our fantastical creatures. I used to work with clay a lot when I was younger, so it was unexpecting and exciting for it to appear on my course. It was very fun to construct my creature in clay, it also made me think about the creature’s design more and what features I might want to change. For instance, I’m unsure at the moment whether I should replace his horns with ears and whether to give him a tail. At the moment I’ve left him without these features on the clay model, but may revise his design when it comes to modelling him in Maya.

Since we decided to go with Gravity Falls I decided to create pamphlets to help my group identify what things we could write about, especially those who had not watched the show before.

I made sure to include research on a variety of stages in pipeline to assist anyone who may want to tackle any part of it. Personally, I am interested in storyboarding and didn’t have to research it to as great a degree as everything else, as I was already quite knowledgable on the nature of storyboarding for this show before beginning this project.