The beginning of the end

Ever since the release of Metal Gear Solid 4 I've had this project brewing in the back of my mind. It's a spin off of my original model for 3D modeling. There's more of a story behind it now, which really lends itself to the development of the character, and the general way I'm approaching the project.

As far as I'm concerned, Hideo Kojima, the creator of the MGS series, is a flippin' genius. The fact that he didn't even know the story behind the last two games prior to making them just astounds me that much more. So I'm dedicating this particular portfolio project to him.

Now that I have a few deadlines set for myself, I'm actually getting some constructive work done. Just to keep everyone on their toes, I'm not revealing anything until each deadline has been met. Lucky for you, I just met my first one as of about 10 minutes ago. The soundtrack for the trailer... is finally finished. Ah, the wonders of GarageBand.

I would love to share it with you all, but unfortunately Blogger doesn't support music files. Such a pity. If you would like to hear it, I will gladly email you the MP3.

Take it easy all, and have great 4th!

More Lt. Dan

In addition to finally getting my flash animation finished I also finished a pretty good Maya animation of everybody's favorite, good old Lieutenant Dan.
He's really more of an acrobat than a Lieutenant in this one though. : )

Back in Action

Things have been quite hectic lately, especially with the finals being next week. I've gotten quite a bit, well not quite a bit, but some, stuff done. Most importantly I finally finished my "Geeky Trio" animation. I ended up calling the animation "Get Cool" since I couldn't think of anything better to call it. If any of you have something better, please share it. I could really use the input. Anyway, here it is:



Please excuse the poor quality of the video, I had to really cut back on the quality to make the file small enough to upload. If it doesn't start playing right away give it a minute. The file is still about 14 MB (way to big in my opinion) so it's going to be slow on the start (especially if you have a slow internet connection). I hope you guys like it!

Walk Cycles

So I switched back to working in 3D for a little while to catch up on my walk cycles. I figured rather than just show you the end result I'd show you a little bit of the process as well. Walk cycles begin with a simple two step forward walk, beginning on what is called the "extreme", where both feet are as far apart as possible. Otherwise when you go to turn the walk into a cycle you get the funny frame where the model is standing still (which never happens in real life). The basic two step walk ends up looking something like this:


You might notice the circles and arrows around the actual model. These are handles that I grab and manipulate to animate the model. They are part of the rig which is built into the model and prevents the animator from destroying the poor innocent model with things like scale. Oh, and just so you know, the model in these animations is known affectionately as Lieutenant Dan.

So once you have the two step walk complete it's time to turn it into a cycle. To do this you grab the master control (which selects all handles on the rig at once and also moves the entire model as a unit rather than moving the individual pieces) and drag the model back to the starting point at even intervals throughout the animation, making it look like Dan is walking on a treadmill. It looks something like this:



This is just a very basic walk, one that doesn't convey much character, so I decided to go back and give it another try- this time adding in the third dimension (depth), and some rotation. The second walk came out like this:



After this we'll start working on runs (and no I don't mean diarrhea) and run cycles, but for now we're sticking to conveying character through walks.

The geeky trio lives!

(Well after having spent over a half hour trying to upload scene 1 I've decided that its not worth my time and yours so we're just gonna skip it.) So I have finally gotten Patrick, Stewart, and Junior up and moving, although not as gracefully as I would ultimately like (ah gotta love those deadlines). I'm quite surprised, I must admit, at how different Flash animation is from Maya's 3D animation and I'm not just talking about the additional dimension. Yes they both use key frames, but the tweening in Flash is so peculiar compared to the tweening in Maya that it takes some getting used to. If you couldn't tell I prefer the tweening in Maya more- it's much more natural, Flash tends to be very logical and literal. So far I have no sound (that is still in the works) but I have the first scene completed and part of the second- enjoy!


This is scene 2. Patrick disappears simply because I haven't nested the trip movie clip yet, but four hours working in Flash is a killer. I swear I'll get on that one tomorrow!

More bouncing balls, a LOT of frames, and more breakdown sheets than I care to count

This time I actually kept track of how long it took me to do this animation. The grand total came to approximately 6 hours, and to be quite honest, there's still a couple of parts that aren't quite right. This was the second part of the previous assignment with the ball and a wall. Thankfully I got to spend a bit more time on this one so I kinda went all out- close to 500 frames total (Don't even ask how many key frames I had). Thanks to a longer breakdown sheet it was actually a little easier to work it out on paper before hand than the ball and a wall was.

If you couldn't pick them out (the parts I'm not satisfied with) here they are: I'm mostly frustrated by the way the ball floats down after the squash. I was aiming for the way a feather floats down, but getting the ball to do that was actually a lot harder than I expected. The takeoff in preparation for the float down also bugs me because it feels a bit to angular, but no matter how much time I spend in the graph editor I can't seem to fix it. I just can't seem to figure out if the problem is with the rotation, the speed, or the x position/ y position. One last thing that gives me pause now that I'm watching it over again is the timing between when the large ball exits and then returns. It almost feels like there should be a longer wait between the two, but I'm not quite sure....

A World Made of Rubber Bouncing Balls

I've finally gotten around to uploading my first few bouncing ball animations for my 3D Animation class. All I have to say is that it's not as easy as it looks... the animation that is, not the uploading- that's the easy part.

This assignment was to make a ball bounce across three screen three times and leave. Simple enough right?Unfortunately simple is no longer a part of my vocabulary.

This one was a little different in that we were told to make the ball jump rather than just bounce- it's all in the timing.


This assignment was just called a ball and a wall. This is the first animation we've done working with a rig, which has proved to be completely different than animating without one. Honestly I had envisioned a lot more for this one but the due date came to fast and I had to compromise. Quality over quantity right?

Beginning with Flash

I'm taking AM338 this quarter and so far we've been working in Flash with character development, and soon we'll be moving into animation. The assignment began with creating three characters that we would eventually animate. Here's what I came up with.


Patrick



Junior


Stewart

And So It Begins

So, hello everyone. I've finally decided to join the 22nd century and get a blog. I've never done a blog before so we'll see how this whole thing goes. Hope you like what you see