I’m starting a new segment on my blog where I take scenes from 2D shows or movies and recreate theme as 3D animations. I will be going though the steps and talking about the animation it self in the scene and what we need to do to convert from 2D to 3D.

This is the order I’ll be going thought:

•    Introduces the selected scene 

•    Break down the layout of the scene

•    Recreate the stage

•    Recreate the animation in 3D

•    Full process Video    

This December I am taking Character animation 2 for the next 2 weeks. 

The Frist week was the pantomime project where were had to choose from 21 different scenarios. I decided to do the scenario of my Character walking to a vending machine to get a snack and the snack get stuck in the machine. My objective for the animation was to really explore exaggerating poses with my character to achieve good composition and staging.

The first step, was to make thumbnails which helped me plan out my composition, staging and important key poses

Exploratory thumbnails:

Storyboards thumbnails:

Action Breakdown thumbnails:

The next step, I written out a Characterization and Back-story which is and Document of my character development to get a better idea on how he will react is the scenario he's in.

After the process of prepro, I started to actually act out what the character was going to do in the animation. I did this with the help of quicktime, basically I turned on quicktime to record me doing the live reference with someone helping me film. I made there reference videos of my doing different action of my idea for the pantomime. Then i had to choose which out of the three to use as my main reference video.

After Filming the reference videos, I started to animate my scene in different stages:

Blocking:

Second Pass:

Third Pass:

Fourth Pass/Final Pass:

Finally, I finished my final pass of my animation is done after working small details in the animation and get suggestions from my peers and instructors.

This month I toke VEF2 (Visual Effects2 - Lecture) and, I learned a that i didn't know when i was in VEF1 (Visual Effects1-Lecture) and would have loved to know so that i could have done more in the class.

For one of my projects I want to make a slime effect correlating to the slime that would be used on nickelodeon. My approach to get this effect will start off with using particles in Maya to get the desired effect. The first, I will create an emitter where the slime will be emitting. Next I will create a sphere where the particles will be bouncing off of, than ill processed with tweaking the threshold and radius of the particles. Then change the color of the particles with the help of a lambert material to match the reference. After that I toke the liberty of animating a robot activating a shield to block the slime to add a little pizazz to my project.  The reference came nickelodeon slime time the show so I wanted to project that kind of effect. I made the sphere passive collider so that when the particles hit the sphere they will bounce off.

I had fun working on this project , I have learn a lot of thing that I would love to have known when I was taking VEF 1.

The first project to we where a sighed to us was a pantomime project where we choose a scenario to animate and evaluate and synthesize the scene into an interesting and entertaining animation. The scenario that I choose for the project was "Stepping in something gross". The first process that I went though was pre-pro where I created exploratory thumbnail sketches, storyboards, and a backstory for the character. 

 I started with explanatory thumbnails, and proceeded with the process of figuring out what camera angle I'll be using for my final piece. I started studying with storytelling poses to figure out which poses will be the best to tell the story of my project scenario that I've chosen. The bottom of my thumbnails is my strong pose, which will help me get a good idea of what my key poses should be in my animation.

 The next step in my pre-Pro is my action breakdowns, correlating to different actions that will be seen in the animation. The first one is the discovery where the character walks and steps in poop and acknowledges that he has stepped in it. The next action breakdown is where he reacts to what he's just stepped in, which in the scene is the strongest of the actual breakdowns. And the final action breakdown is with the character fainting from his discovery from him stepping in the poop.

 The final step to my pre-pro is the storyboard, where I actually draw out the scene of what exactly will be happening throughout the animation to give me a better guideline of where the story is actually going. Later on in the animation that I worked on in my character animation to class you can see that it is very close to the original storyboard but obviously there's always room for changes in an animation.

This month I toke  Character animation 2 (or CAN2 for short). This month was my favorite because I was born to animate, I felt real proud of the work that I produced while taking the class and doing visual reference that i did for the animations. Above are the projects form the class.

Starting today I have decided to start doing daily animation exercise to better my animation skills. I did a simple ball bounce exercise, something to start me off easy.

This month I've been taking VSD ( Visual Development ) there was a lot of things that I've learned English shading and lighting class from the previous one I took a couple of months ago. For the subject of shading and lighting I struggled a little bit, trying to understand and get a good grasp on the whole idea of diffuse, reflection, refraction, specular, and etc. Other than that I got a pretty good idea how to use most of the tools that I've learned from visual development. a couple of the things that I've learned from visual development are how to make glass, UV's in UV mapping, texturing with Photoshop, rendering and batch rendering and a lot more. As for someone who's mostly interested in animation I did find that going through visual development i've learned the importance of shading and lighting, shading and lighting help bring out the most in a scene, even if you have the best skills and animation, good lighting is like the icing on the cake. With the tools and skills that I've learned from visual development I plan on using in all of my information projects.