A week off - Heavy Character Animation - Part 2

I have decided in the best interest of my own health to, take a week off from animating. This is due to the amount of stress that has built up over the past few weeks where I had experienced some pain in my chest and slight headaches. I have not yet seen a Doctor yet but, I feel that this would be the best prescription for myself, if I had been told by a doctor. I'll be booking one in a couple of days time.

Show some work so far- reference video 

I know that I want to become an Animator and be able to break into the industry this year, seeing my university friends able to find a job after the course and how well they are doing has pushed my mentality to where I have to non stop work. Sure they're times when I do take that one day break off to see friends and relax and there are even times when I do procrastinate. However to be safe and sure, I'll take this week off. I will try and do some small animation maybe, prep for the upcoming animations along the way so I'll be ready.

Thumbnail and Annotation of poses

Blocking the scene in Maya

I am a bit disappointed with myself and how I have put myself into this situation, at times, I feel like I'm throwing in the towel. But, like the people I have spoken from friends, family, meeting others from events, that you sometime have to have patience, you don't need to rush in. With that said, I hope that this isn't a long term worry and that I should be back animating and posting my work in no time.

Heavy character Animation - Part 1

Hello all, once again I'm back here to talk about the next animation which I will be working on over the next couple of weeks. I had at the time wanted to produce more creature animation but, I feel that there is a particular area which I lack and have not developed my skills enough yet and therefore, I have decided to work on it.



Valve- Team Fortress 2



This time I will be animating a character from Valve's Team Fortress game, the "Heavy" character. I had other rigs that was available for me to pick at the time but they're a couple of reasons of why I have chose this rig. For one thing, I wanted to test a different rig that I wasn't used to. Secondly, the fact that this asset is from a game, so I wanted to try and add some gaming animation towards my showreel which was suggested by Alex Williams at the workshop that I had attended a while back. Another reason I have chose this is that, I wasn't proud of myself, where I had cheated some of the poses because of the camera angle that I had chosen; this time however, I will continue to stage my scene with one camera, in addition I will put multiple cameras around my scene, so every detail like weight and balance are there. Lastly, I wanted to have a prop animation where the character has something, inevitably, this would mean that I would get the chance to work with the IK and Fk Switch, something which I need to get past.



I also chose the Heavy character as I wanted to have an update from my mentor lessons animation assignment, which only had a basic ball as the body and two legs. This time, I would have to work on a whole body which I'm excited to work on.

This isn't the first time that I have animated a character holding an object but, I think because of past experience on that and another animation project which I had to shelve as it was so badly worked one, really is making me fear for the worse when I begin working on this project. But, somehow I have to look past that and make myself believe that this is another challenge which I must overcome.

The Heavy Rig





Poses are not right- testing constraints

Need to go over the tutorials to how to properly constrain the character with the object (gun).

I have therefore decided to look at Digital tutors again, as I wanted to make sure that I animate this correctly. So after, signing up for another month worth of content, I started to note down a few tips that would help me with this animation.





Digital Tutors

 

It's been a slow start and I'm already not happy with the amount of work that I was able to achieve, no matter, a new day tomorrow. Also to add on just before I go, I was able to amend the frame rate issue that I had with my Dog animation personality.

Dog Animation Part 5

Hello, I know it's been a while since I last posted something on here and I wanted to keep you guys up to date but, it's quite hard to find the time when I was busy animating, especially when I was in the zone. By the way, Happy Chinese new year guys! I didn't even get the chance to celebrate that, that's how busy I was.

Anyway, I have completed the dog animation and right now, I feel great, having it all finally done. I must say, I had one week which I thought that I was animating quite well but, after scrubbing through the poses I felt that it wash't up to scratch and I decided to re-do one part of the animation as I wasn't happy with it. It wasn't easy to acknowledge but, I knew that if I wanted to become a better animator, I will have to make the decisions such as re-doing it again.

Final video- Frames missing

With this project,  I did I a different workflow where instead of blocking it out in stepped mode in Maya, I did it whilst I was in spline mode. It was distracting, as I wanted to change a lot of the poses and I was animating in straight ahead rather than pose to pose which I was more comfortable with. Seeing the animation move like this slowed down my progress. However, what I was able to take from this was that I took more time and consideration of each pose and as i continued doing this, I noticed how I didn't tweak every in between pose and was beginning to animate in a block out workflow. 

For the next several months I will be trying to stage my animation to make it seem more appealing where for example, I added trees and some basic lighting. The problem which I have now is that I have lost at least 10 frames from the final video which may not seem a lot but, the fact that every frame is a drawing and together forms the bigger picture, will effect the whole animation. I.e what if there is a footing of the animation which doesn't make contact? All of this will add up and it's something which I must seek to resolve as soon as possible. 

Anyway, after completing the animation I knew that there are several mistakes, even my friends who I showed this to, have pointed them out and so I will be refining this animation one more time. After that I will start my next animation project, which I will talk about in a couple of days time.