First Maya Animation

This was my first attempt at animating in Maya.  We animated a bit unorthodox like, by moving separate shapes around instead of manipulating a character model with a rig.  All in all these little assignments have made me appreciate the software and removed any fears or preconceptions I mimght have had.

Introduction to Maya Day 2

Decided on an ostrich type character today, manipulating the basic shapes so they don't remain as their default forms.  If all goes well with it I'll be attempting animation with it.  Hopefully it will be possible.

Introduction to Maya Day 1

This was what I managed to do with my first attempt using Maya.  All we were taught was how to create primitive shapes and forms in order to create a character.  It was real fun to play around with it like this using very basic tools.  Reminded me alot of playing with LEGO.

Colour Time

This week we havebeen working traditionally with colour, painting and mixing with acrylics.  It was quite enjoyable, though frustrating at times with amount of work involved in even a little piece.  but none the less the week proved ver useful, as it has allowed me to think much more carefully about my colour choices.

Above we have a value study.  The grays to the left were made first, and were intended to showcase different grays ranging from white to black.  Then we had t apply the same value of each gray to a colour right next to it.  To see colour as value was taxing.

Above we did the same thing, painting in just grays to get the values, and then applying colour to match them.  The theme for that day and the next was monkey.

Here we had two assignments.  The idea was to make an analogous color scheme and a split complimentary one.  Analogous means about 3 colors in a row on the color wheel, like all the greens and little blue on the one to the left.  Split complimentary means to choose a colour and then take the colours next to its complimentary, in this case I chose a certain red, who'se complimentary is green, and thus took the light blue and light green.

Next theme was coffee.  We had to tell a story about a person through coffee, starting in the morning at breakfast and continuing through lunch and dinner.  I decided to try a rectangular colour scheme this time around for the morning.  That means choosing colours that match in the shape of a rectangle on the colour wheel.  In this case it was Yellow and Orange paired up with Blue and Purple.  On the table is a passport and plane ticket.

In the next one I decided on another analogous scheme, choosing reds and pinks.  Now the person is on the plane and has placed their coffee on their tray.

The last one featuring the evening when our protagonist has landed and is waiting for his or her last bag usedd a split complimentary scheme.  Yellow with pink and blue as its complimentaries.

And the final one had the theme of The Three Bears.  Each bear had to have a different color scheme of sorts and we could choose to either have a piece per bear or compose them alltogether.  I chose to do them altogether due to time concerns.  This was just a simple scheme of red and blue, with a lot of value changes.  The one thing I wanted was to have the small bear be a combination of it's parents, but the color for that made it hard to see, so I made it more of low pink.



Flash Week Results

Here are the resulting exercises that weren't just shapes moving about on screen.

I have always had a soft spot for Flash, but have never managed to animate it professionally.  Now I finally had the chance to properly animate with Libraries, though I still have a long way to go.

Escape Animation

Well, here it is, after quite a few months working on this the project has finally come to a close.  If you wish to see some context to this scene, I suggest you take a look at this previous post, which includes the entire storyboard from where this is just five seconds from.

I animated in TV Paint once I got a hold of the layout for the background, while my partner composited the background in Maya and made sure to make the appearance 2D despite being made in 3D space.  I think she succeeded well.  Check out her achievements on her blog.

Once the animation was done I took each frame and placed it in Photshop, where I rendered each image.  It was tough work, but once I got more and more done, each successive frame was easier to make since I could reuse layers and assets.

Frankly I'm quite pleased with this assignment.

Dance Assignment

Well, here's two weeks of hard work.  I used the character from my Escape Project to animate, a decision I both regret and am glad I did.  I regret it because even though it is my own character that I designed, I still don't know fully how he works, thus having a lot of trouble making him move.

However, because of that I have now had two weeks practice with him, thus making me well prepared for next week's assignment, which involves animating the Escape Project.