Much Animation. Wow.

Yowza! There's been a lot of time that's passed between my posts! IT'S TIME TO FIX THAT.

The last couple of weeks have been particularly busy because the third round of RPP arrived! We also started up our MoCap training in Animation. Our assignment during those lessons is to do an assignment that merges everything we have done so far (walking, running, jumping, etc.). Let's talk about animation first. ♥

The first step of learning about MoCap was getting acquainted with the Motion Builder software. I made a lot of blunders with it. A lot. Like ... a lot of really simple mistakes. The interface itself doesn't look particularly complicated but the struggle is just remembering every option and procedure without confusing it with another program. After about five times of harassing our instructor over my dumb mistakes, I was finally able to get the animation working! It was pretty gratifying. Though, I know I need a lot of practice on it.

COVER GIRL put the bass in your walk.

After that, we spent some classes in the Motion Capture studio. We learned how to calibrate the cameras, work with the Vicon Blade software to record everything, and how to marker up an actor. Everything is pretty routine, from how it seems, so it's just something we need to get into the groove of doing regularly to properly master it. I'm definitely going to be making some appointments in November so I could be a certified MoCap animator! ♥

As for the long animation ... it's going pretty well! I didn't want to repeat my previous assignments so I opted for something slightly ballet-inspired. Here's the first pass of the animation that I'm currently editing: 

*swan lake INTENSIFIES*

RPP has been particularly busy. Our team has three artists and we reeeeally took advantage of that to make something great. This week's theme was "emergent gameplay". I'll make a separate post about this later but what I CAN say is that I'm very thrilled with how our game turned out! It's definitely difficult, though. I'm consistently terrible with each game I help create. Here's a sneak peak at our WONDROUS SPOOPY GAME. ♥

*this is halloween INTENSIFIES*

An exciting thing about Drawing Fundamentals is that we FINALLY moved on to human anatomy. I could definitely use some work on my anatomy but, for one reason or another, I can't break out of my anime-like drawing style. Working towards versatility will definitely be a process. Coupled in with learning about human anatomy, I've recently been attending the Life Drawing classes and wondering why the Hell I haven't been attending this entire time. Drawing from a live model is a GREAT opportunity for any artist and definitely helps you improve exponentially in a short time.  

Now it's time to work on some animation & 2D/3D assignments!

Kiss From a Berry

Great strides have been made during the course of this week. James' (the fish guy) finally has his UVs all mapped out. This time around, I didn't run into as many errors with the UVs as I did with the canons. Despite that, there were waaaay too many instances where I had to sew each individual plane together to make a decent map. While I'm not exactly sure what I did to wonk up the UVs to that point, it'll be something to watch out for in the future. Now it's time to get to Zbrush-ing all the details on each part of my fish dude! 

shAZAM.

As for animations ... I've been working on improving both the running cycle & pose to pose jump I blogged about before. Originally, we were also supposed to work on idle animations this week. Since we have our MoCap lessons coming up on Wednesday (yay!) that add-on to our assignment was cancelled. I opted to do two idle animations anyway to get some practice in on them and they turned out to be the most difficult ones so far. Maybe I was just overthinking everything, but there's something challenging of having to keep a character still while still in an interesting motion. They were a great deal of fun!

be looking heavily like the animations in sonic adventure DX.

this guy be copping some serious 'tude.

As for my improved running & jump cycles, here they are! I'm still working on finessing them (nitpicking ahoy!) so I can shove them in a decent-looking demo reel. I think I'm improving!

GOTTA GO FAST.

shout out to chris for recovering my lost keyframes when i thought maya deleted them forever.

NOW. IT'S FINALLY TIME TO TALK ABOUT THE SECOND ROUND OF RAPID PROTOTYPE PRODUCTION. THIS ONE WAS ENTITLED "LOST IN THE FOREST". Yes, all caps was necessary for that.

It's been almost a week since we have turned in our second Rapid Prototype. The reason I have yet to blog about this or shamelessly promote it is just chiefly due to my inability to post it online (as I'm extremely incompetent with all things Unity still and haven't figured out a way to upload it to my Wix site). So, I did the next best thing and recorded a PLAYTHROUGH to give a look into the look and gameplay.

This time around, I was grouped with Larry, Samantha, Gordon, and Jonathan. That's right. Three - COUNT THEM THREE - artists. With this round's theme being "storytelling", we ended up being slow to start our game's production. The "story" part of the project, since it was the most important part, ended up making us indecisive during the first few days and that had a trickle-down effect to every other part of the prototype. These two weeks taught us an important lesson on organization and planning.

One of the most important things to take away from this all is: don't be afraid to produce absolute crap in the beginning phase. Don't be afraid to take over if things are going stagnant. Don't be afraid to make shitty character designs or pisspoor level layouts. They can ultimately be changed and refined later but it's extremely important to start generating ideas to get the ball rolling early. Nothing's going to be final in the beginning.  

Despite this tangent, I think we made a pretty good prototype that had a positive reception. Check it out!

GOTTA GO FAST

an actual image of me.

The last few days consisted of me powering through my assignments at an EXTREME SPEED - after a weekend of doing nothing school-related. I completed each of my assets for the second RPP round strangely early (even for me) so it allowed me waaaaay more time to work on my homework and improve!

I finally finished up my Common Core homework. Our assignment was to do textures for either a character or an environment. I did both. Because I'm that kind of obnoxious overachiever. 

First, here's Carl! When I did the fish model painting a little while back, I saw that I was way too subtle on the details. Before I went to paint Carl up, I went back and added more details to his sculpt (which was pretty plain, now that I look back on it). After that, I went happy with painting! Thanks to the carve mask tool, a lot of the detail work was done thanks to the geometry. There's a lot of bold and subtle details in there this time around, so I'm very happy with the end result.

he's seen even more shit.

i skinned the starfish but i did not skin the octopus.

After that came the environment texture! This one had to be a repeatable tile. Since it was my first go at this, I went for a stone wall texture to work on.

heeeere's the render.

the shadow map.

the depth map.

the normal map.

aaaand the painted-up tile!

The only problem I ran into was fixing the seam Zbrush so kindly gave me (argh!). Also with trying to get everything to wrap properly (as I sculpted) so I wouldn't end up with strangely shaped rocks for the wall. I don't run into as many problems as I once did -- so that must mean that I'm improving! YAY. I can't wait to do more of this in the future!

As for animation: I finished up my assignments for that too.

Because running is apparently the assignment for next week (lol), I had to do a pose-to-pose jump too. I got to do this one with Jonathan giving me instruction as I went along, so it was pretty hard for me NOT to screw up.

complete with HAT BOUNCING.

After that was finished, I went back and corrected the errors to my "running into the jump" animation. Anticipation & body shape variations really do add a lot to a sequence. Just after fixing a handful of details, this animation looked LOADS better.

RUN, BRO, RUN.

I'm pretty excited with everything I've accomplished in the past few days! ♥ Now, onward to UV-ing James (the fish guy).

Merry Month of Spoopy

Happy first day of Halloween Month!

This week has been pretty busy! The second RPP round is slowly coming to an end and my group's end result is a pretty darn promising prototype. There'll be more on that after we show off the final product on Tuesday.

So far, I've been working on my homework for my other classes. For the last two days, I've been working on this guy here!

I've named him James.

Our assignment this week was to model the first half of a complex character. As you can see here ... I kind of went overboard and did next week's assignment (the legs, boots, and his awesome accessories) too. This gives me a lot more time to fix him up and get to UV mapping him before the third round of RPP begins. WOO!

In Animation, our assignment was to do a jump animation. After taking all of the feedback I gathered from the walk cycle animation, I wanted to do something more ambitious. That thing is: running into a jump. Here's the current work in progress on that!

Some things I have to fix on this include: speeding up the run cycle (clearly), and adding in some anticipation before the little dude flies into his jump. So far, it looks pretty good!

Drawing Fundamentals had us working on VALUE today. I like to think I have a decent grasp on value by now -- I tend to do it best using charcoal because I could get some more dramatic lighting. This was a pretty good opportunity to work on it a lot more. This is the current state of my homework assignment right now:

It's not too shabby. It's definitely still bordering on cartoonish shading, so I might go back in and try to add some more detail and lighting variants. Since I'm finishing stuff in a vaguely timely manner, I'm hoping to take the opportunity to continue practicing and challenging myself in each of these assignments.

Be PREPARED

... for the second round of Rapid Prototype Production!

This time around, the theme of the game is "storytelling". This time around, I'm grouped up with Gordon, Jonathan, Samantha, and Larry. Cue the pressure of having three artists on one team. I won't say much about the game so far since everything is still in development. I will say that I'm very confident in my group and our idea!  Our designs and in-progress assets are looking good so far. ♥

an accurate depiction of the week to come.

This week in Drawing Fundamentals: SILHOUETTES. Whiiiich is pretty self-explanatory. Admittedly, it's something I need to get myself in the habit of doing before I devote time to a full character design. It certainly helps me see -- very early on -- if the shapes are really going to work or not.  Our homework assignment for this week was to make silhouette designs for assets that might/could be used in our second RPP game -- which was pretty cool! I approached it trying to think of characters/props/environments/mounts/etc. we could have used if we had the time to make more levels. I'm still not entirely sure how to do environmental silhouettes for non-man-made environments, and Google didn't seem to know all that much about it either.

some character silhouettes!

aaaaand some props & mounts. 

my environments are hideous so i left them out.

Oh! And for last week: our homework was to do two drawings of different compositions. One had to be iconic and the other could be any composition we would like (I chose the L composition).

i should really get back to drawing more men.

For 2D/3D, our task was to model, UV, sculpt, and texture a fish then import it to the unreal engine. Naturally, I went for the cute kissy face fish. This model was a lot easier than the canon. I didn't have as much of a problem with creating the actual maps (though, I ran into a bug on Maya where I couldn't go to the "tangent space normals" option to apply the maps). A chunk of my time was spent attempting to resolve the seam down the middle of the fish where the maps were joined. It's definitely less pronounced on the low res mesh, but still noticeable. The frustrating part is that it's completely absent on the smooth preview and the meshes with way more geometry so it leaves me uncertain on how to fix this problem. That aside, my paint-splatter fish ended up looking really good! I think I'm slowly getting the hang of this process.

glubglubglub.

As for Common Core art, we're working on digital sculpting. Fortunately, I've already had some practice with this with the 2D/3D assignments. One of the reasons I did the fish assignment was to use it as an exercise before I did this one.

carl has seen some stuff.

I also worked on doing some painting in Zbrush. It's safe to say that I prefer Mudbox exponentially for creating textures -- there's just way more tools on it to get a more detailed paint. Carl came out pretty well, though! [ tooting of own horn in the distance ]

Aaaaand lastly, for animation we have been working on adding overlap & following through to our walk cycle. As fun as this is, the thing I'm having trouble with is making the tail to the hat more lively. Originally, I wanted to make it bounce with each step but it ended up moving waaaaay to unnaturally fast (this is just a 29 frame walk cycle, after all). I wasn't too fond of it, so I had it sway back and forth like a ponytail would. I might be making changes to this in the future until I'm completely happy with it. The walk looks better, though!

And that's it for now. :D

There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow ...

... Shining at the end of every day!

Over the last few posts I have made, I realized that I haven't talked about my Drawing Fundamentals or Animation courses in detail. First: Drawing Fundamentals!

Those who don't draw act like it's something magical when an artist can reproduce something on paper -- that it's just some latent talent we're born with. Nope! Any artist who's picked up a pencil knows that every piece comes from an understanding of all the artistic principles and tooooons and toooons of practice.  I was an art minor during my undergraduate degree. I had the opportunity of learning from three artists who were all very skilled in his craft. That doesn't mean I'm anywhere near done learning! There's still a lot of things I have left to refine (clearly). So this Drawing Fundamentals course is becoming the beginning of that. By the end of next year, I hope to look back to this post and see significant improvement.

One of our first assignments was focusing on shapes, lines, and getting a grasp on the tools we were given. 

The next was a focus on One Point, Two Point, and Three Point perspective! This needs a looooooot of work, as does my environments in general.

Currently, we're working on artistic compositions. This is a peek at some of my notes. 

Now I finally know the names of the compositions I spam. LOL

 SO, ANIMATION.

Last week, I made the choice to specialize in Animation during my time at FIEA! The times I was able to animate were definitely the highlight of my undergraduate. It's the field that I have the most passion learning about (not that I don't like 2D & 3D art! I just like animation more, LOL).

Currently in class, we have been working on the fundamentals of animation, some of the history behind it, and the principles.

this is our first assignment: a bouncing ball.

this is our second! more bouncing balls, WITH DIFFERENT WEIGHTS.

Aaaand this is what I'm currently working on: a generic walk cycle. This is currently still in progress because I have to get rid of this character's limp. ORZ

As a late birthday present, my parents gave me this doozy:

It's a book regarded as the "Bible of Animation" to many. As far as I know, it's ranked consistently high by people in how helpful and informative it is. Also, Disney. I love Disney. I already have Tony White's "How to Make Animated Films" to help me out in learning the basics a little while back. It looks like I have two great teaching aids at my disposal. ♥

Currently, the animation course is moving at a leisurely pace. It's calm enough so I can focus on the basics, fine tune things, get feedback, and correct my mistakes before the due date arrives. Later in the semester is when I'll be diving deep into animation as the assignments get more complicated. It'll be then when you spy a lot more posts detailing it. 

That's all for my progress in these two classes thus far. Until next time!

Steady As an Exploding Cannon

After weeks of working on this project, I think this cannon business has finally come to an end! This week consisted of me fine tuning textures (and finally being able to successfully bake a gradient map!) and shoving everything into the Unreal engine to spiffy-fy it.

ambient occlusion map.

the normal map with the zbrush textures.

the final color map painted in mudbox!

aaaaand the gradient map.

My getting each of the maps to bake properly was definitely a ... trying process. All of the trial and error has definitely helped me understand the baking process far better than I did before. It's definitely something I'll have to work on during the coming months.

looking good, yo.

some mental ray renders of the cannon! 

Adding the cannon into Unreal was definitely one of the more fun aspects of this entire process. Through this, I was able to learn about parameters and adding in more detail to these cannons. While my normal maps are slightly off in alignment (but vastly improved from before, after I started the whole mapping process over), I think that this turned out to be pretty good for my first go at it. A little while from now, my props will be looking a lot better!

Aaaand that's all on this project! Off to work on other stuffs. ♥