Arya Test

This is a simple animation test that was created using Arya, the main character from “Child No More,” a FIEA cohort 12 capstone project. The purpose of the test was to gain an understanding of game animation workflow in UE4, and to create a series of cycled animations that could transition seamlessly between each other. I began with a series of simple cycles: idle, crouch, walk, and jump. Each of these cycles needed to translate with the character's root while avoiding foot sliding. To do this, I also created unique transition animations to bridge the cycles. The final scene shows the cycles and transitions assembled together into a longer animation with constant root motion to demonstrate how the animations blend together to create the final arrangement.

Semester 04 Portfolio 01

For the first portfolio piece of my final semester at FIEA, I created a dialogue animation that concentrated on depicting a change in emotion. After listening to the dialogue, I decided to have the character confronting someone, only to realize she's in over her head when he stands up and reveals his enormous size. Because I wanted to focus on the main character, the decision was quickly made to place the person she's confronting off screen and have the camera serve as the unseen person's point of view.

Semester Four Portfolio Pieces

To begin semester four animation, we were asked to do a dialogue test with a change in emotion. I found this sound clip from the film, "Admission," starring Tina Fey. I chose this particular dialogue because I liked that she transforms from having a confrontational, diva attitude to regretting her decision to confront this person and trying to backpedal her way out of it. Her super sassy attitude was inspired by Disgust from Inside Out. Below is the original reference for Disgust, as well as super rough thumbnails that I put together to establish the general idea of the scene before I begin blocking it.

 

 

For My second portfolio piece, I will be working on a pantomime that will be heavily focused on body mechanics that are character driven. In this piece, a father sneaks down to the basement to wash his son's filthy teddy bear in the middle of the night. Though he takes great care to make as little noise as possible in order to avoid waking the kid, his efforts are in vain as we hear the child screaming and storming down the stairs to retrieve his beloved stuffed animal. Dad reacts in horror at the realization that he has awakened the beast, and his reaction suggests that he knows this routine all too well given that he's gone through this ordeal many times. The child frantically tries to retrieve his bear from the washing machine as dad carries him off and back to bed

This piece will be a highly stylized cartoony animation which focuses on the mechanics of push, pull and lift. The main objective will be to create an accurate sense of weight that is balanced against stylized movement, while bringing the two characters' personalities to life. 

The Third piece will be an series of animations states that will be put together in UE4 using a state machine that I will be creating. The purpose of this piece is to gain experience in creating seamless animations for the purposes of game play, and to also learn the process of creating a state machine. I will be creating a series of seamless animations that are combat based, concentrating on advanced body mechanics throughout the piece. Below are examples of professional demo reels that inspired me to focus on this project:

  

Animation 101

When I came to FIEA I planned on specializing in 3D modeling, and had no intention of bothering with the animation classes. Whoops. During undergrad I was interested in only animation, to the detriment of all other basic skills. After spending time forcing myself to learn how to model I found other interests, and before long, animating became more and more of a distant memory. I begrudgingly dragged myself in at 9am to attend the first week of animation classes, since everyone else was doing it, and before I knew it everything I thought I was going to do when I came here suddenly flew out the window. It was sort of like being on a self imposed junk food free diet for 10 years and being placed in front of a tray of brownies; one bite and its all over. I left class wondering why I stopped animating in the first place, and soon after declared animation as my specialty. This is a run cycle that I just finished for homework this week:

Common Core Week 6

This week we finished off our starfish characters by polypainting in ZBrush. I typically use Mudbox for painting, and hadn't used ZBrush for this previously. After painting this guy, I'm officially a convert. Here's how he turned out:

Common Core Week 5

This week's adventure was sculpting out the little starfish character that we modeled previously. Thankfully we had a clean version of the model to start with, which saved the frustration of fixing any topology issues with out own models, and allowed us to concentrate on ZBrush. Here's how he turned out: