ANNAMATIONS

Unfortunately I can’t be puting up any images of the game I’m working on as junior artist /animator since it is all confidential. But I can promise I am enjoying it lots and looking forward to the game being released to see if non-biased people like it as much. Although that means we only get to work on this until August and then move on to something probably sports related.

So here is a few pages I scanned recently from my sketchbooks, ranging from recent stuff to few months old.

Some life drawing I scanned recently - about a year old. A definite improvement from previous years especially with quick sketches, and much more enjoyable and chilled sessions. Finally I could let go and not care if each sketch is a portfolio piece or not. Hope find somewhere to do some more sessions soon! 

Thank you for visiting my space of bloggings and work in progress. My personal website is finally up and running, visit it here: www.annamations.com

You can see my showreel and short film / tv shows involvement under animation, life drawing, sketches, paintings etc in the gallery and find out more about me under resume. And if you care for some animation news and inspirational work you can find them under links. All feedback is always welcome!

Coming up: Working on more animation exercises in Maya to improve my folio of work - and to keep from rusting - there are some great rigs available free online to play with. Oh, and lots of recent random sketches and life drawing - which I just need to finish scanning and photoshoping, annoying when stuff is A3 and your scanner is A4…

My animation showreel, featuring scenes from mainly three short films (Squeaky Clean - MA Final Major, Petrified - BA Final Major, Dreamcatching - MA Group Project). For concept and character design you will have to watch it to the end. Music - Akilah by Turiya Mareya Latin Jazz Ensemble.

Ladies, gentlemen and animation ppl (a species of our own), I present you my MA final major project, CG animated short, ‘Squeaky Clean’. Enjoy!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=cJmZkdPF0vc

Three days before hand in, I thought I’ll post a few stills of the rendered shots, which I must say I’m quite proud of how they are looking. Still need to rerender a few passes and colour-match all the shots together but if someone told me last September that I’d know my way round XSI and achieving these results I would have had my dooubts. I even replaced some of the 2D effects I was planning to have with CG elements, and funnily enough it took me less time to achieve a good result that blends in with the rest of the style.

Well, enough blabbing here are the stills. I will be saving the animation till next week when it is all put together and looking Clean! Click to enlarge.

Spend most of this week carrying out some extreme UVing. Used Roadkill for the initial unwrapping and then tidy up diferent objects togehter on the same maps - something like puting together puzzle pieces. Same as for the boy, I did ambient occludion render maps for each objects and used them in photoshop to produce some sketchy shading. I had to keep myself from adding too much detail or making the textures too realistic since I want to keep the film’s look more simple and stylised.

The results so far:

I decided to keep the walls and floor in the same colour to keep it less distracting. Perhaps a slight bump map to give the feeling of tiles. Well, now that I got the look sorted I can go back to animating!

Pausing on the animation a bit I thought I’d go back and work on the textures. Being a big fan of the Abient Occlusion goddess but not of the loooong rendering times I did Amb Oc render maps for the boy’s body and head which I can use in a texture.

freaky amboc boy

body uv map

body texture

Roadkill was extremely helpful when unwrapping the UVs - last time i tried to do it manually it took me several more days. It does require some thought out seam selection but other than for the hair I didn’t have to deal with much point moving.

I did attempt to paint the textures in Painter first, but they just looked dirty and rough. So I made several copies of the amb oc render map layer in photoshop and tried various filters which i multiplied with a block colour layer, The one used here is a chalk and charcoal filter with coloured pencil (inverted) for the darker parts. It seems to work well for the clothes, hair and face. For the hands I used the underpainting filter.

This is the final result, after adding a few touches of colour for the cheeks, lips, ears and eyebrows. A few problems are the eyelids which look horrible when shut, and also the low res that the render maps were produced. Seems that 512×512 were not enough and they come out pixellated though you cant really see in the render region. Perhaps I will do another one for closeups of the face. There are a few details that need tweaking on the painted textures, seams especially, but overall I’m very happy with the result, the textures make the model look so much better!

How exciting, i have finally blocked out all the rough animation for my film! Plus I came up with a new title, since ‘Bath Day’ is not really that exciting.. I didnt upload the original block test since there have been a lot of changes so it doesnt really reflect how the story will be presented. You can see the development of the visual sequence of events comparing with the original storyboards.

Please feel free to submit any comments and feedback since it is essential at this stage - while alterations are still feasible! I would love some new perspective on the whole thing. Enjoy! and keep in mind that the finished polished piece will look so much better!