Wednesday, November 24, 2010

First Semester Junior Year

We're about three weeks away from the end of first semester junior year, so I figured it might be about time to update :]

Here are some of the assignment's I've been working on during the past couple months.

Push Pull Natural from Eric Prah on Vimeo.

For this assignment we had to tell a story in which a character makes at least two attempts to push and pull something. What made it really interesting though was that our models had to be based off of one of 6 silhouette character designs that we did during "Drawing for Animation. And what made it really interesting was that we weren't told our designs would be used for anything when we drew them. Not everyone was thrilled when we our teacher waltzed in and declared that we'd be animating our bizarre 6-headed 4 armed monstrosities, but we were allowed (see encouraged) by our animation teachers to modify our designs to make them more 3d friendly.

The great part about this particular assignment was getting a better feel for weight. I hadn't realized how much life a little foot shuffle can bring to a character till I started on Push-Pull.



Waiting from Eric Prah on Vimeo.

For "waiting" we had to animate a character waiting for something to happen. I decided to have a little extra fun with this one and modified Ringling's "Arty" rig to make it a little more girly.

Also, I don't think I've ever had so much fun shooting reference before.

Silhouette Animation from Eric Prah on Vimeo.

The Silhouette animation exercise was cool because we got to practice the magical art of cheating. Cheating poses, cheating shapes, cheating motion - basically animating everything to camera. The bigger shock was realizing how much you could, and actually needed to do this to get the most out of your poses in non-silhouette 3D.


Character Walk from Eric Prah on Vimeo.

This was our first assignment after summer break, and it was a nice warmup to get everyone back into the swing of things.

I'm pretty happy with how all of these came out, although I still have a whole lot of cleaning up to do before they go on any kind of reel. Time to get out the buffer and start polishing :]