Maya Weightlifting - Added Barbell

In today's class we looked at staggering key frames and also adding a weight to the animation. I tweaked my animation a little by moving the pelvis forward and the hands a little closer to the body. However, when I added the barbell to the scene, I realized how wrong the positioning of the hands were. I tried my best to fix this but this made my timeline a little chaotic and the hands are now very shaky, so I may just remove the animation I have done for the hands and start again, unless there is a less time consuming way to do this? I'm not happy with how rough the animation looks right now.
Weightlifting Added Barbell from noah greenhalgh on Vimeo.

Maya Weightlifting - Restart

In today's Maya class I worked on fixing my weightlifting animation. I think the reason why I was so unhappy with my previous attempt (posted yesterday) was because I was using forward kinomatics on the MooM model's feet instead of inverse kinomatics, which meant that the feet were sliding around awkwardly and it was difficult to fix this without being very meticulous and time consuming. I also didn't like how I had positioned the spine. I figured that it would be less time consuming to just start again instead of messing up my timeline further. I was much happier with my second attempt so I cleaned up the animation in the graph editor, ready for next week when we work on loosening up the animation.

Second Version of Weightlifting Stepped Tangent from noah greenhalgh on Vimeo. Second Version Weightlifting Animation from noah greenhalgh on Vimeo.

Maya Weightlifting - Added Poses

Weightlifting Added Poses from noah greenhalgh on Vimeo.

Updated Moom weightlifting animation, pretty similar to the last video I uploaded, but with more in between poses. I'm really not happy with how this is looking though. I'll be tweaking the poses a lot as I feel like I've positioned the spine wrong and the whole thing looks very stiff.

Character Design Week 3 - Rough Project Concepts

In today's class, we also had some time to work on our own projects, so I started drawing some rough thumbnails of my Aristocrat Ghost from 1920s Paris. These concepts were loosely based on my research on both 1920s Paris and Art Nouveau.

Character Design Week 3 - World Building and Rough Sketches

I've been trying my best to catch up on my character design class this week. Today we looked at how important world building can be when it comes to telling a story. I was given a couple of simple tasks during the lecture presentation; Draw Big Ben in an exaggerated way, and draw an environment for an Egyptian Pharoh. 

Big Ben Thumbnail Sketches

Justin liked the smaller sketches of the tower as he said that putting perspective into account wasn't massively important when thinking of the overall design of the building, and to focus exaggerating the building in a way that gave it more character. He also advised that I look at the building in more detail, as there may be some cool things about the building that I wouldn't notice from a distance, so I started drawing a detailed zoom in of the clock face of the tower.

Pharoh's Tomb Rough Concept

This is a rough concept of a throne room for a powerful Egyptian Pharoh. Justin liked the idea, but he said there isn't enough personality in the drawing. He could figure out that the Pharoh that owned this room was powerful, but not much else. For example, it doesn't show if the Pharoh is scary, or serene, there's not a lot of character to it.

Poses and Arcs in Motion - Weightlifting Key Frames

In Today's class, we were asked to apply the skills we learned posing the MooM model to animation. This is a very basic animation using a stepped tangent to simulate 2D animation, I'll only be using a stepped tangent while creating the extreme poses of the weightlifting animation, the animation will look more fluid once I start adding more in-between frames.

Weightlifting Stepped Tangent Animation from noah greenhalgh on Vimeo.

Dramatic Arcs - Five MooM Acting Poses

In last Thursday's class, we were asked to create five more MooM poses, but this time we had to choose 'Action Poses'. I actually found this rather difficult, but I think this was because I was looking for full body acting poses, and surprisingly a lot of shows/ films will not show the actor's full body in a shot unless it is a heavy action scene (Or at least that was the issue I had), These are the poses I chose to do, but I may re-do a couple as the poses didn't really translate very well through the MooM model due to his rather odd proportions and I feel like these poses aren't dramatic enough.

Confident, Sensual Pose

Confident, Tough Pose

Happy, Friendly Pose

Frightened Pose

Happy, Laughing Pose

Character Design - Week 1 - Research

For week 1 of our character design class, we were given a random number that came with a few prompts for a character design. These are the prompts I received:

- Person/Animal: An Aristocrat

-Conceit/Trait: Art Noveau/Romantic, Dead (A ghost)

-World/Time: 1920s Paris

-Filmic Scene: "We will always have the Eiffel Tower."

-Animation Action: Longing looks.

We were asked to research our given prompts, so, for now, I have been researching 1920s Paris, and the Art Noveau Style.

"Art Nouveau, ornamental style of art that flourished between about 1890 and 1910 throughout Europe and the United States. Art Nouveau is characterized by its use of a long, sinuous, organic line and was employed most often in architecture, interior design, jewelry and glass design, posters, and illustration. It was a deliberate attempt to create a new style, free of the imitative historicism that dominated much of the 19th-century art and design. The term Art Nouveau was coined by a gallery in Paris that exhibited much of this work." - Encyclopedia Britannica

1920s Paris Influence Map:

Art Nouveau Influence Map: