Matdawna Jn Philipp's Animation Blog

 So..... turns out that you can't model your own props. (Great). So, I got very  worried that I'd need to go back to the drawing board with my project (and honestly I felt ready to jump ship to the 11 Second Club even though I'd be going through a lot  of crunch time). Luckily they had stand-ns for my project that meant I could actually do the work I originally planned to. All the Adobe Substance 3D Asset Library had that i could even think of using were a closed umbrella and a floor lamp (yep, not even a hat was available to me to use - at least not without paying money for something can easily model in 1-2 hours). With that frustration out of the way, we'd been shown how to rig up props last week - which is good seeing as I need to do that for my entire scene. So, with a lamp and umbrella needing rigging (annoyingly enough), I decided to work on the blockout and get it to a decent point and then playblast it out. Its not done yet (as of writing), but when it is I can ...

 Well, it's been a while since I've posted. That's mostly  because I've been a bit tired, but also because I've been struggling to get motivated to work... Well, I can share what I've got so far! So, as part of our grade for our Character Acting module, we need to submit a piece to competition. Usually, this would be The 11 Second Club, but because we've started this module later than usual, we get to choose between that and any other competition we want - one of the suggested being The Knight Spider competition run by The Rookies. As you can tell, I chose to work with the Knight Spider: the competition's timeline works really well with the length of our module and provides us with a professionally made rig and model to use. Despite the higher number of constraints for this one, I think I had an easier time coming up with ideas for this character. Well... kinda? First of all, I decided to sketch the character in different poses to get a better idea of th...

 After working the jump for a good part of the week, we eventually moved onto making a more complicated motion - a baseball pitch. This was difficult, mostly as there is a lot of turning and twisting in the character in order to perform the action. So, this took quite some time to complete as a task: Most of this involved watching a reference video and mimicking the movements in it - so less imagination based unlike the jump exercise from Monday. Anyway, tis task took a majority of the day - which is perfectly fine, it means I'm spending my time doing work over getting distracted by other things. But, because I needed to make sure I had this task completed before the end of class due to not having time over the weekend to work on it properly, I think there are still areas that need polish. Specifically one of the feet near the end of the sequence. I may  have also rendered it out, it was fast but then again its only 88 frames total: I should definitely take time to play with t...

 Good Morning! It's been a while since I've written anything on here, so i thought I should catch up on what I've missed. Over my reading week (other than submitting my essay) I've been playing with rigs we've been given access to via our university. Among these different mega packs and standalone models I found a 'Cute Frog' rig in a folder called 'External World Characters' (by David O'Reilly: https://davidoreilly.itch.io/external-world-characters ). So, I tried animating with it. This was very difficult . I can't blame Maya for this this time, especially as the rig was clearly designed to be a background character (or is just very old). The feet on the mesh would horribly deform if pushed past a certain point, the FKIK switches were also the pole vectors that directed the knees (which were placed against the mesh), the head was permanently in IK meaning it wouldn't turn with the rest of the body - there were a lot of issues. I did get ...