Matdawna Jn Philipp's Animation Blog

 Hey! Guess who finally pulled together an animation showreel! Any and all feedback on this is greatly appreciated, it's the first time I've made one of these! I have plans for some extra 3D animation that'll go onto it's own showreel, and I'll hopefully ahve some progress on the character rig i'd worked on for a little while!

I haven't made a post in a while, so I thought I ought to put this artwork up here! I'm not very good at sharing the artwork I do, so it's a habit to get into for myself (also a bit of evidence that I can draw more than a cloud-shaped sheep) I will warn that 99% of these drawings are to do with Dungeons and Dragons, which I blame for the number of elves you'll see here. A profile picture for a Twitch Channel - I plan on streaming at some point so I thought to set up the channel early so I'm not brainstorming stuff later on. Two Rabbitfolk characters I'd worked on designs for, named Eccles (Left) and Butter (Right) Two more rabbit folk that are related to the two above, Castella and Dundee - everyone in their family is named after a form of desert. Designed an Elven spy based around the setting of Tamriel from The Elder Scrolls, this was his initial character sheet before I separated his backstory from the setting and re-wrote it. A collage of different character...

Greetings! I have come to announce that I have worked on two short films with a few peers in my class! It's been a pleasure to work with everyone involved and we've had good times (and stressful times) but I think the final result looks great! Here are some links to the films! I will write up some extra pages to cover some of the techniques I've learnt over the past 3 months! And I'm planning on working on some rigging and animation work over the summer break as well, so hopefully I wont' forget to write entries in here .

Well, once again I have ignored this blog for the sake of finishing module work... But, I have finally finished the ident itself, so I'll do a bit of catchup work! So, after starting the initial blockout, I found that my storyboard was way  too long. So there was a lot of cutting early on so that the ident would fit the 25 second upper limit set out by the brief.  This did mean that i wouldn't need to create transitions between a walk cycle and any non-cyclical actions though - which meant I would get a final product created in a timely manner. Following the initial cuts, I began animating the sheep. However, I quickly realised that I forgot to model a plane.... and to fix the grass.... The main issue with the grass I had originally created was that it was sparce, and extremely patchy. As it was an integral part of the scenery, I spent some time modelling a tuft of grass to then instance around the field instead of using the default hair particles to fill in the empty space. T...

 Well, this is earlier than I thought. So, I just completed my storyboard for BAA 2022. It's about 3 pages long (each page is 9 boards for reference). Now I think about it, I should probably cut this thing down a whole lot - mostly as the range for our submissions is between 4-25 seconds.... Yeah, not good at all. But, I can easily work with this constraint as i have a second idea to work with (that also uses less assets in shot). As usual, my original concept is a bit ambitious for a (at most) 25-second indent for an award show.  In the end, I decided to go through the boards and cut the ones that just added extra time on (even though they were to just give some more context to the viewer, the sheep were planning this). I have to remember that this isn't a short film, so I made a few  cuts (in red ink). My other idea? Well, its not been boarded yet (and would probably only be one page of drawings now I think about it). I'm pretty excited to give this a shot, but I'm al...

Now I've returned to classes, we're starting to look into specialisms in the Animation, Games and VFX industry. Before we broke for Christmas break ,we were encouraged by one of our tutors to consider what we'd like to specialise in for the foreseeable future. Like most things , this isn't set in stone as we might change our minds later down the line - but this year is an opportunity to explore our options and learn new techniques before we make a decision in the next year. What did I pick? I couldn't decide. So, I had a chat with our then Studio Assistant and found out that my uni also allows you to specialise as a Generalist (which is role that basically means you're a jack of all trades and can kinda slip into most departments where they're short on numbers). Works out great for me! I want to make some o my own projects in 3D, so being a Generalist is probably a good idea as it means I can kidna navigate multiple pipelines at once. Also, our uni has partn...

 So......... yeah it's been while (sorry). I've been so caught up on doing this project that I've kinda ignored this blog in favour of just, well, finishing my submission. But I've literally just submitted my retrospective, so I think I can finally return to updating this blog. Like the last module, I'm gonna make a page specifically for it, but I'm also gonna quickly make sure I link the final piece here. I will note that, while the one I have here has got sound, I submitted a completely different version to the contest with no sound  just to not break the rules too heavily. (At least I remembered to add sound, unlike last time.) Well, here's the obligatory Youtube link! Also, here's a link to the full page on the project in full!  https://matdawnaj-animation.blogspot.com/p/the-knight-spider-tale-of-character.html This project really did consume my time, so hopefully I can keep remembering to keep this site updated more often! I am working on different ...

 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 ...

 IT FINALLY FINISHED RENDERING!! I was sitting through this morning's class when the tutor went over how industry professionals render out their sequences: rarely with backgrounds and with all the settings turned down and slowly increased until it looks right. So... I didn't do either of those. I felt a bit silly, but then again I am only learning - I'm gonna make some mistakes! So, I finally have the end result of this whole module completed and encoded. I'm so glad! For a longer form explanation of how I made this page to go over how I got to this point (including all of my references:  https://matdawnaj-animation.blogspot.com/p/the-frog-and-fly-tests-and-whole-lotta.html

 So, I might be missing some of my class time for the sabertooth tiger we're working on with our other tutor - but I need this to be rendered out. I'm sure it'll be done before the afternoon begins, but I'm not entirely sure if it will be anymore... I got some extra frames rendered out last night, including re-rendering the 9th frame (good job me, cancelling it halfway through it being rendered), but my PC decided it was time to just... well... break? It fully just stopped displaying stuff on my screen - and it didn't revert after an hour so I just forced a restart. I'm worried that this might be a sign..... (It probably isn't, my PC is pretty old ) I'll post an update when this mess is finally rendered out! (or re-rendered in some cases)

UPDATE FROM LAST TIME! I made a big mistake - it was 30 hours, not 30 minutes. So, I said no to that and cranked hte settings back down. Hopefully the tutor for our pipeline-based lessons will let me render through his class - I'd like to take notes from him anyways and I don't wanna risk slowing Maya down by having two files open at the same time. Here's my new plan - get as much of the animation rendered today, and then get the rest rendered tomorrow. I will have to re-render frame 9, but I can cope with that. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined. (I'm joking, I'm just annoyed that I misread my own maths and thought it would render lickety split). So, I'm not gonna have any kind of finished render to show for today, but hey I got some pages made! I'm so glad I caught this error now, I'd be sat here all day waiting for this thing to render otherwise.

 Today I decided to do a test render of the final animation, just to see how long it'll take on the university systems. I know that my home PC is a bit, well, unstable - but it is able to run maya as is pretty well (as long as the file isn't a whole gigabyte). So, I started out today by rendering a single frame in the Arnold Renderer - which comes with maya by default. The initial frame took about 1 minute to fully render - but there was an issue with noise in the image, meaning I had to increase the samples the renderer took per frame (and due to not wanting to go through the AOV options and assign passes to this very short animation, I increased each sample by 1 (excluding the camera, which I increased by 2)). To put it simply, today is going to involve a lot  of waiting around - which I will use as an opportunity to not only work on notes for the retrospective piece we need to hand in next Monday, but also to work on other pages that I haven't gotten close  to finishin...

 Today I needed to fix foot slipping on my frog's feet, but I had already begun the process yesterday (but I didn't finish it in one day so that's why this post has been delayed to today). Honestly, to begin with I thought I'd be able to get the World Bake plugin to work, but I really didn't work . It would return error after error telling me it couldn't find the file, even though I'd placed the file exactly where it told me to, This is something I'll have to troubleshoot later anyway, seeing as my deadline is fast approaching - but luckily I had an alternative to this method. I already knew that the fly was moving so quickly that trying to fix foot slipping at this rate would be just, well, pointless. So, I spent some of my time sticking the lil guy to the rock he landed on. This was a terrible decision I can't come back from - mostly because of how time consuming this whole thing was: Each little dot, for those that don't know how 3D software w...

 Good Afternoon again! Today I knew I needed to work on my fly for my final project, so I got to work on that. However, I think I overestimated the amount of time it would take for me to animate an insect (especially after finding not only a very good piece of reference footage for the speed of a fly's legs but also attempting the spider task earlier on in the module) and ended up finishing this in about half an hour. I don't know how long I thought this would take me, but at least I know I can start fixing any foot slipping on my frog now. I'm probably gonna leave the fly as it is though (Except for some adjustments to make sure it actually is  on the rock), mostly because each of the fly's legs were 3 frames each - meaning the movement of the fly is so fast that it'd be a waste of time going through and sticking the feet down each and every time the fly moves. Well, here's a playblast of the actual motion: (it goes by quickly, so try looping it if you want a b...

 Good Afternoon! I'm not very good at posting progress on my work, but I can at the very least begin compiling my progress on my final piece of work leading up to the deadline! So, since starting my second year in university, we've begun learning how to animate quadrupeds (aka Creature Animation) and have been tasked with creating a short animated sequence (about 7 to 12 seconds long) that features a quadruped performing a cyclical action and a non cyclical action. This also required us to create storyboards so we can understand fully what we need and what exactly  we are animating. I... decided to make this hard for myself, I won't deny it. I wanted to take the point of a quadruped and bend the rule as much as I could - not because I didn't want to animate a house cat or a crocodile, but because I thought the challenge of animating a quadruped found doing more unusual cycles would be quite fun! It was fun in the end, but my choices were narrowed down to an axolotl (of ...