Friday, March 28, 2008

The first week of the new Quarter...

Here I am, at it again. This Spring Quarter goes as follows:

Monday/Wednesdays
8am - 10:30am, 3D Character Rigging and Animation
5pm - 7:30pm, Animation II

Tuesdays/Thursdays
11am - 1:30pm, Conceptual Maquette Class

I survived my first week of classes so far. In 3D character I'm working towards building a fully rigged model of a character I've created. I'm using Anzu yet again for this project although this will be interesting since I'm still relatively new to modeling and animating in Maya. My Animation II class has just begun animating bouncing balls and working towards an Emotional Ball. I was supposed to take Animation II before 3D character...but my double major causes me to overlap classes unfortunately. Finally my Conceptual Maquette class is starting our Celebrity Maquettes. We have to find reference photos of an actor and sculpt a maquette from those references.

Today, I managed to work on a lot of stuff. I got my "stalker" board completed yesterday, its a big foam core board with all of my reference photos on it. After class, I worked on my character turnarounds that are due for 3D character on Monday. I also worked on my armature when I got home later on in the night. Here's some pics of my progress.



Armature in progress, "Stalker" Board as my professor likes to put it.



Looks nothing like him....yet.



My supplies for Maquette Building.



The finished Armature setup. Yeah arms and legs aren't proportional, but that's so I don't end up with short line while constructing and I can always snip off the metal if it was too long.

But yeah...that's my week.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Class 20: Last Day

So I managed to finish the project, woo! I'm pretty satisfied with the final outcome, although I would have liked to have everything smoother and more animated if I had knew what I really wanted to do before the quarter started and worked all quarter long. I'd like to continue working on this later to really get it completed.

Anywho, here's the piece!



hmm seems like the video is a bit slow...looks better on the real file and the swf.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Progresso Reporto V


In class, I worked on the scenes with Anzu and Jurou and managed to complete most of it. The only things I need to do left are the close up reaction shots of both of them, draw the smoke effect and food and animate it. After that, I'm going to try and add sounds to the animation.

Looks like a lot, but actually I'm quite pleased at where I'm at. You'll see a finished piece by Class 20.

Class 19: Oh crud...

Unlike most, I'm not finished. Still got work to do, as you can see by my previous posts. Not much else to say, because I need to get back to work.

Progress Report IV


I just finished the first scene of Anzu on the roof, animated. If you follow with the storyboards, I finished up to board 19 and I need to finish the rest. Work work work.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Progress Report III


Woo, so now I'm finished with the interior scenes of the restaurant. Everything is animated up to storyboard 14 if you wanna know where I'm at. Now I need to do the rooftop sequence with Anzu and Jurou...yay the fun part.

Sunday, March 9, 2008

Ahh nooo come back to me my lost hour!!

Daylight Savings sucks ;-;

After waking up and looking at it, I'm also going to go back to the shot of me and my friends and change my hair darker, like my friend to the left. Also going to redo the weird darker brown squiggles behind us. Supposed to be shadows of customers, but I'll fix that real quick.

Lookie lookie what I finished a min ago

So I just finished this scene...animated with Anzu swooping by stealing more food. Going to rest up for now and work on the rest tomorrow. Yes, that's me making a cameo appearance in my own animation and 2 of my buddies. Bowl of Udon, Dragon Roll, and a Beef Bowl...mmm.

Saturday, March 8, 2008

What happened to Class 18? Progresso Reporto II

I missed it, crud. Been battling fatigue, but I'm doing my best and have been working on my project. I managed to finish animating the first pair of customers who get their food stolen by Anzu. I'm currently working on the next set of customers. But here are some samples.



Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Progress Report I

So, I finished two backgrounds, the Exterior and Interior of the Japanese Restaurant. I also began to place rough elements I'm animating that are in those scenes, like the people. I managed to get my opening sequence done, a Fade In to the establishing shot of the Japanese restaurant and Zoom In then Cut to next scene. Thought I'd give ya a sneak peek now.




So I've began to notice after really diving into Flash and coloring/drawing with it, it was kind of tough to use. I couldn't really figure out how to select specific areas to fill in cuz Flash wouldn't let me...which i think is mostly because I don't have a lot of closed sections...hmm answered my own question, would have been helpful earlier.

I also miss certain shortcuts I'm used to doing in Photoshop that I think aren't in Flash, like being able to change my brush size with the [ ] keys. If there is, well crud, haha.

I wish I could work a bit faster, I'm still fumbling around with menus and stuff. I know we did the tutorials and that was supposed to be enough to teach us about Flash, but I guess I didn't really get as deep into Flash with those projects until now. But I think the more I work with Flash this week, I'll find my streamlined work flow.

The backgrounds are a bit scratchy and messy....but I kinda like how it looks. I do however want to try and get a nice clean look to future animations, like the BiteyCastle dude.

If anything I wrote doesn't make sense...its 3:04am and I'm probably hallucinating my bed floating with other soft and fluffy objects...luring me to come sleep...

Think I'll work a little more longer then Ill sleep... ^^;;

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Class 17: Bleh

So I'm tired, whats new? Oh yeah, nothing produced yet again. Get my butt to work...will post at end when something new magically appears. Bleh. Mostly couldn't get work done because of other work in the way...not sure what else to add. Work Work Work!

Saturday, March 1, 2008

Schedule...meh

As you can tell, I'm not good at scheduling things. I'm down to the week before finals and that's all I've got for time. So here's the basic game plan...

March 1st & 2nd: Work on Backgrounds

March 3rd - 13th: Animate like there's no tomorrow.

It's hard to put my work flow into a nifty chart, all I know is that when I'm given something thats due...I'm gonna get it in on time. I'm cutting it real close, but I should be okay, I'm down to my final projects in my other classes and I'm pretty much finished with my Digital Form Final except for a few tweaks.

So enough blogging and back to working on this project...even though its 1:08am...many many long nights ahead haha.

Storyboards...Finally!

Yeah, I didn't get to upload these as soon as I thought, but hey here they are at least. They are a bit on the sketchier side...but I have a good idea of what I'm doing now. Hope you like.

Oh yeah, ignore the 2nd row of the first page, the crossed out lines. I didn't like it anymore.

Edit #2: I wanted to change how I do the transition from the interior of the restaurant to the roof shot with anzu eating her loot. I'm going to pan up from the interior of the restaurant after she steals everything and fade out to black and then fade in while still panning up to her eating on the roof. This is so that I can try and make sure the audience know's its on the roof of the restaurant.