This unit has been very important for my animation practice. The main part of the unit was a feedback that George gave us every week. It really helped to understand more all the principles of animation in practice and mainly prepare a few animations for our showreels.
An animation exercise on body mechanics was very beneficial for me as I could focus on a body movement and timing. In the beginning, it was important to think of an idea that would show interesting and challenging movement of the body. I tried to make a mannequin look as realistic as possible but the fact that it is made from wood means more limitation in movement. It was easy to work with the rig, although it took quite a lot of time to keep body parts in the same position, as an example – when a mannequin falls down on its knees, I had to add more keyframes to ‘hold’ the knees on the same spot.
A final animation of body mechanics:
A lipsync exercise was challenging not only in the lipsync itself but also in the body movement, as it had to help desired emotions of the audio. For the lip sync, I learned that it is better to start with opening a mouth with jaw rotation and then create mouth shapes according to the sound. We don’t have to add every single sound and articulate every letter and it is a very interesting process of identifying what is important in the lip synchronising and what is not.
A rig was very pleasant to work with, it had an appearance picker and all the main controls separately. The only main issue is the it was not possible to render a final version as we have to pay for it with this rig. However it is not a big problem as playblast shows everything needed.
A final playbast animation on lipsync:
In the nearest future I plan to polish these two animation even more to put them on my main showreel.
Artefact Animation
My artefact animation was my first full animation that I developed from the idea to a final version (however I plan to polish a few animation shots). It was a great experience and I learnt a lot of new tools and technics as a particle system and a bloom lens effect. I also exercised more on the animation itself from the walking cycles to the emotion expressions.
A final animation “Firefly”: