CT4NAR - TB2 Animatic

University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 1 - Narrative

For my second attempt at making the animatic I decided to make a 3D world and use it for the background. This saved a lot of time because I didn't have to figure out the perspectives and paint draw the background by myself. 

When the storyboard was completed I imported it in Premiere where I tweaked the timing and added sound effects.


This is my part of the animatic:

The full version:

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CT4NAR - First (discarded) version of the animatic

University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 1 - Narrative

This is the first version of the animatic, in which I focused on making the character believable. I spent a lot of time deciding on different face expressions, but I overlooked the camera angles, so in the end I decided to scrap it. 

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CT4NAR - TB2 Storyboard

University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 1 - Narrative

Before starting to draw anything, my classmate and I spent a lot of time just thinking about ideas of films. The brainstorming stage took a lot of time because both of us wanted to make something that we enjoyed. 

After we finally settled for the story of a conflict between two islands I made some concept art.

The concept art helped us imagine the setting better, but only a few elements remained in the final storyboard, due to their complexity

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T4ANIP - Showreel

University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 1 - Animation Principles

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T4ANIP - Motion Drawing

University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 1 - Animation Principles

Base jumping, HALO/HAHO jumping and break dancing:

Shaolin Kung Fu and Gymnastics:

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T4ANIP - Weight catch and throw

University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 1 - Animation Principles

I liked this project in particular because I could animate something that I wanted for a long time. This animation was inspired by the Earth bending style, from Avatar: The Last Airbender, I chose this subject because I could get lots of references but also because I thought that it fit the task quite well.

Before I started to animate I planned the timing and the poses: 

This video shows the production process:

Final animation:

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T4ANIP - Walk on Stairs animation

University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 1 - Animation Principles

Even though my skills need to be improved, I believe that my Flash animations look better than the ones that I made on paper. Because I am used to Photoshop I didn't run into many problems while adapting to flash. One of the biggest differences between Flash and Photoshop is actually how the brushes work, and as seen in the final result the lines are wobbly. These are the steps of the creation of this animation: 

Final version:

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T4ANIP - Run and jump

University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 1 - Animation Principles

I believe that this animation exercise was a good opportunity to learn a little more about the timing and the weight of the character, which I believe that I still need to improve. In the future I will try to exaggerate the poses a little more and also and more delay to certain body parts, to make the character look less stiff. 
Planning drawing:

The process of making the animation can be seen in the following video:

The final version:

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T4ANIP - Personality Walk

University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 1 - Animation Principles

Animating on paper proved to be a difficult thing to do for me, because I couldn't play the animation as much as I would want to. In the future I will be a little more careful while planning the transitions between the key frames because I feel that the timing and speed could be improved.
Planning drawing:

 While making this animation I had to go through a few versions, as seen in the following video:

The final version: 

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T4ANIP - Human anatomy

University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 1 - Animation Principles

In the following drawings I studied how to draw specific body parts and how the muscles are positioned:

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T4ANIP - Pose Drawing

University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 1 - Animation Principles

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T4ANIP - Motion Drawing

University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 1 - Animation Principles

These drawings have been made after watching people on Youtube practicing different sports. Some of these drawings were used as references for making a 3D animation. 

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CT4APP - Legs Animation: The floor is...

University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 1 - Animation Production Process

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CT4APP - Legs animation: Animation

University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 1 - Animation Production Process

Some of my moves were challenging so it took a lot of trial and error to make the animation work. 

In the beginning, the first pair of legs is walking a lot. At first I tried to animate each step individually, but each step was different from the other, so I gave up and made a walk cycle instead. 

That was a good decision because I saved a lot of time, a slight slide of the feet can be observed. Also the fact that the rig was not so refined, certain movements are not looking so good. 


Many of the Shaolin's moves asked for a lot of work. The biggest problem that I ran into was that the character lacked mass while jumping. To fix that I had to correct and exaggerate some of the poses. Also stretching the time was a thing that I have done a lot. 

After I finished the animations, I jumped to the post-production stage. Most of the editing was done in Premiere, but some scenes needed to be done in After Effects. The transitions from the first background to the second were really fun to make because I got the opportunity to play with many effects. The camera shake was also added in After Effects by parenting a camera to a null object and setting the layers as 3D objects. To get a control over the effect, I applied a wiggle expression to the position of the null, and also a slider to control the size of the shake.

Because of the lack of time and resources I chose to playblast the animation instead of rendering it. Even though it didn't reach its full potential, i believe that the final result looks pretty good.

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CT4APP - Legs animation: Legs Modeling

University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 1 - Animation Production Process

The modeling of the legs was pretty much straightforward. In my first attempt of creating the Shaolin legs I actually modeled every detail, like the straps and wrinkles. 

At first I was very pleased with the looks of it, but then I realized that the mesh is way too complex and the poly count way too high for such a model. There wasn't much that I could do from that point, so instead of trying to clean it up I decided to make another model from scratch.

This time I made sure to use bump maps instead of polygons for adding the details.

I painted the textures mostly in Mudbox but I also used Photoshop for some details. To see how the pants fold I used a reference photo from Google.

Rigging was quite challenging because I added a reverse foot lock. Because my project demanded 3 sets of legs I went through the whole process again. The difference is that the 'smart' dressed legs have another, simpler, kind of rig: 

The kid's legs are in fact just a modified version of the Shaolin legs.

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CT4APP - Legs animation: Background Modeling

University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 1 - Animation Production Process

When I modeled the background I ran into problems while making the rocks. For some reason I just couldn't get them to look good. To fix that I searched for images of mountains and cliffs and I used them as references. 

In my early tests I focused on getting the basic shapes and lights in place. 

At first I experimented with HDRI maps that I found on the internet, but I didn't get the results that I wanted. Because my scene was quite stylized I tried to alter the sky map. That didn't work. Probably because of the format of the image. 

My next experiments were focused on the sky and clouds textures. To add depth to the scene I added volumetric fog, knowing that it will greatly affect my render times.

While playing with the reflectivity and specular options of the cloud's texture I actually managed to create a nice-looking water effect. I will probably use this in future projects. 

At this point I started texturing the rocks. At first I tried to do it in Photoshop, but the results were not good enough. So in order to make these I had to learn how to use Mudbox. Since it resembled Photoshop, it didn't take me long to get used to it. After I used the projection tool to paint the textures I exported the diffuse, bump. and specular layers, which I later imported in Maya.

Because the scene looked still too empty I added basic planes with transparent cloud textures that I made in Photoshop.

It took some trial and error, but in the end I managed to get the transparency and translucency settings just right.

The second background was easier to produce. Because of my artistic decision to have a 'cardboard world', I didn't struggle at all to texture everything. I made a few house models, and then I duplicated them many times to create an urban environment. 

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