Principles of Animation - Anticipation and Arc

Bringing back Wallace to demonstrate Anticipation and Arc. Something strange is going on with the lighting and the fur, but hopefully the motion conveys the elements I'm going for.

Anticipation and Arc from Adam Alexander on Vimeo.

Group Project Segment

Group Project Segment from Adam Alexander on Vimeo.

Array Animation

Array Animation from Adam Alexander on Vimeo.

New Term

Here is a sample from Day 1 for Animation. I will try to get the creature film to a mangeable size and upload it soon.

Ball Sample Animation from Adam Alexander on Vimeo.

Wallace Walk Cycle

Wallace Demo from Adam Alexander on Vimeo.

Weight Painting

Wallace seems to be about 70% fully weight-painted. I'm going through and testing each joint. I'll add some IK solvers afterwards. That's pretty metal.

Wallace Update

Wallace continues to grow.  The new challenge is getting the eyes to work.  I've attempted to build several versions, but am having difficulty aligning the texture.  If worse comes to worse i can always unwrap it.

Interior Mouth Modeling.

http://www.animationforcreation.com/2009/08/blender-tutorial-part-four-mouth.html

This is the tutorial I used for modeling the inside of the mouth. Its pretty short, but goes into deep detail.

Wallace the Troll Progress

Wallace T. Troll is coming along nicely.  He is 97% modeled - all that is left is to model the mouth and teeth.  This is my first time building a complex model without sculpting, but I think I have got a clean edge flow throughout.  Hopefully this week will see him fully textured and in the process of rigging.

Wallace the Troll Concept Art

Final Project

My final project for the character design/white wall project.  The focus of this project was to get a compelling, non-"stereotypical" 3D character model.  This character was sculpted as a high poly model, then retopo'ed into a low poly character and rigged, suitable for animation.  As for the white wall aspect of the project, I wanted to work with the strengths that blender had.  For me, I think that has to be the dynamic lighting that can be changed so easily.  It seems to me to have the best of both worlds of painting and photography.

I found this project to be pretty time intensive.  Of course, half of that was learning new techniques; I am sure I could do this again much quicker.  There was one thing I wanted to do:  I was going to add hair, but neither the comb function nor the soft body physics were providing what I wanted.  Outside of that, only marginal things were left off.

Here is a progress shot, back when her armature was not working quite well.  Still, I kind of liked this, and it definitely influenced my idea for the final composition.

And another progress shot of the finished sculpt, before retopo.

Project 1 Touch-ups

Here is the final pic for Project 1 after the critiques. A list of things changed:

-Added smoke

-Repositioned overall composition to show the entire mobius, center the train

-Unwrapped and retextured the tracks

-Reduced the size of the halo lamp

Project 1 Complete

Its done!  My.  This project had a lot of hurdles to overcome.  I'm pretty happy with the end result.  Things I wanted to do but couldn't:

-Add an alpha layer text with letters to the train

-Add smoke from the train (I have spent a gross amount of time attempting this)

-Clean up some textures.  Probably shouldn't have gunned so hard for the smoke.

Project 1 Progress and Sculpting fun

Here is my progress on our first project so far.  I still need to texture a lot of this, add a few more cars, and play with composition, but I feel as though the modeling is finished.  

And here is another sculpt mode render.  I am enjoying this a lot and want to try making a low poly version of one of these soon.