Evaluation

Ok, after the whole mess up with the library computers, I have also just realised that in the rush, I didn't send my Evaluation to be burned to the Data Disc, which is really annoying as originally, I had all the folders set up so that everything was easy to find. I thought I was on top of everything until everything started messing up today- going from bad to worse!!! But like I said before, it's done now and here is my evaluation in blogged form so that it can still be read.....

Evaluation

Digital Skills 2

Jade Midson

I thoroughly enjoyed this project as I had touched upon some 3D before, but I felt a lot more confident this time. I managed to keep ahead of myself with organisation at the start and blogged everything as I went along, though towards the end I know I began to slow down the pace I was working at due to commitments to another project. I enjoyed watching the Moom character ‘come to life,’ and seeing my success in this, I was a lot more confident creating the Action Sequence animation.

I didn’t however leave much time to render my projects as a lot of the settings were wrong and wouldn’t render out properly, though thanks to the video tutorials, I was able to pick up on these issues and learn them.

The ball bounces were also quite fun to animate as we got to play around with extreme squashes and stretches etc.

A minor issue I had with the project was that I was confused with what I was being taught and the brief. For example, the brief said we had to include a collection of our captures and it was only mentioned that we save out versions as we went along in the project. Also, the camera’s settings were animated and we were told how to overcome this and then to ‘render all passes.’ However, upon doing this, one camera’s settings would render out as JPEGS and the other camera would render out as ‘TAGARS,’ which was confusing as After Effects didn’t seem to like this. The main downfall I would say is that I would have liked to have learned about all the different render settings a lot longer before the end of the project as this made me rush. Although having to complete my project a day earlier than needed due to personal circumstances may not have helped the rush, I think I would have been able to get all the rendered images together a lot quicker to author my DVD.

Oh, and as I was half way through rendering my action sequence footage, after about half an hour, I realised that I forgot to smooth the football that I modelled. Also, with this particular render, when I added it to the render queue in After Effects, the estimated time was ridiculously long, so I opted to only loop the video twice, as it is relatively long itself anyway.

I think I have learned that I need to keep on top of things as I go along like I started at the beginning of the project, regardless of other commitments, but I had fun animating in 3D, especially with the Action shots and using reference footage.

DVD Case, Label and menu design

So, after the eventful and very hectic day of rendering and trying to author my dvd, with crashing computers and unresponsive programmes, I finally got my DVD menu ready with fully working buttons...until it got to that time in the library where apparently its a good idea to restart all the computers without warning!! During this horror, the computers decided that it would wipe off all my files that I had lined up to burn to the data disc and then wpuldnt let me recreate any- I thought the day couldnt get any worse!!!

Last week, i spent ages sending my PSD file and blank DVD off with someone reliable at my old UCA in Rochester, to get my CD printed on- there was  a lot of fuss getting the designs to match up with the technician's files, but i was soon presented with my printed DVD which I was very happy with- i thought that it was one of my better, most thoughtful pieces of work as i continued the theme of  my blog- until the dreaded library computers took that away from me right at closing time- I was sooo close!!

Luckily, Matt was very close at hand and offered to let me recreate my DVD menu on his Mac and burn a basic data disc I was very disappointed after all the effort and time I had put in, but I guess that's it now- it'll be handed in tomorrow and I'll go from there, tho this experience has dropped my confidence in my work a lot.

So, just so that my labels didn't go to waste completely, I thought I'd present them on here!!!

DVD Label

Data Disc

DVD case

DVD Menu



Football Action Sequence

I quite enjoyed animating this sequence as it pushed our basic knowledge that we were taught in class. If I had time, I was going to animate another action sequence of some netball throws I did and some other football skills. However, after spending most of the time editing settings and working on the other projects we have running alongside this one, I ran out of time, which is a shame. However, I will still produce these so that I'm able to broaden my skills in SoftImage and learn all the render and camera settings and fixing any problems, as I am getting quite used to doing this.

If, im totally honest, the animation doesnt quite look right from the side view and at some point when creating the sequence, the legs were rotating in all different directions and the moom seemed to be leaning, though I have no idea why and couldn't rectify this as it was messing up the key frames that I had set so far. Also, after half way through the gruelling process of rendering, I realised that I had stupdly forgotten to smooth the ball!!!

Anyway, this will all be written in my evaluation, so here's the video....

Football Action Sequence from Jade Tamara on Vimeo.

Reference Video

Yep, a girl doing kick-ups for my reference video! I shot quite a few, but I think that this section of the video will allow the moom to have some character and quite a range of poses.


Football_Reference_Footage from Jade Tamara on Vimeo.

Rendered Characterised Walk

Characterised_walk from Jade Tamara on Vimeo.

Rendered Walk Cycle

Walk_cycle from Jade Tamara on Vimeo.

Shuttlecock Bounce

Untitled from Jade Tamara on Vimeo.

Tennis Ball Bounce

Tennis_Ball Bounce from Jade Tamara on Vimeo.

Bowling Ball Bounce

Bowling_Ball from Jade Tamara on Vimeo.

Characterised Walk

I animated this a couple of weeks back, but now it's here :)

I started out by spending absolutely ages trying to be clever and challenging myself with a more difficult characterised walk, however, even as i was going along, i could see that it wasn't going to plan and the final outcome looked like he was drunkenly dancing...my idea was over compicated!!! I learned from this and went back to the original walkcycle and just exaggerated the Up and Down Key Frames and left the Contact ad Passing position frames as they were, thus creating the following, which i think works nicely and definitely a lot better than my first attempt....However, after I've finished the other projects and have time, I will come back to this and see if i can challenge myself further.....



Characterised moom Walk from Jade Tamara on Vimeo.

Moom Walk Cycle + arms

Our next task was to block out the key frames for the arm movements. It got a bit confusing at first as when moving to the next key frame position, the arms would pop back to the original position because when blocking out the legs, we clocked 'key all.' This ment I had to delete the extra keyframes, but I didn't find the actual animating too difficult and I'm fairly happy with the result:)


Untitled from Jade Tamara on Vimeo.

Moom Walk Cycle

At first, I was a bit anxious about attempting the walk cycle in Softimage as the hand-drawn work we did for Animation Principles was hard enough, but once I got going, I became familiar with what to do fairly quickly. I took a capture after plotting poses 1,7,13,19 & 25 just to see if I was heading in the right direction (posted below)...



Then, obviously, i key framed the remaining main poses to create the finished walk cycle (without moving arms). The one main thing I'm not overly happy with is that the back foot seems to drag at one point and the knee joints don't seem qutie right, but this is something that can easily be changed, so I'll go back later and create another walkcycle from scratch to familiarise myself with it.

Finished Moom Walk, Version 1

Moom Superheroes!

The idea of this task was to get us used to the idea of different rigs and posing characters. Unfortunately, I missed the lesson on this, but I managed to find out what the task was and watched the video tutorial that was put onto myuca for us. Before I started, I got myself familiar with all the controls and rigs for the different joints. I think that what made it difficult was the glitch in the scene file- mine appeared with no rig icons for the head and shoulders, so it confused me, but i found out from the following lesson that by reloading the scene file, it will appear- and sure enough it did, which made the other poses i made a lot easier!!!

The task was to take the moom character that was prepared for us and to pose it based on a superhero or any dynamic character pose.

To start off, I decided just to go for a very simple pose to get the hang of it...

This didn't look too great for me, so I tried putting him in a scene with the character he was slightly based on to see if that made any difference!!!

Ok, so a couple of days after posing this character, I went back to the file, stared at it for a while and decided that I wasnt happy with the pose and knew I could do a lot better.... so I did :)

Here's moom trying to impersonate superman!!








This next image is my favourite. After the superman pose, I found a ninja image on the internet and thought id give it a go posing the moom as if it was jumping through the air. I was very happy with this, then thought to make it more challenging, I'd try and do a karate-style pose. This pose proved to be more difficult, like i imagined, but after some effort and trial and error, i think i managed to grasp it. Then I decided that they couldn't just be posted on here alone, so, here's the final scene!!!....

Croquet Scene

We were given a scene of a croquet mallet, ball and hoops and was asked to animate the scene so we can get to grips with the use of key frames.

Ball Slide Homework Exercise

After our lesson on key frames and having a go at making the croquet ball move, we were given a ball slide to animate. I didnt find the animating that dfficult and am becoming very used to keyframing. The only difficulty I had was keyframing a camera, which it seemed to hate me for, so i had to resort to piecing a few different angled renders together for now.

The first image is just the overall view of the animated scene from one angle.

(The video takes a little while to load and for some reason the youtube index comes up too quickly at the end, over my animation, but if u watch the scene behind this, then you'll see the ball dropping into the box!)




This second video is the scene with a bit of a camera pan.

Mr & Mrs Potato Head Comic Strip