summer!

So summer plans- got into the Technical Undergraduate Program internship at Pixar! So will be in California for the summer and working on thesis prep during my free time.. As well as enjoying Cali of course.

And here's a quick test I did using TV Paint- I'm trying to familiarize myself with it. A lot of beautiful films were made using this program so I wanted to explore.. I used the watercolor brushes for these. (You can't really see the textures of the brushes I used thanks to the horrible upload quality..)

monologue progress

WIP so far for my monologue. I started blocking out the lips. I haven't messed with the teeth and tongue yet. Just the jaws and the lip corner ins and outs. This is only my second time lip-synching in 3D and I know it's not perfect yet. So any feedback would be appreciated. I guess it doesn't help that Blogger unsynched the sound for me though =/

you can just call me yoshi!

Next animation assigment: monologue with the Morpheus rig!! Woo! I got used to the controls pretty quickly actually. So for the assignment, I decided to do an intro of how pronounce Shreyasi. If I can get a nice animation out of it, I'll put it with my intro slate in my reel and that way people will know how to say my name!! And there'll be a little bit of my personality in there too. So here's the first pass at blocking: (She doesn't look like me, no)

Update 04/08/2011: Body Spline, first pass-

latest

Latest playblast of my Jekyll-Hyde (shift of thought) animation assignment.

on-the-side creepy-crawlies

So I've been working on the very talented Gayane Bagdasaryan's thesis and it's an honor working for such an awesome animator. I'm animating a supporting spider character for her, and she's kindly given me the permission to share it on my blog.

I'm doing this in ToonBoom Animate Pro 2, which I've never used before, so it's a learning experience for me. However, I'm only just using the software for the basic frame-by-frame drawn animation, so it's pretty much like Flash.

This is one of my favorite shots that I've animated:

They're all quick shots, but really fun to work with.

it kicked!

First pass at blocking for our Jekyll and Hyde animation showing a shift of thought. The timing needs a lot of work. The total time has to be less than 10 seconds so everything is rushed now. So any feedback would be welcome!

the winter swan song

Two weeks until Dissonance is officially due. I have three small shots left to animate, and then all I need to do is fix the flickering from Final Gathering and get the final soundtrack from my sound designer.

I uploaded a more recent version of my Technical Direction Demoreel to Vimeo. You could also just look two posts down to take a look at it. Feedback is welcome! I'm not too proud of the Mr. Bean caricature, but without that, I don't have any deformable models to show, since the robot character is not really a "traditional" character model.

Also, just to update on other school stuff, here's my rough animation on 4's for a class:

The lip synch is not in there yet.

enter protagonist

Here's my bot for my upcoming student film, almost done!! These are two renders I did for my Advanced modeling class.

And here's proof that my rig actually works so far! The poses should be familiar from Richard William's book of awesomeness. I slapped in the extreme poses for the character for this quick test animation. At first, I was going to animate something for a shot in my film, but I decided to do something more "cartoony" with broader movements to really push the rig. In actuality, the acting in my film will be subtler, but I wanted to make sure my rig was capable.

I can't wait till I can start animating!! But for now, on to more lighting tests!!

sneaky peaky

These tests took about 11 hours to do. The character isn't done texturing yet. Now that he's in the set, I have a better idea of how to texture him so he doesn't blend in with the background so much. Till now, I've been using the Norman rig in my 3D animatic, so now I have a better sense of where I should be going.

Also, rigging is still as terrifying. But I have to thank my self from the past for making life easier for me in the present by practicing rigging all of summer =)

^ I goofed up on the timing of the light for this one.

Floo

So I guess I can say that I have officially started animating for this project. Am I happy with what I am animating? No. I've been really sick with some sort of viral flu for the past 4 or 5 days and now is not the time. People are out frolicking in the apparently warm weather and I am still parading around in my winter jacket.



I really hope that I develop a proper style quickly in the process of animating this. I can make beautiful individual abstract drawings of Bharata Natyam dancers, but once I start animating and get a couple of frames into it, the figures start to resemble "beautiful and abstract" less. It's one of the challenges I have to overcome for this project, I suppose.

I really like the drawing style I have in my Figure Drawing class, and it's probably because I'm using charcoal, and also maybe because I'm drawing big. I don't know if I would be able to animate with something like charcoal/pastels, but I really want to try. The thing is, I don't know if I have the time to experiment anymore. Right now, literally whatever I animate has to be in the final film. I guess this is one of the problems of making a complete film from pre- to post- production in 10 weeks. There is so much scope for learning, but not much for going back and perfecting from what you learn.

But anyway, what I have above is what I've done since the last update, quickly put together. It isn't exactly what the final film will look like, but it hints heavily at it.

We'll see..

Hello Hello, Testing Testing...

I figured I'd start experimenting. It's better if I figure out potential problems with animating at this stage rather than later.

This is a quick AfterEffects test I did. It wasn't shot properly because I need someone to teach me how to use the scanner in our lab. The drawings I did today were supposed to be rough and for experimenting, but I might end up using it in the end. So I didn't want to risk batch scanning the papers without any training with the scanner and having it eat all the paper up.

Not sure how I feel about the animation though.




Will post more details about the project later.