493 Senior Portfolio Post 1

    For this spring, I am taking the second round of the Senior Portfolio class as well as my last semester in CSU Chico before I graduate. I am excited to take full advantage of what this class has to offer, which is time and feedback. Last semester, I took on way more than I could chew. I made a complicated two person fight, which I would rush before every blog post submission and then have to redo the damage I had done. It was not a total loss though, because there was a lot that I learned about myself regarding my experience, workflow, strengths, and weaknesses. It also made me think about what I wanted to showcase in my demo reel to represent the kind of person that I am. 

    This semester, I will be focusing on much smaller scenes. I first want to warm up into the semester with a quadruped walk. I’ve been thinking of doing a cat, since I’ve been researching their unique gait of their feet nearly crossing and their back feet perfectly fitting into the track of their front feet. I’ve animated a runway model’s cat walk where they cross their feet in front of the other before. I think it’d be nice to pair the two walk cycles together in my demo reel. This is the rig I plan on using.

    After that, I want to do a dialogue piece that shows off strong expressions. I’ve chosen a very comedic line from The Princess Bride that reads:

Westley: "Give us the gate key."

Yellin: "I have no gate key."

Inigo Montoya: "Fezzik, tear his arms off."

Yellin: "Oh, you mean this gate key."

    I think these lines offer a lot of creative freedom. There could be animation before the line starts where a man is being cornered. I could have a pause between the last two lines to show Fezzik with his arms crossed, raised eyebrows, and a devious smile. I feel I should make a few quick storyboards for which directions I could go without doing too much. It’d definitely be a camera shot above the waist though, so I don’t have to worry about feet placement too much.

    If I stayed true to my timeline below, then I have five weeks left to do another animation. Obviously, it can’t be too complicated as I wouldn’t have much time left, but I would love to do a mix of my studies this semester, which would be a scene with a quadruped and biped with a tiny bit of dialogue. I have a vision of a cat hopping onto the right shoulder of a girl, she’s giggling and interacting with the cat. The cat settles onto her left shoulder like a familiar, and the girl looks straight on with a determined look and balled fist saying, “Now, let’s do this.” This concludes my plan for the semester.


Quadruped Walk:

Week 2: Find rig, and block.

Week 3: Spline and add personality to the walk. Present.

Week 4: Implement feedback and do final polish.


“Gate key” Dialogue Scene:

Week 5: Storyboard the gate key scene. Collect assets and build layout. Very rough position blocking to get a feel of the space. Set up cameras. Present.

Week 6: Implement feedback and block key positions and key facial expressions.

Week 7: Continue blocking, adding important in-betweens. Present.

Week 8: Implement feedback. Polish the block out to near perfection.

Week 9: Spline and correct any timing issues first. Present.

Week 10: Implement feedback. Spline and retime part two.

Week 11: Polishing and adding small details. Present.

Week 12: Implement feedback and do final polish.


“Now, let's do this” Dialogue Scene 2:

Week 13: Storyboard the lets do this scene. Collect assets. Block out positions and set up cameras. Present.

Week 14: Implement feedback and block key positions and key facial expressions.

Week 15: Polish the block to near perfection. Present.

Week 16: Spline and correct any timing issues first.

Week 17: Polish and finish. Present.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Post 2

Image
     This week, I spent time doing the quadruped walk. I first gathered a lot of references of cats walking from the front, side, and top view. I know that all the cat’s feet touch the ground at different times, but I didn’t want to confuse myself. I figured that I would animate the beginning, middle, and end poses first and then offset each step to reflect how cats walk in real life. For the beginning pose on key 1, I had the cat’s front right paw and back left paw stretched forward, while the front left paw and back right paw were stretched back. For the middle pose on key 12, I had the exact opposite feet positioning. Finally, I copied and pasted the beginning pose onto the ending pose on key 25 for a seamless loop.     I did some in-betweens on keys 7 and 19 so that the paws moved in arcs since cats tend to put one foot over the other as they walk. I also added some side-by-side movements in the spine, shoulder, and hips. At the moment, I’m animating solely on 3s, and I’m not going
Read more

Post 4

Image
     For this week, I got a little behind my schedule because I overrode my runway model’s cat walk with some kind of random attack animation that I started but only got two poses down. I was so sad to find that out, because I knew that I foolishly did my walk cycle on one file. I know I shouldn’t have, but I plan to catch up in the next three days, since I don’t work at my job those three days. I’m still fixing up that walk cycle back to its original progress, and I’ll be focusing on implementing the feedback I received from class afterwards.      I also showed up to Mark Pullyblank’s office hours to talk about the walk cycle of a quadruped. I couldn’t quite tell what was wrong with my quadruped walk, because I was looking at very similar references. In that zoom meeting though, it was very eye-opening seeing how Mark used the reference compared to how I did. He drew lines to measure how straight the back was, how far the legs went, and how angled each part of the body was. I also lea
Read more