493 Senior Portfolio 2024

     For this week, I got a bit side tracked with what I want to call the “side quests” of my animation demo reel. Instead of my third idea of a quick animation with a medium camera shot from the waist up of a female character looking determined as her familiar (cat) hops on her shoulder from above, I decided to do a facial expression test instead. I’m using the “Moisha” rig because of her many face clusters that allow me to manipulate her skin to move in a more organic way. I wanted a theme for my facial expression test to establish a personality for Moisha, so I referenced the flirty poses as well as the eyerolls and hair flips of a classic “mean girl”. For now, I turned off the visibility for the hair and extra accessories to not get overwhelmed by the details. I think I’ll be working until near completion in segments, one segment per expression. This is what I have so far for the first expression.      The second “side quest” that I began but wanted in my demo reel anyway is creati

     I decided to go back and finalize the woman’s cat walk. I made her shoulders and hip movements have more of a pop by grabbing the in middle keys and translating them in the graph editor to happen closer to the highest sway with a longer drag of in between motion. I noticed the fingers were quite unnatural, so I redid them. I made the fingers straight at the highest part of the arc and curled at the lowest part of the arc. I offset the wrist and fingers, so it looked like they were following along with the flow of the rest of the arm.      Mark said that I needed contrast as feedback to my animation. I envisioned this cat’s walk and model’s catwalk to look almost identical to show kind of how owners resemble their pets. However, I decided to make the cat’s walk loop two times quicker than the model’s catwalk, so they only match once in the loop. I also made the cat have a very quick blink with a more exaggerated tail bounce, while the model has a slow blink with a less emphasized h

     This week, I started the process of redoing my model’s catwalk that got overwritten. I both referenced the original model catwalk videos that I was watching and my own animation that I happened to play blast before overriding it. I started off with the typical 24 frames, and I will retime it later. I got all my blocking down and splined with everything keyed at frame 1, 13, and 25. I mostly focused on that hand position on the hip, feet placement with heeled shoes, hips and shoulder movements, and head movements. I basically went through the entire process I originally did, but I knew how to organize myself better so that my key poses would automatically create the the majority of the inbetweeners I needed. Next, I'm focusing on the details such as the fingers and hair.      I also tried to block a bit of the key poses I needed for my prison scene. After trying to wrestle with my posing and camera angles, I realized I needed stronger references to make sure that what I’m tryin

     This week, I am starting a new animation using a quote from The Princess Bride. The quote is: 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 didn’t realize how much time it would take setting up for the animation. I first found the character rigs I wanted to use. There were several that I could have chosen from. I imported them into Maya and experimented with their features. I really wanted rigs that had great facial controls, and these three rigs (Dude, Malcolm, and Ray) matched what I wanted. I changed the color of Dude’s (left) clothes to match a prisoner’s outfit. Ray’s (right) outfit was also part of his skin, so I didn’t want to change that, but his clothes were conveniently already orange. Malcolm (middle) has a picker to change his outfit, which I will be doing since he can have a mustache and suit with tie to look sort of like a