Animate!

I have started going to the 3rd years life drawing class on Monday mornings! Its been a few years since I have done any proper life drawing so I'm a little rusty but its really good to get back into it. I think I have let my 2D drawing skills go a bit with my current focus on 3D and I should really be trying to maintain both. So here are a few of my drawings from life drawing today. We did a lot of quick 1 minute sketches and a few 10/15 minute drawings. (Apologies for the bad angle these photos are taken from I don't have a scanner.)

So I got most of the way through making a character turn around before I realised that I had basically given my character a lot of clothes and hair which would be very difficult to model. Showing my character to Phil he agreed so I'm going back to try and redesign what she is wearing and maybe put a hat on her or shave her head, haven't decided yet.
This is some of my brainstorming for her new outfit. While doing this I have discovered I really like drapey jackets that will be incredibly hard to model. Despite knowing this I seem to have drawn 3 of them. I'm going to do a sort of second draft with all of my favourite bits and simplify it down a bit and add some accessories.

So this week I have continued to work on my character design. I'm still not 100% sure what the final look is going to be but I think I'm getting there.

This is just a very quick doodle of my main character.
 Here are some of my quick sketches of the development of my main character and my antagonist.

These are just some very early sketches for my 2D character i'm designing. I'm still not 100% sure what style i'm going for so the design may change drastically before I'm finished.

In our Maya class we began talking about the 12 Principles of Animation and we made a very quick animation of some bones swinging to show some of those Principles(follow through, anticipation etc).


Krish and I also wanted to learn more about simulations in Maya so we followed a Digital Tutors tutorial to make a flame-thrower.
I don't have a render of the scene as it would have taken FOREVER but the tutorial was a good start for learning more about what Maya can do. I might go back and try some more beginner orientated tutorials as I feel like I don't really understand what a lot of the settings we used in the tutorial actually do.

Our first project for Phil's class is to design a human or humanoid 2D character that we can later convert into 3D. We have to create character concept art, a model sheet and turnaround, a storyboard and an animatic. We can create the character for our final film or do an unrelated story, as I don't really know what my final film will be about yet I'm doing something unrelated.

I'm going with a sort of urban fantasy vibe for this story. I started with making moodboards for my character and for a few more characters that I can use in the storyboards. This is the moodboard for my main character who is the one I will probably be modelling.

 And this is my villain/antagonist.
 And finally some allies for my main character.
This is just initial brainstorming so once I have a clearer idea of the story I can refine my ideas and start designing properly.

Over the last 2 weeks we have had intro classes for Maya and Mudbox. I have used both of these programmes before but its always good to go back to the basics and remind myself of some of the things I have inevitably forgotten about the programmes.

Our first task was to model a bedroom in Maya. I also decided to uv map the room as I'm not very confident with uv mapping so I thought it would be good to have a little refresher.



Next we moved onto some basic sculpting in Mudbox. I haven't used Mudbox in a few years and I wasn't very confident in it when I did use it (that may have partially been due to the fact that my laptop really could not handle it and would crash every hour when i tried to use it, it never quite recovered from that).

This is the model I made in the class (slightly inspired by Mr Punch from Rivers of London which I read the other week when I was procrastinating instead of writing my contextual review)

And this is the model I made after class, the task was to change the base model into our own original character. I'm not really sure what she is but she was fun to make.