Animate!

So in our tutorials we started learning rigging. This week we placed the joints and created control shapes and the lesson is going to continue next week with skinning and blend shapes. We learned where to put the control shapes and how to place them so they would make sense for animation. We also put IK and FK handles on the arms so that we could switch between them.

So today we had a quick tutorial on after effects. I have used it before for little things but I haven't really done much with it so this was really useful for me. We looked at how to key out green screen, how to rotoscope (which apparently we will be doing a lot of in entry level vfx positions), how to camera track and how to insert a 3d object into a scene or an object into a 3d scene.



I'm actually quite interested in compositing, I might try some nuke tutorials over the Christmas break if I have time to try and get a feel for it.

So I have started trying to model my character in 3D. I think its going ok so far but it might just be too early to tell. I have been using some digital tutors tutorials as well the the class tutorials to help me with the modelling.






I'm not very happy with the head at this stage, I'm thinking about restarting it but I will keep working on it and seeing if I can improve it for a little longer.

Here is the model sheet I will be using to translate my character into 3D. I have redrawn a few bits to make sure that the body is symmetrical so hopefully this will work for modelling. 

Next I need to finish up my model sheet and get started on my storyboard and my character model.

For our research module we have to create a poster showing what our research for the year is going to be about. Phil showed us some examples of bad poster design and gave us some tips on how to make a good academic poster. I'm kind of worried about how my poster is going to turn out as graphic design is really not my strong suit. We had a quick tutorial on how to use InDesign which was new for me, it looks really good though I'm considering buying the student package of Adobe Creative Suite so I will get to experiment with it more if I do that.

This is the result of the tutorial. We were basically learning how to use columns and images properly and how to make sure the poster is high enough resolution for printing etc

After accidentally taking a week off to sleep in last week (oops) I went back to life drawing today. (One day I will actually scan these instead of taking a photo with my terrible phone camera)