As the title says, we got to make our real first steps this week XD Actually animating things walking :O Well... when i say things, i mean a person and a sphere on legs.
My 2d one was terrible, by far the worst thing i have done yet, and i deservingly got my butt handed to me about it. If there was one time i could have put my head through the desk so far on this course... it was then. But i will bounce back... and model my walker much better next week. I don't think it's as wrong as it looks animated, but it's too fast and as such it's impossible to tell that the legs are colour coded as back and front. But everything else is wrong with it.
Anyhow... here it is.
I've already modelled my walker for next week with actual joints and shading on the back limbs... i can only hope it animates to my walk well enough. This is just a first sketch of it, and i know it's primitive and one leg is too long, but it's the joints i'm working to get right this time.
Anyhow, on to 3d now.
This was... a little better than 2d, the sphere on legs that's actually kind of adorable ^_^ Burt.
I think i got the basic idea of a generic walk, though it's by no means good -_-
I think Derek was right at the start of the year when he told is 'No animation you ever do will you be completely happy with, there will always be things you hate about it' Well he certainly hit the nail on the head right there XD
Anyhow... for this week... nothing else to report... But because this journal has kinda been on a downer... here's a rat :D This is my baby Morenwyn ^_^ My youngest ratty. But yes... that was simply and sheerly for the purpose of cuting things up in this entry.
Well everyone else seems to be away in bradford, so there's very little to be said here really... i've done a little bit of playing with Maya using rigs i found online and things like that, but since Maya and myself are still looking upon each other as mortal enemies, none of that ended with successful animations, just silly little things that weren't worth uploading XD
So instead i thought i would fill an entry with talk of the past ^_^ What i did before this stuff and how bad it was XD
My animations Prior to the course were... bad. Primitive little frame by frames done in MSPaint and GIF Animator 1.0 because that was all i had access to really. Well i had better art programs but anyone who has used old GIF animators knows what happens when you put a good quality image into it. It looks like a mess.
This one stemmed from my friend making a joke about how you can injure someone on the other end of the internet...
This one stemmed from someone wisecracking on the previous one that they would rather someone thre pudding through the screen at them.
That horrible thing was an avatar for someone -_- i hate the way it's done but it was a number of years ago.
I have done other small animations, but they are all much the same as these, primitive and old fashioned.
The again i say that but i still play Monkey Islands one and two... in their gigantic pixels of dooooooooom. Feh, i guess i'm just strange in that i will judge animation not by how shiny it is, but by what is contained within it. It's why i cling to films and animations from years and years ago, ones that everyone laughs at because they're old. Then i like to point out that things like Akira are not exactly stonking new and that generally makes them realise how judgemental they're being. That's how it is... animators work with the times, and when new times roll around they leave the old ones behind. Kinda sad when the old ones contain such artistry as they often do... rather than having a computer do all the work.
When people ask me what my drives are to do things like that, what inspired me really to go into animation, i can name the exact moment for me that it happenned.
It was the second year of my film degree course. We were studying out Postmodernism unit, which had until that point had strictly real action films. But today as i approached the classroom i heard something that made me look up in surprise. Something i had never heard anything like before, something so eerie and unusual that it actually gave me shivers.
We were studying 'Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence' that day... and the sound i had heard was the theme music that was on the DVD menu as the lecturer set up the film for the screening. I knew then that i had stumbled onto a film that was going to change something in me. And it did.
As a film it was not that groundbreaking at all really, but i had never seen a film acheive such atmosphere before this one. I'm not sure what was different about it at all, but something was, and it made me realise that all of the studying i had done of real action films had paled in comparison.
Here's a youtube vid of the theme responsible.
The re-edit and such are not my work, but it's the only vid with the full song in good quality. It's still just as eerie for me as it was when i first heard it.
Anyhow... i feel i have waffled long enough, so i shall call that it for this week.
Last night i had a nightmare about animating Mr Cubie -_- i think i am taking this too seriously. No more Maya before bed for me.
This week my 2d animation was a lot of trouble, the speeds were wrong, the frames didn't seem to go in the right order even though they did. And if that weren't trouble enough someone hadn't taped down the peg bar on the stopmotion Pro computers and it came loose at one point... inconveniently D: So at one point yes it does appear to be spazzing out. But anyway. Here we are:
I think my dislike for Mr Cubey came out in this one ^^;; since i did knock him about a little... but Cubey Jnr is only a little better. But if you think what i did to cubie in that one is bad... well... check my 3d out.
I really went all out on this one, and up until the last superslow ball bouncing into wall phail... it's actually okay... Or maybe i just think that because i had fun beating up Cubey. It was like Maya agreed with me for once!
Perhaps we can learn to get along after all.
Oh and this week i got the most amazing photo... of sunrise over the ugly end of Penryn XD please to look beyond the hideous buildings.
Oh yeah and since we had a halloween of course... i leave you with a picture... of the alright and terrifying... STEVE.
