Over the Christmas break we were tasked to create a ‘performance animation’. This is pretty much everything we’ve learned so far in an 8-10 second animation. We had to choose a character and make it act. I chose the same quote I used for our phonemes exercise (“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t doContinue reading “Christmas holidays – Performance animation”
Category Archives: 3D Computer Animation Fundamentals
Week 8 – Phonemes
This week we looked at phonemes, that are phonetic mouth shapes. Western languages have similar mouth shapes, as they all derive from latin. Asian languages have some completely different phonetic mouth shapes. To animate western phonetic mouth shapes, we have to really enunciate and exaggerate the mouth shapes. The quickest way is to work onContinue reading “Week 8 – Phonemes”
Week 7 – Dom’s matchmove session 1
Week 8 – Dom’s matchmove session 1 This week we had a very interesting session on matchmove and motion tracking using 3D Equalizer with Dom Maidlow, who is a CG Generalist at Union FX. There are many different types of tracking in film and TV, and it is used constantly. Apparently there is a massiveContinue reading “Week 7 – Dom’s matchmove session 1”
Week 6 – Introduction to body mechanics
Body mechanics in animation are full body actions and selling the motion, such as playing football, running, parkour, boxing, picking up heavy items and carrying/pushing them around. Essentially anything which involves your entire body. Always start with the hips when working on body mechanics. The principles which apply to body mechanics are anticipation, overlap, squashContinue reading “Week 6 – Introduction to body mechanics”
Week 5 – Render farms and introducing baking in animation.
Baking animation – locking things and setting keyframes for that object as a whole. When an object is constrained to another object, it follows it around. Baking converts all the curved animation to keyframes. A render farm is a computer system, or ‘cluster’, created to render CGI for film and TV VFX. A render isContinue reading “Week 5 – Render farms and introducing baking in animation.”
Week 4 – Reference footage and stylised walks.
This week we were introduced to the green screen room, it’s ours every Thursday for the rest of term 1. We will be getting into the habit of filming ourselves doing stylised walks to add personality to a simple walk cycle. I filmed myself skipping. Once we have filmed ourselves we have to reproduce whatContinue reading “Week 4 – Reference footage and stylised walks.”
Week 3 – Splining and polishing
This week we splined and polished our walk cycles. ‘Splining’ is ‘in-betweening’ in 3D language where you just fine-tune the frames between the key poses we blocked last week, making sure all the contacts are where they should be (so the character isn’t going through the floor) and giving the walk some weight. ‘Polishing’ isContinue reading “Week 3 – Splining and polishing”
Week 2 – Introduction to Maya tool set
This week we looked at basic tools one can use in Maya. We looked at ghosting (similar to onion-skinning in 2D animation), motion trail/motion path, arc tracker, atools, QPAS, Bhpath, Bhghost and Abxpicker. We didn’t try a lot of these, we mostly worked with arc tracker as apparently it’s the most useful one to use. Continue reading “Week 2 – Introduction to Maya tool set”
Week 1 – Introduction to Maya and ball bounce exercise.
A little bit about myself, I’m an Italian-English illustrator and animator. I studied FdA Illustration at Camberwell College of Arts and I finished my BA in Illustration Animation at Kingston University. I graduated in 2017 and I went on freelancing for the next two years – and here I am, at LCC studying on theContinue reading “Week 1 – Introduction to Maya and ball bounce exercise.”
Luca's research blog 