DigitaLeon Illustrations

Almost forgot to post day 3's gestures! :p I've been learning some interesting methods from veteran artist, Glenn Vilppu. I've learned that there's lot more to the gesture that just racing to get them done. There's a very important way of seeing the model and getting that "feeling" rather than trying to just copy what I see.

Well, back again in full force, well, kinda. Here's a short animation I did in a previous class, advanced animation principles. It was a very fun class actually, learned a lot of new things on animation, like how to really get the feeling of weight in an animation. I also improve a bit more on the timing of movements in an animation.

Here's the completed walk cycle, and also a background I painted in photoshop to add into the project. You know, it's always great to have the character's environment to be clearly defined. Having the environment clearly defined, really brings a new element of life and depth into any animation. The quality of my animation has surely improved, I remember the first walk cycle I had to do and it was okay at the time. However, it was very jittery and inconsistent, this one, is so much more consistent and I kind of like the result. 

Here's a new walk cycle done for digital ink and paint. It's still kind of rough, but much better than the last attempt. At some point I want to add the inbetweens so that the motion is a lot more smoother than were it's at now. Next I've got to make a background and have the walk cycle play over a panning background. So that should be fun. Another short animation for the same course! A head turn, I did this before the walk cycle and it was earlier in the course. Seeing it now, there's a lot of things about it I would definitely fix and do it again.

Here's a short How To, I hope could be of help to someone who'd be interesting in learning how to set up a 3D model for lip synching, or any kind of dialogue animation in 3Ds Max. I'm sure that this could be useful in other 3D applications as well. This is kind of what you can end up with: When you've completed a 3D model that you want to to be able to animate with facial expressions, and have a character's mouth animate along with a dialogue. One way that you can achieve that kind of animation is with the use of a Morpher modifier. I'm going to explain the process of setting one up, don't worry, it's very simple! This is an example of a completed head model, it could be textured or not, it's entirely up to you. From this point, you won't be able to do much animating to it's facial expressions or do an lip sync. Why? That's because you have to apply a morpher modifier on the the main head model. Next, you'll be making copies of...

I had to get Tim here, to walk along with the background. When I was first drawing out the walking part, I really didn't think that would be necessary, buuuut I guessed wrong, and so I had to find out a way to get him to walk in place, so that I can pan the background. I also "beefed" up the background so that it would be wider for space to pan the background. :)