Assignment 1: Obstacle Course

For the first assignment, I've been given the task of making an obstacle course for a bauncy ball rig that I've been given. The ball has normal joints for moving and rotating, but also has 2 green ones for squishing the model and that's what I'm using to give the effect.

The obstacle course actually uses 3 balls instad of just one: A Beachball, an 8 Ball and a Bowling ball. In addition, there's dominos, a button, a piston and a bucket to end the animation. Originally, the bowling ball would have no bounce, but then I had to add it since it was part of the course.

One thing to note is that I've encountered a nasty crash during my rendering process, losing a lot of the animations on the 8 ball which I never saved, which is why the animation does get a bit dodgy when going down the slope and the bucket. There used to be some bouncy animations in the bucket.

But with whatever time I had left, I've saved and rendered with no issue. Including the playblasts below to showcase the transparency and the outside of the camera.

Once I've rendered the frames, I've ported them to Adobe Premiere and exported the video. It's a little faster than I intended so the proper speed to watching this video is in 0.75, but you can watch it normally.

Assignment 2: Character

For my second animation, I've been given the task to animate movement from a 3D model. The one I've chosen to use is the Eleven Rig model that was given to me by my teachers for testing.

The model has plenty of rigs for the face, hands and to change its body size. My task was to take everything I've learned like Anticipation, weight, silhouettes and clear poses to make an animation out of it.

And so, I went with a character walking, pickihng up a ball, throwing at a camera and being pleased with it.

Unlike my last assignment, I've had no issues with crashes or other sorts. I've done my playblasts and a full render with the same steps like last time.

Assignment 3: "11 second" animation

At last, I've moved onto the final animation for the third assignment and it has a resemblance to the 11 Second Club contests. I was tasked to take an audio clip of a similar length and I've settled one that was around 13 seconds.

The clip is from a Puppet TV comedy called Mongrels which ran for 2 Seasons on BBC Three. The clip was taken from Season 2 Episode 8 where a cutaway shows the character Vincent Fox being "Fired" from another TV show, The Apprentice. The last couple seconds dedicate to a Come Dine With Me joke.

There were 2 other scenes I was thinking of using. One came from the same episode where Destiny (The dog) tries to kill her husband by baiting Vince with fake graffiti saying "Vince is a C***" which he hates being called that. The twist is that Vince can't read and Destiny gets fed up. The other scene was Vincent showing Nelson (The main character) a hole in his head saying "If I stick a pencil in it, I can see Jesus." whilst preceding to stick a pencil in it. I chose to scrap both of them due to having too many characters to work with and some customizations that would take up a bit of time if I don't know how to do them. So I went with the cutaway.

I began by cutting out the part where Vince talks to the driver so I have a lot less to work with. Next, i used Adobe Photoshop to make a mannequin sketch of what the character would behave like.

During my animating process, I've learned the importance of the Layer tool. With it, I've divided each body part and rig and it allows me to turn their animations on and off. So when I want to animate something new without the head or body moving around for instance, now I can turn it off. It has helped me quite a lot with animating facial animations for example.

While I sorted the layers out, I've used an assortment of shapes, extrutions and materials to create a set for the scene. The set of course is the car like in the clip. I've added windows, but then had to remove them since the lighting clashed with the intended lighting I wanted on the character.

Speaking of lighting, I wanted to recreate the same orange lamp post lights that I see at night. I've animated 5 lights to move past the set. It helps make the set feel more alive, like the car is actually moving.

Other small details were added like camera shaking which I did manually and for the sign, I chose to scribble out the 7 and replace with "Let's go Brandon!" I hope to not lose any marks on that joke.

As always, I've rendered the animation in Arnold and it's here for your viewing pleasure.

As a bonus, here is a comparison of the animation from source, to sketch to animation.

Non-Assignment stuff

Coinsider this section as a dumping ground of some of the animations that I've done during my time in Uni. Ones that I'm happy with sharing.

The first one is of a flour sack walking in a straight line, akin to the inaminate objects from Fantasia.

This next one is my first walking animation for the Eleven Rig model. I've learned to make the character walk on the spot. At the time, I wanted to make the character look more mopey and angry, but I was only able to make him look worried and paranoid.

The earliest time I've animated was with a bouncy ball, but not like the rig I've used. On the very first week, I've animated a bouncy ball and PingPong ball to get into a cup and have a bouncing animation inside.