Class 3 Final Assignment

Wow, yeah, finally vacation!!! Both from AM and in two days also from work.

I finished my last assignment, the polishing of my second dialogue test. I rendered it over night. I still don't know how to set the parameters for Global Illumination and Final Gathering right so it does not take so long to render and still look good. So I just used Maya Software render with two spot lights and raytracing.

Also I wanted the body and the duck to produce ripples. I used the maya pond function but they have such a bad documentation for Maya that I have not found out yet how to change the wavelength and the height of the ripples. I guess for now I'll have to live with that.

Week 11 assignment

This is the class 3 week 11 animation:



I did some smoothing, added a bit of overlap to the head and changed the right hand movement when dunking in, made the duck not float away at the end. I have one week left to finish this shot.

Wingmansion Logo

This is a first attempt in having a logo for my webpage.
I had started the model long ago and since I didn't have my own webpage I just worked on it recently. It's not the final version though.

week 10 assignment

Due to server problems at AM we have one more week to animate our dialogue animation. Here is my week 10 version:

New Webpage

I finally have my own webpage wingmansion.com hosted through netfirms.com. It is nothing fancy (will probably stay like that for a while). I just want to use it to store my animations from Animationmentor.com so that I can link to them from this blog.

My last weeks assignment (class 3 week 8) is a re-blocking of the second dialogue test. I chose a soundclip from the movie "National Treasue". The scene it is from plays originally in a library.
My scene plays in a bathroom.
My first attempt from week 7 was to have the character sit in a bathtub and talk to his wife who knows everything better.
Since my mentor Warren Trezevant (from Pixar) said "it didn't read at all" I re-did my blocking and made the person talk to the duck instead.
What I need to change this week is to move the duck on the water and also to change the ending so that he is not randomly mean with the duck, flinging it away.

Rabbit vs A380

Rabbit vs A380
Originally uploaded by wingman323.

During the first landing of the A380 in Hamburg a rabbit had to run for his life. Hope this is not fake.

Can I use this for my demo reel, too? It's the Airbus A380 that had landed yesterday in Hamburg. It's still mostly unpainted and there's no cabin in it yet. I have worked on the primary structure of the sideshells in the front cylindrical area (if anybody knows what that means). I am the guy in dark brown an the left of the posing group.
It is a huge airplane, especially if you stand under the wings wich spread like a huge roof above you. And it is really quite.

she's a tiger 

 

 

Clara celebrated her birthday today and had her first cake. What a mess! The living room also looked like a junk yard after her friends had left. 

 

Clara celebrating her first birthday in America (actually it's one week before her real birthday, which will be celebrated in Germany) 

Class 2 Week 6

My wife and daughter left for America to visit her parents for a month last week.
I thought I would have more time for AM but somehow ended with time pressure towords our sunday deadline again.
We were supposed to do refine our push assignment and have 4 poses that show Stu in different emotions (relaxed, alert, engaged, rejected/disgusted).
It took me so long to do the splines in Maya. I thought that one hour woud be enough for the legs but they took me more then two hours. Also I had trouble getting the transition between FK and IK in the arms right. I had the change occur over 4 frames and the hands just spun around wildly. Then I altered it so it would change from one frame to the other. The problem was that I did that while the hands were touching the box and so not moving much. But under the timepressure I could not get the hands to allign nicely in the frames before touching the box so I have some jittering in them now.
After I uploaded the push I had 25minutes left for doing the emotion poses which was not really much and it shows in my poses. There's no real silhoutte there, arms are covered .... I wanted to do a guy lying on the beach and hearing a seagul, looking at it, being pooped on and then being disgusted about that. I don't know anymore if I should stay with that cause I don't know how I would show the poop cause it's so little. (I could pretend it's a giant mutant seagul though).

Eating on the right side of the mouth

A week ago on the weekend I had strong tooth pain when chewing or getting cold stuff on my upper back left tooth (there probably is a name for it). I got an appointment at the dentist who is in the same house that we live in for the following monday after work. Of course through traffic jam and me trying to be smart and walk/run by the standing cars I was hoping to catch a bus that was more ahead than the one I had left. Didn't work out. I saw the bus drive past me and had to take some other time consuming public transportations to get to the dentist. I was 50 minutes late but the dentist still treated me. She said that the tooth that was hurting was a total mess and that she had to take it out.
I was afraid cause I had never had a tooth pulled before ( I mean those that you are supposed to keep for the rest of your life). But the injection was strong enough and I hardly felt anything. Praise God for narcotics.
There was a huge hole inside my tooth... hmm, so that's why I used to call it "my collector tooth" cause I could always get some meat out of it even hours after meals.
The one next to it didn't look to well either so maybe next week I will need to get another filling or a root canal treatment.

For AM I blocked out Stu walking as a kind of dinosaur (some say it looks like a chicken). I really learned from David's (my new mentor) critique. He said that the most important thing is to determine what the character you are animating is thinking throughout the whole shot. Well I didn't consider that but just wanted a funny, silly walk. He also stressed out that each keypose should always have a clear siluette, should always be clear and readable.
I find it quite challenging getting timing, spacing, good arcs AND siluette right. Sometimes it seems like having a certain clear pose destroys a good arc. It's like playing Majjong: You see a fitting pair but need anther pair to be removed before you can get to that and another one for that and so on.
Those challenges in animating are both frustrating (when you can't find a good solution) and also rewarding (when you find one). Who needs Majjong if he animates?

Dove eating bread

While I was waiting for the bus to go to work today, I had the chance to watch a dove eate some huge bread that some person apparently didn't like anymore. The dove seemed pretty excited about it being the only dove there. Sharing gives you friends, but not sharing gives you more bread. What a conflict. Anyway... I tried to observe the movements: It hardly lifted the feed of the ground and each step might just have been 3 or 4 frames. Nice swaying motion with the whole body and a pulsating squash and stretch of the neck when swallowing the bread.
I need to lear modelling, texturing and rigging so that I can try to animate birds, too.
God made cool creatures.

Dream Job: Veggietales

Hmm, mostly all AM students seems to want to work at Pixar. I guess I wouldn't mind that but I'd rather work for Big Idea, the makers of the funny christian series "Veggietales". That show got me hooked onto animation. They don't have arms but lots of heart.

If you buy 500 diapers you'll get a free baby. They even deliver it in the original box. Cool collector's item. 

First Q&A in second Class

This morning at 6:30 am German time we had our first meeting in the second class at AM. (I am tempted to call it "2nd semester" but you can only speak of a semester if you have two of those a year, with three it's "trimester" and with four ... "quadromester"?)
We have new and fewer classmates which is good cause everybody gets more attention. But also there might be some weird moments when nobody asks a question.
Also we have a new Mentor, David Smith. He told us a bit about his animation chareer. He had been working for several studios since 1997 and now works for Pixar on Cars. He said they really value animators there whichis not the case in all the studios he had worked at.
We students got to introduce ourselves and it was really neat seeing some new faces. There were some webcam issues though. Hopefully those will get solved for the next Q&A.

Tonight I want to start with my first assignment for the 2nd class, a blocked character walk that shows overlapping and shape reversal. I tried several walks yesterday but my wife said they all look boring. So, I might try a T-Rex walk similar to the one Jim Carrey does in the movie "... series of unfortunate events".

Donkey Konga

Our friends Daniel and Claudia had been visiting. We went shopping yesterday and I bought a Donkey Konga for my Gamecube. We had some fun with it already.
Went out to eat with Em and Clara, but it was kind of weird always fearing that your daughter would start screaming and embarrassing you. So we ate and were out of there really quickly.
Finished my jumping Tailor for Animation Mentor today. It seems students at AM like to kill their characters.

My friend Daniel visiting.