Life Drawing Post 2

Here is the next set of drawings from my life drawing classes that I have taken throughout the past year in the Character Animation program at UCF.

As you may notice, these ones actually have heads!  I tend to get too focused on the rest of the body and run out of time to include the hands, feet, and head in my drawings.  In the future I want to be able to draw faster so I can include these parts that generally get left out so the pose looks more complete.  If you have any critique let me know in the comments!

Life Drawing Post 1

Every Friday in the Visual Language/ Character Animation program, we had figure drawing days.  I figured I'd start posting these drawings up here now that I've almost graduated from the program and actually have time to keep up with this.  I think I'll keep it to posting four drawings a week until I run out of drawings.  First  off, I'd like to show all of you this picture of what my figure drawing skills were like when I came into this program a year and a half ago.

So these were pretty bad, I didn't really know what I was doing and it showed.  I hadn't done any kind of figure drawing prior to this and without much direction, it was pretty bad.

Fast forward to this semester!  I think I have definitely improved, and through practice and getting direction from one of my professors, I think these drawings are a vast improvement and I hope to continue on improving.

Portfolio Website

My website is now published!  http://www.chelseastewart3d.com/

Action Animation

I've been putting my demo reel together lately and I decided I needed more than just Ember shots in my reel, so I looked back at assignments from my first 3d animation class and I realized that I have definitely improved my animation skills in a year.  

This assignment was a study in pantomime, so we were suppose to have the character doing some kind of action with no props.

The weight for this is really not good, considering when I opened up the file the waist controller wasn't moving much and most of the waist movements were in the hip controller.  Also, there's a lot of sliding going on with the feet, and the poses could be more dynamic and exaggerated.

Here's the cleaned up version that I did last week.

I changed the camera angle to try and make the shot look more interesting, cleaned up sloppy feet, and made his poses more dynamic and hopefully more appealing.  Let me know what you think!

So I've decided that instead of bombarding everyone with posts, I'm just going to wait until I'm done with the animation I'm working on and then make one big post about the whole process.  I'll leave the videos I have up for the lipsync animation for now, but I'll remove them and put them in the big post when I'm finished with the animation.

Lipsync Animation Post 2

From my last post for this animation, I have added more in between poses and have roughed out the actual lipsync part of the facial animation.  I haven't really messed with the rest of the facial controllers yet because I was focusing more on the mouth shapes today.  The rest of the facial animation I will put off until the rest of the body animation is done though because I think it's more important to focus on the body animation first.

So from the last playblast that I posted I've been working on trying to make some of the poses more appealing, I think there's still some work to be done on that front.  Also, you may notice that near the beginning the hand kind of goes through his shoulder, this is because I was messing with her IK hand in splined mode to make sure her hand stays put for the entire time it's on his shoulder.

Lipsync Animation Post 1

I've started a new animation for my demo reel and it's a lipsync   I chose to use a line from The Office for the sound clip, since there are a lot of good quotes from that show.  I've started off with filming my reference and sketching out some poses.

From there, I've blocked out the poses in Maya.  Some of the poses that I ended up with are more exaggerated than what I had for my sketches or reference video.  I try not to limit my animations to what I come up with when I'm shooting reference video because what I filmed as reference may be limited to my acting skills, whereas the character I am animating is limitless.  I think exaggeration can be key when animating and it can really help sell the emotion of a character.

Now I'm not totally happy with all of these poses that I have at the moment, I think some of them could be more dynamic, so that's something I can work on more in my next pass of animation.