Industry
Bring Your Own Animation
Within the industry of animation, I went to an event called Bring Your Own Animation on the 21st of October. With the animations I had at the time was Zelda dance animation, 2D coat animation and Tia walk cycle. I came across a head professional animator called Stafford Lawrence. I gained a lot of knowledge and feedback from him on my animations. The main ones were how to deal with noise line art in my 2D animations. The solution was to keep a guide of shape, so the lines don’t wiggle so much. For the coat animation he recommended to have a wired frame playblast as an alternate, so the line art doesn’t go out of bounds on the character as much. For the walk cycle, he said to have guidelines in the shoulder area, so the lines didn't flop about as much. You can see my processes and how I dealt with them here in summer work and term work. At the time I was asking how to have outlines on 3D characters to make them look like 2D and he mentioned the Toon(S) Shaders for Maya as well as the Toon Outline tool in Maya. This was a huge help for me for the last animation (dynamic take down) I did because all the feedback I received from him reflected on this animation.
Animdojo
I also used some tutorials with Animdojo to help me with my last (dynamic take down) animation in follow along movements. It was a tutorial of a ninja turtle doing an action and the tutorial explains how follow along movement can enhance action and context. After the 3D animation was done, I was able to correct all the mistakes in 3D in 2D using the follow along movements tutorial and receiving feedback from my teacher. The mistakes in 3D was the jump to the pillars as I didn’t animate it properly and the slam poses want up to standard. In 2D I made a subtle head turn to show that the character is escaping from the gun fire. Little things like that can really change the context of what’s happening because If the character didn’t look back it won’t explain why its running in the first place. After that I animated the body in 2D to jump from pillar to pill with guidance of the 3D character corrected in 2D while also adding follow along in gravity from each launch with the body. Overall Animdojo was helpful towards my work in general, its too bad my subscription has ended now.
Blue Zoo
Back in the second term, me and my class went to visit animation studio, Blue Zoo. We learned a lot about their work flows and how they tackle difficult situations. We got to see Dan (one of the employees) explain his animations and other projects the studio worked and explain some useful techniques for 3D animation. He went into super detail about 3D character animation process and how important it is to be close with the director orders. One of the main things he always said was to be a jack of all trades in different skills in the animation process; as the industry very much favours flexible animators. Here are some more important notes I took down.
Dan went to say that they have a 2D internship available too. The only thing that pushed me away from applying for them is that I would have to learn some 2D rig animations. I am curious about 2D rigs and I would learn it if I were get a place there, but it’s not something I would see myself doing alongside traditional animation. In the future though I would like try out 2D rig animation.
Commissions
As an illustrator, I take in commissions from consumers that like my work through Instagram and other platforms that can showcase art. You can say I'm apart of the art industry as I get a slow amount of income from these illustrations. In the future, I would like to take on small commisions using my animation skills. That way I can look for industry work while I take on commissions from others who like my work outside the industry. Here are my two recent commissions that I've done for illustration. The one I did for Clair was an icon for her profile picture. The other commissioner called Darran had me do two characters. One of them was him and the other was Evelyn from the game called League of Legends. These characters were for his banner he designed for his twitch channel.
Darran was kind enough to send me the poses he wanted and reference to the gauntlets, which saved me a lot of time!
The background was there just so that I can get better lighting on the characters. They're actually separate png files sent fro him to use on his banners such as the image above.
