Term Work
Tia Walk Cycle
In the first term of October, I wanted to go back to the basics a little and animate a walk cycle of one my characters, but with a little twist; it’s in sync with music. This was a little test for the love of music videos that express character animation in sync of the music. The walk cycle was stylised and improved from a basic walk tutorials I found online to give me a refresher of the placement of key frames and poses. I made my character Tia walk and shuffle in sync with the music. I referenced the sudden shuffle in the walk myself as it was tricky to find anyone doing it the way I wanted to online. The t-shirt, hair and hands (excluding the shoes) were animated after the main body for overlapping. The type of walk I animated was inspired by the music itself so it was a type of happy-go-lucky type of walk. It wasn’t coloured mainly because I wanted to move onto the next animation test and do more research. I received feedback half way through this sequence and it was to do with the rotation of shoulders because before the shoulder at the back wasn’t coming forward enough to show the depth that the chest and shoulders are rotating/swaying. Other than that, I was good with this test, I just wanted more time on it.
Dynamic Take Down
The last animation test was biggest test out of the all tests I’ve done so far. In November to December I found myself struggling to get this piece done; eventually I did, but it was a mission. Just like the coat animation; everything had to be animated on 1s. There’s some story premise in this one. A character is being shot at and is running away only to find more enemies coming its way so the character jumps onto the pillars ahead and jumps off them to land onto the enemies position with a grand slam to the ground that blows them away in the gush cloud made from the slam; the dust disappears showing the character showing a finisher pose. The character design wasn’t the focus on this test but the body movements were and so I did some quick sketch designs of how the characters body would look in 2D. I was thinking of making the body more angler/android looking and thus making the shapes of the body resemble more like morphed triangles. I made the head look like a helmet from the movie Tron Legacy.
In Maya 2018 I animated dynamic run cycle in 3D with the help of this 3D running tutorial online I found I was able to create my own personal run. Using reference from athlete runners, I noticed that they have their hands out flat for that aerodynamic thrust in their arms. I did the same for my character in 3D. The only difference is that I made my character swing their arms forward and in to show urgency of escape from the gun fire similar to a head start of 100m run (image on the right). After the run was finished I started making a simple environment from the storyboards I drew in 3D. After some asking around I was able make the background and the rig to look like 2D with line art using the tool called Toon Outline in Maya. This was to make things easier when I transition it into 2D animation. The big hurl of this test was the camera movement I wasn’t really a pro in camera movements so I wasn’t sure what was a good shot to a bad shot so I just eye balled while looking at camera work with dynamic action for reference on how they stage their shots. Here are some examples. One is from an animator animating a 3D version of a character (that’s jumping from wall to wall) called Midoriya from anime series called My Hero Academia. The other animation is from anime series called The Land of the Lustrous; they have excellent work of camera and character animation and were perfect help for me with my camera movements in 3D.
After the 3D camera animations were done I ran into another hurl, which was to do with Toon Outline tool as it wasn’t sticking with the pillars of the shot that’s play-blasted shown here. From there I trying t figure out why it was doing that but it kept happening so I ended up trying to animate the background too which wasn’t ideal with time I had left but it seem like the only solution as no one could find a solution even online too. Quarter of a way in animating the background I realised that Toon Outline would stick after the timeline is scrolled up to the part that the problem occurred. So I just cut to that and put it together in Adobe Premiere Pro to import over to Clip Studio Paint. The rest of the process was pretty straight forward but time consuming as I animated over the character on 1s and rest was gun fire and the stationed enemies for the final touch.
I was really happy of how it turned out because I received feedback from professional animator called Stafford Lawrence from the event called Show your own Animation. The feedback was on my walk cycle and coat animation. He said there’s too much noise in areas of the line art in the animation. He said the reason why is because there is no clear shape declaring that area, which is why the line art morphs around. To counter this he said to have a wired version of the 3D render so that the lie art can always follow that line and not lose its shape. For the walk cycle it’s the same thing, I didn’t sketch any apparent shapes in the shoulder area so there was noise and wiggling in the line art in that area. I learned and put that knowledge into practice with this animation test as there was no noise in the line art in the end result meaning the wired version and Toon outline of the play-blast helped out a tone in this test and the shapes I designed for the character made it easier to avoid too. I was very satisfied about that and how it turned out.
Animation Time Execution
Zelda animation: 56 hours in the span of two weeks
Coat animation: 180 hours in the span of a month
Tia Walk cycle: 68 hours in the span of two weeks
Dynamic take down: 192 hours in the span of a month
Online Presence
During the first term I was doing work towards my research I had to increase my presence online. My Instagram is my main platform for client work for illustration and is already a business profile. The only difference is that my artist name is ‘Rookeyx’. To change that, I made it show my full name as well which is Rahmel Atkinson-Oduro. I’ve also created a new logo that goes with my full name. Its my initials with a ‘X’ replacing the ‘-‘ between my double barrel surname ‘Atkinson – Oduro’. It can also stand for Rookeyx Animations X Originals for my artistic name. I’ve also made presence in LinkedIn, Vimeo and YouTube. The animations on YouTube are unlisted for now but will public after my Vimeo videos have more attention. My website is also an additional opportunity for my presences online.
Buisness Card
I’ve also made business cards for showing me as a 2D animator. I’ve designed it with 3 simple colours primary yellow and purple with some black. Yellow and purple are my favourite colours and wanted to express that through the card as well as my website. I wanted it to be simple but colourful because I think that translates to my animations and it keeps my information professional and clean. The information stated is what’s needed to contact me fully for anything for my work in 2D character animation.
CV
This was the first attempt at making a creative animation CV. I do believe that it looks clunky in a way, but that can show my boldness. Jokes aside, I would like to tweak this cv in the future when I get some good feedback. The aesthetic I was going for was information going around the centre of the X. X can mean many things, but mine means 'connect' such as my double-barrel surname; Atkinson-Oduro, the hyphen is replaced with X for my logo.
All the crucial information has been put on the CV, although I think I put too much information in the profile section but overall the information is there.
This is the first pass of my CV, hopefully, I can improve on it at a later date. I'll be sure to make it less complex and more simple next time.
