Oh! Mighty renderer, how I hate thee!

I'm currently rendering out some shots. I'm using an IBL, and a 90 frame shot has taken 5 hours to get half way! Ouch! Why, oh why, did I decide to use an IBL?

I've been to a couple of meetings with animation studios, and things are looking promising. I've been given some great feedback from the directors, and am currently in the process of adjusting my reel, according to their critique. Hence, my reignited relationship with the mighty renderer.

Hopefully over the next couple of days, I'll have my reworked reel ready to send back to them. It was really nice to hear positive things from professionals in the industry, who aren't my tutors or classmates. Happy face!

Oh, Happy Halloween by the way. Here's the article with my screen shot of my animation from the musical Wicked (bottom right, in the article).

And so, here's a reminder of the work in progress shot I did (in its rough form)...y'know, as it's Halloween and everything :)

Spider!

One of my latest animations has been a spider. I wasn't too keen when I first got the rig, this beast brought out an irrational arachnophobic feeling in me. So, immediately I turned him bright pink, and that was fine!

The assignment was to animate the spider on a walk cycle and add some sort of performance. I did two. Weirdly, and most interestingly, the two animations are very similar. One appears more playful, one more vicious. It's amazing what colours and additional set items can do to tell a story - or rather change a story.

Here's the first one, Playful Spider:

 

...and here's the second, Vengeful Spider:

 

See what I mean about them both being very similar? The only real differences are colour, lighting and "prey".

You should also be able to see how much more professional the second animation is? This is because it was the first animation I did as a proper render! From trawling various animation forums, I found a link to this really smart app called "Zeitraffer". Basically, it takes images and puts them together a your desired frame rate, and makes a movie clip. It's so simple. Best thing is, it's FREE!

Righty...off to do more animation now. I love receiving comments, so please let me know what you think...or just say hi!

Thanks :)

Horsey Horsey

On the Animation Apprentice course we're learning about Horse locomotion. At first, fear careered through my body, it looked REALLY fiddly and complicated, but I'm pleased to report...Tweren't at all bad, twas it not!

Once I got my head around the rig and understood the controls, it was really about making sure all the curves looked good and the cycle was working smoothly.

Here's my Walking Horse. What do you think?

My mind is constantly drifting to the dreaded question: How am I going to get a job? The end of the course with Animation Apprentice looms, which means I need to get my showreel up to scratch and good enough to show to a studio, and prove why they should take me on. Lots to do. CV and Linkedin profiles to sharpen!

And above all else...I need to come up with an idea to cohesively put a showreel together. Watch this space!

Some Mental Ray Renders to Salivate over...

On Wednesday, I posted a playblast of my latest Animation assignment, with Animation Apprentice. I've had a look at some renders, and have come up with these.

Don't they make the whole thing look so much better? When the scene is fully finished, I'll render the whole thing out properly, but until then, I'll leave you to drool over these...

My Popular Post...

It's been a while since I posted anything, mainly because I've been working on this.

It's not quite finished, but here's a playblast of a lipsync exercise. The extract is Louise Dearman, singing "Popular". All comments welcome :)

A little piece of Big Bang Animation from me...

Feels like ages since I posted something, so thought I would share my latest piece of animation. It's not finished, there's still work to do and tweaks to make before it's worthy.

Anyway, hope you like it, and the joke doesn't make you groan too much :)

Oooo...by the way, do you recognise the voice?

How's the Animation Training going?

Me, where the Animation dream got
reawakened, back in 2009.

Things have been moving on for me at a nice pace! I must say though, being honest, for anyone that doesn't have a lot of experience in VFX, doing the Maya course with Escape Studios and doing another course with Animation Apprentice is a lot of work...especially juggling a regular job at the same time.

I've nearly finished with Escape Studios now (it's flown by), only 4 weeks left, but still have a good few weeks left with Alex at Animation Apprentice. If I had to do it all again, I would probably start off with Animation Apprentice, and maybe do a self-learning online Maya course, in my own time to up my skills.

The tutors at Escape are really lovely, and incredibly talented. However, some classes at Escape were, dare I say, I tad boring as we were learning things that bared no resemblance to anything I actually wanted to do with my career (of course, they were useful things to know about, but felt like teaching a drummer how to play the guitar)...but more recently, at Escape, we've been looking at Animation, it's not a patch on what I'm doing with Animation Apprentice. I recommend the course with Alex at AA, 100%!

I'm not phased by what the future holds...yet. I know jobs are few and far between in Animation, but I'm positive and optimistic. I really enjoy Animation, and feel that I'm being true to myself by taking the bull by the horns and retraining to do a completely different career in something I longed for as a child.

I'm leaving work in a few weeks...eeeek...although I will be back and forth, and doing some hours to tide me over, until a job opportunity comes up... I need to take the step and spend more time on my animation and show reel and really focus on landing that dream job! Very exciting! Kinda nerve-racking! Definitely fulfilling!

A Proud Piece of Animation

I am bloody loving animating! I've created quite a few small pieces, but none of them are really showreel yet - still lots of tweaking to do.

Here's something I'm working on - it's still work in progress, so still some work to do - but I'm happy to show it at this stage.

I took a rig of a big "heavy" character, that comes armed with a machine gun - so typically this is the sort of character you would expect to find roaming the darkened streets killing everyone in sight...so, I decided to turn the character on its head - and give him an effeminate twist. Let me know what you think :)

3D art? How do I become an animator using THAT?

Someone asked me: how do you become an animator ...which I thought was a very good question...and inspired discussion, that I thought I'd share. 3D art and animation is everywhere, so how do you get to train how to work with it? But firstly, let's get one thing out of the way, can you believe it's the end of August already? This year is zipping by. It also means that I have now been training in animation and learning animation techniques for about 2 months now. I'm at the stage where the software I'm using is getting very familiar and I'm feeling almost to the stage of it becoming second nature. Of course there are more programmes to practice animation techniques than just using Maya, but I'll stick with the one programme for now!

Click here for Image Credit

I used to ask myself "How Do I Become an Animator?", and end up getting lost on Google with articles telling me "to become an animator write letters to production companies and ask for experience", I think it's a good idea, but I don't know how much that would help in the long run. I wanted a solid training foundation, particularly in 3D art and 3D animation as that sparked more of an interest with me rather than traditional animation. One thing is for sure, I wanted to make sure I would be equipped with the animation techniques that I would need to know before I even attempted to approach a studio or company to take me on. The best piece of advice I was given (and I believe is paying off) is to network, network, network.

I didn't study Animation at uni*, so at the age of 30, I felt at a disadvantage - I didn't have a clue about any of the latest animation techniques or how to work in 3D art other than traditional sculpture. I've known about Escape studios for a while - I had a friend who studied Compositing there, and I had been to a couple of open days - so it automatically popped up in my mind. As I'm sure I've already explained, Escape couldn't help me with my dream to become an animator because they pulled the course, just as I was ready to sign up...but they did introduce me to Alex Williams...so a course in learning Maya with Escape, and a course learning Animation techniques with Alex followed.

I felt confident with Escape, the 3D art they created blew my away. But not only had I been given a personal recommendation from a friend, but the work their students is excellent - knowing Alex had connections with them, and seeing his showreel, I knew I was in the right company with him too. The animation techniques I'm learning are brilliant and easy to understand and follow (however, mastering them, is another matter). If I hadn't found either, I guess I would be looking for more schools or colleges with good reputations, good work to show for what they do and a good feel for their connections with the industry...THEN I'll approach a studio with my "let me become an animator with you" approach. Escape will help you find work when you finish a course, but I understand that they would charge a finders fee to the studio-potential-employer, which studios don't like, for obvious reasons! So, the networking approach is one I hope to explore to its full potential! It's still early days, but it's always good to be prepared!

*Some great uni courses for animation and working with 3D art, as I understand, are at Bournemouth University and the University of Kent.

Working With Wonderful Wacoms

It's been another busy week. My biggest achievement was to use a Wacom Tablet! To be honest, I was nervous about it, I've always used a mouse. Basically, Wacom tablet lets you use the Maya software (and any software really) using a pen stylus on a tablet. It completely replaces the mouse. It's weird, you just hover the pen over the tablet and it moves the cursor around your screen. It also has little buttons on your pen, to use the respective middle and right clicks. It's going to take some getting used to, but I'm really excited and have already done some Maya modelling with it! I got my Wacom tablet from Amazon, I'm using the Wacom Bamboo Pen Graphics Tablet from Amazon.co.uk and I'm really pleased with it (it only cost me about £50, bargain!). You can also get Wacom tablets on Amazon.com so it's definitely worth shopping around.

See link for image credit.

I also started modelling heads and modelling furniture this week! Quite a comparison, lol. The head picture on the left is from a design page at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne I'm linking because there are some pretty nifty tutorials on how to model in Maya, so definitely worth taking a peek.

I'm beginning to feel more and more confident about using Maya. It's taken a few weeks, but things are starting to sink in, and some techniques are turning into autopilot in my mind.

As far as travelling to my course goes, I've not had any commutable problems into London, with the Olympics in full swing...which is always a bonus!

My First Ever Piece of Animation

I've done it! I'm so excited! I've done my first ever piece of animation!

I animated a ball bouncing down some steps. It wasn't all that hard actually. Finding my way around the programme was fine, and the tutorials from Alex were very comprehensive and easy to follow. I came a bit stuck when I needed to add some more key frames to my Y axis (don't you just hate it when that happens), but I managed to work it out. So, now I'm just waiting for feedback.

The most simplest thing, was getting the ball. You can't just animate any polygon shape you create. It has to have certain properties that are defined in a rig - which is basically the framework to tell the animator what bits can be moved and how. So, the ball I animated can squash and stretch from the top of the bottom, without losing it's mass. Very clever.

We used a site called CreativeCrash.com which is free join, and allows you use rigs added to the site from it's members. Brilliant, isn't it?

Bloody Textures!

Hmm. That was a tough class. For some reason lots of things not working for me. Very frustrating, the perfectionist in me is struggling. The "don't panic" voice inside me is trying desperately to take over.

I guess I just need to reassure myself that that was only the 7th session and still at the very early stages of getting to grips with Maya.

I've given myself extra homework to try and catch up - its texture mapping that doesn't seem to behave. Grrr.

Bring on the Animation teaching!

Why Animation?

I had a really good time at Escape last night - the modelling is making more and more sense with each session. I also discovered that sitting at the front of class, was a hell of a lot easier to follow what's going on...all this time, and now I can actually tell that there is text on the front screen!

Our tutor explained how this type of work can be demanding and gruelling, and some students start at 9:30 in the morning, and often don't leave until 10pm (this didn't phase me one bit, in my "day job" I hold my first meeting at 7:30am, and often don't leave the office until 8pm, and often work weekends too). He went on to say that this type of job has to be more than "just doing a job" - working in 3D, has to something that you need to do.

It reminded me of the advice, from a lady called Cecily, who was on the panel of auditioners at a Drama School in London. She would ask the auditionees why they wanted to be actors, but there was only one response that she regarded as "the right one": "I don't want to act, I have to act".

Image credit: 
http://www.animatormag.com

It got me thinking about why I want to animate.

When I was little, at Infant school, I distinctly remember having to draw a picture of the job we want to do when we grow up. I wanted to be a Clown (...don't ask). Then shortly after, when I went to Junior school, I decided I wanted to be an Animator. I was obsessed with cartoons, drawing, painting, anything art related. I became an avid viewer of Rolf's Cartoon Club and shows like Art Attack. 

Growing up, Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield, was my hero - I would draw pictures of Garfield all day long. I would be given Garfield books as gifts, and I would paw over each page. It was from my love of Garfield and watching my recordings of Garfield and Friends, that I knew that I wanted to make cartoons. I wanted to become an Animator. I was given stacks and stacks of books on Animation. Everyone at school thought I was bonkers and didn't understand why I didn't want a "proper job".

As I got older, I got completely distracted by drama and theatre. I still kept my art up, but all aspirations to animate disappeared. Theatre was my life. At university, I didn't want to give up on art completely, so did a combined degree in Theatre with Art. When leaving uni, I worked on some shows, and sold my art, whilst working in the family business for a day job.

I held my own art shows, and worked on 3 professional theatre productions (2 in the West End)...I am lucky enough to say I achieved 3 of my dreams in one job (long story, for another post, probably). After that, I began to think "...What now?"

I love Disney, but had never been to Disneyland. My partner is also a massive fan and had been to the parks many times. In 2010, I booked us a long weekend, Disneyland Paris, for a birthday treat. It wasn't until we went through the Animation zone (the big blue Mickey Fantasia hat), that all my memories and affections for animation came back. Then we sat at the little Mickey Animation desks (you know the kind, with a big square, backlit section to trace through) and a guy taught us how to draw Winnie the Pooh. Then, at that moment, drawing on the desk, I knew it was what I had to go for my earliest childhood dream.

I don't want to Animate, I have to Animate. 

Finding My Feet

I've had a pretty good week, as far as learning how to become a 3D Animator goes. Actually, no, that doesn't make sense, because technically speaking, I haven't started any animation training yet...so, far I'm still learning the fundamentals of Maya...but that's going pretty good, so that's good, right? Yup.

Last Thursday we made a bottle using a NURBS curve, then created a surface with it. It was so much fun. I'm still finding it a little bit tricky to keep up with the pace of the class, but I'll get there.

One thing I like about the course, is at the start of the session, we have a chance to go through any questions that have come up since the last time. So, that's a really good opportunity for me to dig a little deeper with anything I don't understand!

In the past 10 days or so, I've been thinking how grateful I am that this course is twice a week, in other words, part time. Escape Studios do full time intensive courses, that are all day every day for a period of 12-16 weeks. I don't think I would do very well with that one. I'm really enjoying having the time to go home, reflect on what's been taught, and practice and go other bits that I'm not sure on. A bit like driving a car, I found the experience of having a lesson per week, gave me more time to think about what I was doing, than had I done an intensive crash course over a short period.

I don't have an incredibly strong, technical background when it comes to IT and computers, I am slower than most of the others in the class I've noticed. Oh well, we all learn at different paces and ways don't we? When we made the bottles in class, there was one guy who had not only made a bottle, but a cork to sit in it, a table to place the bottle, and a glass to accompany it!

I'm confident in my creative background - having a degree in Art and Theatre. My puppetry and animation manipulation should tap into my theatrical directorial work, and the whole look of the shot should tap into my artist's eye...at least that's the theory. That's what I figure.

Hoping to find out more about the Animation side of things this week, to get that underway...I'm tres excitedo indeedio! As soon as I have more news and updates, I'll be sure to update this trusty blog :)

Look, I made a pig!

So, as you know, I've been using Maya for exactly a week now. I've had 6 hours teaching time, and a bit of time to play around on the software in my spare time. I've just been practicing some techniques, ready for my class this evening...so I made a pig. Ain't he cute?

My Maya

I've had a quiet weekend, so found the opportunity to get stuck into a good book, The Animator's Survival Kit, by Richard Williams. It was recommended to me when I first went to the Animation Open Day at Escape Studios. I bought it shortly after, but never really got chance to read it. So far, so good...a real bible of a book.

 I spoke to Alex, my Animation tutor, he reassured me about the course and restored some faith back into what I was doing. We're looking to start the Animation side of things later in July. I can't wait. He also told me about a way to download Maya onto my computer, so I could practice in my own time. Amazing!

So, I've had a play around, and have got the hang of pivots in vertex mode - which you can see from the angle of the flappy, thin cube, suspended in the air. It's a very nice feeling knowing that I can practice at home. Thanks Alex!