Walk Cycles and Dinos

So it looks like this'll be my first post in a while and my last post for a while. Let me start with that walk cycle I mentioned last time.

I think it took so long because I felt the need to overcomplicate it. I started with the legs' "bones" in black, then covered them in "red" muscles, and then drew the final "skin" in purple.

After finishing this, I started thinking about starting one last project for the year. This is the last day of school and it's still in the storyboard stage, but I'm glad to have worked with an idea I was confident about.

You might recognize this little guy if you're into a certain Japan-only video game. Yeah, I'm that kind of nerd. Don't worry, I was gonna give credit had I finished. Anyway, I wanted to animate something that took as few strokes of the tablet pen as possible - this egg-shaped baby dino seemed to fit the bill.

The animation was going to consist of him getting bopped on the head with a shoe and proceeding to chew on it. Nothing major, just another test of my skills. Who knows - I might pick it up again next year!

Tablet Practice

    I've been figuring out how to use a tablet in Photoshop. I couldn't draw a straight line when I started, but two months later and I'm working on my first presentable walk cycle!

    This is a little test I finished a few weeks ago - It took a while to make, believe it or not.

Project Curvy pt. 3: References

If you go to my school and you've been snooping around the blogs of your classmates, you might be wondering why I have so little to show after six weeks. I knew what I wanted to do with Curvy (hence the storyboard), but I took a very long time in figuring out how I was going to do it. Thus, I spent a while gathering anatomy references while working on my storyboard.



First I looked for pictures of long-necked animals - everything from deer and giraffes to Apatosaurs. I wanted to get a good idea of how Curvy's neck would look if he was an actual creature (God forbid). I would've animated him based on that mental image when he wasn't dragging his head along the floor. Plausible Impossible and all that.

Then I found and liked some guides to animating equines. I knew from experience how hard it is to draw horse legs in a still image, let alone four dozen frames. Thus, I figured I should expose myself to lots of videos of walking horses long before I would get to animating. The top video is my personal favorite.

Project Curvy, pt. 2: Storyboard

Here's some more concept art for, uh, "Curvy." Yeah, I think I'll just stick to that name. I may not have gotten to animating, but I hope you can get an idea of what I was aiming for.

The animation was pretty much going to be an exercise in making shapes move fluidly, the starring shape being Curvy's curvy neck. I think it would've run for at least thirty seconds.

Project Curvy, pt.1: Concept Art

So I've been working on a hand-drawn thing for Animation class. I was supposed to post about it here a while ago, but I've felt a bit unmotivated so far this year. Here I am, thus, posting my concept art a week before the whole thing is due.

As this was going to be my first hand-drawn animation longer than 10 seconds, I didn't want to make whatever I'd bring to life too hard to draw. Since I still wanted to challenge myself a little, though, I thought I'd try making up something with four legs. Somehow I went from Waddles from Gravity Falls to a sort of long-necked, four-eared equine. If you asked me how I came up with that, I honestly wouldn't have an answer.

His limbs should be less like tentacles in the final animation.

Video Copilot: The Hand to Hold When Using AfterEffects

A couple of weeks ago, I was tasked with choosing a tutorial on Video Copilot (.net) to follow through in Adobe After Effects. Timidly, I chose this simple video - a guide to creating a spinning Earth in outer space. 

What I had when I was finished was a little bit different from what the video shows. Sadly, this site is keeping me from uploading the 10-second file. (Maybe I set the quality too high?) All I have to upload are a bunch of screenshots I was told to take while I worked. 

I took this one early on, when I had just taken a flat map of the Earth and bent it into a sphere. The tutorial pointed me to the "CC Sphere" effect (look to the right, under the "Effects and Presets" area). It pretty much takes any picture and rounds it into a 3-dimensional sphere for you. I was scared that "making the Earth" would be a longer, more challenging process, but all I really had to do was click a button. To say I was pretty grateful is an understatement.

Here, I was getting started shedding light on the planet. The tutorial wanted me to make a bright green glow on its right outline. I was confused about it at first, but it helped with creating a realistic blue atmosphere over the sphere a while later.

Observe. I can mostly thank the tutorial that it came out this well, but I'm kind of proud of it.

The video called for a scrolling "space fog" texture underneath the Earth. It ended up purple in the finished version, but this is what the texture looked like on its own. The classic "Fractal Noise" effect worked just right after a few edits.

It's not a realistic Earth unless it has clouds, right? This picture looks really weird, I know. It actually looked like a bunch of clouds after I lay it on top of the Earth's texture (which took forever for some reason). I set a few keyframes so it would spin just a little faster than the continents below it.

This is the closest you might get to seeing the finished animation. I took this shot before waiting about 10 minutes for it to render. When I saw the result, I was honestly stunned that I had made anything so good-looking.

Saul Bass, Master of Minimalist Movie paMphlets

     Saul Bass is one of the names to know among budding graphic designers. He was responsible for many memorable opening and credits sequences across four decades of movies.
     As a new graphic design student, I was recently introduced to his portfolio of movie posters. Most all of them featured only five colors at most (two of them almost always being black and white) and consisted of only barely edited shapes. Even so, they got their messages across as well as any other sort of poster. Observe:

   (Now, I can't really say this one was made by Saul Bass himself--his style is often imitated due to its popularity--but it's a nice sample of what he was known for.)

(Note: I'm not sure if I can count this post as finished. I'll leave this notice here, so I can remember to edit it later.)