Oliver Castle - BA(Hons) Computer Animation Arts

Today's task was essentially bringing together everything we've learned over the past few weeks, stretching, squashing, weight, layering, etc, into one animation.

Today we spent the session learning about different materials and where their uses lie; Blinns, Lamberts, Phongs, Anisotropics, Ramps and Surface Shaders. Then we messed around with reflections, creating different metals and materials. Silver Chrome Gold Glass Glow Spooky Halloween Glow

Isaura Crit - Oliver Castle Invisible Cities 2017 by Oliver Castle on Scribd

These ones didn't actually turn out too bad. I rather like them. I'm still not great at drawing open mouths though, definitely something I need to work on.

We got started on the first part of the Digital Sets tutorial today, nothing much to talk about really, it was just putting everything we've learned into one large space.

We worked on the orthographic views for our monster designs today.

These are the colour keys I made as a quick test using one of my Isaura key thumbnails.

Today's session was about overlapping action, we were tasked with re-creating our bouncing balls and adding more animation on top on a separate layer. I gave mine a tongue. Honestly, I don't like it. It didn't turn out how I wanted it to, partially because I thought I could make it work simply by transforming the tongue when I really should have just redrawn the tongue each frame. Hindsight is twenty twenty I suppose. And I've got awful eyes anyway.

One more tutorial completed.

I did it. Raygun. There.

Today was spent contiuning on from last week, finishing up the pen tool designs of our monsters. We moved on to adding colour, using the live paint tool and set out to quickly create a bunch of colour variations. After that we used layer styles to add shadows and highlights to our original designs.

Today we had a session on different weights, how differently weighted objects will react differently when hitting the ground. Here's what I ended up with. First a ball bouncing along in a cartoonish style, stretching and squashing. Then a heavy bowling ball, a light ping pong ball and finally a tennis ball.

I don't really have anything of value to add here. Anyway, egg cups.

Additional Material:  "Toolkit 1" Blog Label

Following up from last weeks session, continuing with the same kind of stuff except this time with a male model.

We spent this afternoon learning about perspective; 1, 2 and 3 point. It's a useful technique that I'll definitely be using in my final few thumbnails. Would have been nice to learn it a bit earlier though, I've always been terrible at perspective, I just can't seem to imagine how it's 'supposed' to look. But I suppose I could have learnt it in my own time. Upper Left: 1 Point, Lower Left: 2 Point, Upper Right: 3 Point, Lower Right: 1 Point (But using non-cubes!)

Today was spent going through the first tutorial on Hard Surface Modelling, specifically building a scooter. We pretty much just spent the session following Simon's instructions and learning along the way, not particularly my preferred way of working but oh well. Learning how to use reference images was nice though, should come in handy. We didn't get very far but we're supposed to finish it of in our own time so it's not too bad.

Friday afternoon was spent continuing work on our monstrous 80s designs (mine being the archetypal 'Princess') except this time we used it as a way to explore Adobe Illustrator, and more specifically the Pen Tool. While I've never really used the program before I'll certainly be using it in the future, I found the pen tool is a much easier and nicer looking way of 'tracing' a scanned in image, which I do quite a lot, over something like simply following the lines with a Photoshop brush. Anyway here is the scanned in character from last week re-done with the Illustrator Pen tool. And also a coloured version because I got bored and started exploring the other tools.