Animation update

Just a collection of recently finished up animation, including a nice weight exercise with Hannah and the first animation for Ella. The squash and stretch rig from Adam is really good fun and it is exiting being able to animate her as well, finally. :)

Good dream

I worked on a wee very basic test for the good dream scene to make the life of my 2D animator easier and communicate my idea better. The 3D animation in this shot isn't finished and I really need to tweak the camera movement since the angle is quit unfortunate from time to time, but I still thought it's worth a post.

Picture-Book Illustrations

A very talented illustrator Aimèe McCulloch who's currently undertaking the undergraduate course in Illustration at our university has provided us with a few illustrations for the picture book that Hannah is reading in the beginning. I hope you like them as much as I do.

nCloth and other worries

I’m sorry for being so silent within the last couple of days, but I’ve really been struggling to finish up a scene for my 4th year project Sandmen. It is the awakening of Umb (the nightmare bringing umbrella) and therefore a key scene of the whole movie.
First I had problems to get his jump out of the cloak rack right, because his neck is rigged like a spine from the bottom upwards. While animating a proper swing I needed so many key frames for the bottom control to make his head stay where it was supposed to be. That cursed the whole animation to be bumping up and down. Parenting the head to the cloak rack did not work. I could have done a different rig, key visibility and replace the model in between, but I was worried that this could be problematic for the nclothed canopy that had to be attached later. As a compromise I decided to go for the animation as you can see it above. I’m still happy with it and I think it gets the point accross.
nCloth for the canopy was a second huge problem. I am not that experienced yet and therefore ran into a few problems and mistakes. I think that this scene is a quit difficult one, simply because the nclothed mesh has to stretch from very little (closed canopy) to very large (stretched out spider walk). My first try turned out having too less geometry for this purpose and looked like a too small skirt. More geometry made the canopy look huge in the closed position, but it gave me a better performance for the walk which is why I decided to go for it. I scaled the right jacket up to make it look less awkward. The jackets are directly animated and have blendshapes btw.
The nCloth is still a bit clumsy but time isn’t really our friend and I have other scenes where the canopy is going to be a lot easier. Umb will already be in his normal walking pose which allowes me to model another canopy that matches this shape perfectly.

In a whole I call it a day with this scene, even though it’s compromised and move on. Fingers crossed that the finished render with textures is gonna be fine!! :)