Storyboard: Inventing a Place

Here are a couple of drawings that I did as part of my story-boarding class during Spring'07 at SCAD. We had to come up with a rough story concept and design an imaginary place for that idea. It is very difficult to design something without any reference at all. The best thing to do is to study references for all or some elements of the environment and add your creativity to it. References help making the environment more believable when all the elements are put together. Hence it is very important to study real life references, be it a drawing or an animation piece.

Amazing Animation Film: Thought of you

I became speechless after watching just the first few seconds of the film. And absolutely gorgeous drawings in every single frame. Watch it in HD!

Thought of You from Ryan J Woodward on Vimeo.

Message from Remote Planet?

Still alive and blogging, just not on this blog. After I finished my studies I moved to Norway and I have been busy with my job and other projects on side. Unfortunately not much related with the art side of animation. To which I will get back once I have reached specific milestones for my current projects. If you want to check what I am upto you can check my other blogs.

• Rigging
• Programming 

Pose to Pose Again and More

I am back to animating and so far I am learning what my shortcomings are and what should I do to improve myself. It is a great feeling when you know what the problem is and what could be the solution.

The biggest problem in my animations is that they look very pose to pose. The solution to this is simple! Add overlapping and not have all body parts reach the key pose at the same time. I understand this and I have added overlapping in my new animation, but it still looks pose to pose to an extent. Here are some points from my learning so far,

- Body parts reach the pose at different times and some body parts overshoot a little bit in the follow through action
- There are few times when in real life we go pose to pose.
- So overlap is good, but not all the time. Depending upon the emotion or the action we have to do partial overlapping, only few body parts overlapping. (This comes from James Baxter's notes taken by Amrit here)
- Too much overlapping makes animation feel like rag doll. It depends a lot on style of animation of course e.g. slapstick comedy needs quite a big of overlapping. But in general for a little more realistic action we have to be careful in using overlapping.
- When adding overlapping you have to think what is leading the action. Or what makes action clear and stand out. In a simple example if character is punching somebody, you want to delay arm as much as possible and have arm hit the target in the last couple of frames with bigger spacing.
*-Always push the poses for overlapping and exaggeration to find the limit where you feel that it's not too much and too obvious. If we don't push the poses to extremes sometimes overlapping is too subtle to even notice and it can make animation pose to pose and stiff.
(I think this is where my main problem is.)

So in conclusion it is important to remember that we are creating feeling of natural motion and not actually showing overlapping itself.

Finally, my own website!

I feel very excited to have my own website. I am still in the process of updating the pages with more detail and better layout. But mainly I have my demo reel up!

I want to say thank you to my lovely wife :)

http://maulik13.com

I am back, with notes

I am posting few links and notes (mainly for myself) as I begin animating again. Wohoo!

"Pretty movement vs good acting"
LINK

"Cut the fat from your shot, don't give too much to digest to your audience. Make action and acting clear to get the emotion and story point across."
(from author's comment at LINK)

I generally end up putting extra fat to the acting. While I am animating I suddenly think oh man this would look cool or this action would be very pretty because it has awesome use of overlap and arcs. But, as Brad Bird says, It's about acting man! Not the cool looking motion. (paraphrased)

What makes animation look pose to pose?

There are times when I get a comment like your animation looks pose to pose or it is easy to spot that animation is just going from one key pose to another key pose. I understand what the comment means, but sometimes I don't know how to solve it.

While animating today I realized that if I break down animation into different body parts and loosen up the body (not too much or it will look funky) I can remove that pose to pose feel. So it's about adding proper overlapping action, arcs, follow through and secondary motion. But instead of doing it randomly or following just one rule, like hand always lags behind, find out what leads the action. Is it the torso that leads the action or force, or hands or pelvis or legs? Then it is good to draw thumbnails of how you reach your key pose with a particular body part leading the action. And always important, try to feel the action inside your body.

I just re-realized this so I thought I should write it down.

Puppet Animation, great act

This is absolutely Amazing! Best puppet acting I have ever seen. Even though it's just a stick man with one leg and no face, you know what he is doing or feeling.

Latest Render of old character.

Just playing with built-in Mental Ray material for sub surface scattering (sss) effect. SSS looks cool.

My first businesscard! I am excited

Front and back vertical format.
The gear system represents the technical aspects of rigging. However, rigging also requires an eye for aesthetic or art so I have those gears made from faces (And they will actually work in practical if put together properly). So the gear system made from faces is my logo. And it will be driving an Inverse kinematics chain pulling head on the other side. IK is something I am very interested in for research hence IK highlighted in my name too. Also because it brings attention to name quickly.

Blue and brown are not my typical colors, so I feel good being adventurous this time. However this color scheme is widely used in graphics designs (esp blogs). And so it's not unique, but I like it. (please ignore the white border)