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Class 5 Week 3 – Assignment & Critique Notes

Daniel Lim — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 20:01:02 +0000

Apologies for being a bit slow with the updates this week, I’ve been doing a lot of drawing (as you’ll see in a later post). I’ve back-dated this post so it’s listed as last Sunday. Here’s what I handed in:

And that’s it! No more time to spend on this animation right now (until Class 6 at least!) – it’s on to bigger and better things! Regardless, Mario still had to critique it, so here is what he had to say:

Mouth

“This is REALLY good stuff!” but there’s still room for adding a little more intensity to the “can’t a girl” section and perhaps either on “after” or “all”.

Brows & Eyes

Again, really good stuff. Full of nice beats and feels really solid. The brow changes feel like they’re coming from her, not me as an animator.

On the “can’t” expression, it might be possible to accentuate the asymmetry and squash and stretch of the face by swapping the eyebrows round to help define the line of action through the face.

Body

The new end pose is much more stylish, a lot clearer and easier to read. There are still opportunities to polish up the hip and shoulder movement, but that can wait for Class 6!

Overall

This is a great shot. It’s clear I’ve got a lot of experience already and there are only a few little this to shape and polish up; all the foundations are there and very solid. This shot is pretty much done!

A-

My first A-grade for the term! Woo! As I said earlier, I’ve been super-busy getting my drawings and layouts done for the next hand-in, so I’ll post those up when I get a spare moment!

As ever, please feel free to leave comments, questions or suggestions! Thanks for reading!

Class 5 Week 3 – Dialogue Mid-Week Review

Daniel Lim — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 09:58:44 +0000

Just a quick mid-week update on my shot. Mario told me to “go wild” with the asymmetry and elasticity of the face in my critique, so hopefully this is moving along the right lines:

The second clip shows the new version (left hand) against the version I handed in on Sunday (right hand) – I know it’s hard to see a difference (especially when Flickr won’t let you can’t frame-by-frame it), but trust me, they’re pretty different!

I showed this to Mario in our class Q&A yesterday afternoon and it seems like I am going in the right direction with the cartooniness of the face. Mario seemed happy with what I’ve done and told me to push it even further (which I have actually done already – I playblasted this late last night), so that’s good!

We’re meant to be finishing this shot by Sunday and as I said previously I’m actually away this weekend, so I don’t have much time left. The things I still need to do are:

Animate the tongue
Check the jaw/lip bounces on the “can’t a girl” phrase
Clean up the facial anim curves and add some subtle lip overlap
Adjust the hips and line of action for the end pose
Clean up the head movement at the end
Ensure the head movement propagates down the body
Any final tweaks

Not much to do then! 8)

Let me know if you have anything to add to the list!

Class 4 Week 10 & 11

Daniel Lim — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 01:21:58 +0000

Here’s my work from Week 10 – refining the dialogue test some more and a ‘surprised’ hand pose:

And here’s my final polish pass from Week 11. Obviously the lip sync hasn’t been fully fleshed out as that’s part of Term 5′s workload:

Class 4 Week 5

Daniel Lim — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:33:26 +0000

Again, this one is slightly back-dated and I should be ashamed of myself for not posting it sooner! Anyway, here is the polish pass for the pantomime shot. I’m pretty happy with it, but Michelle had a few little notes to tune up the odd section here and there. I will have to get round to sorting that stuff out sometime in the future…

Let me know what you think! Comments, suggestions and questions are always welcome!

Class 3 Week 12

Daniel Lim — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:51:02 +0000

Spliced the best chunks from week 10 and week 11′s assignments and I’m pretty happy with the results, especially compared to last week’s work when taken in isolation!

And that’s it for this term! Progress Reel to follow shortly!

Class 3 Week 10

Daniel Lim — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 13:46:18 +0000

This week has been absolutely brutal. Only really had (maybe) two days to work on this since my last critique, so my weekend was very stressful shall we say! I therefore do not recommend trying to move house, polish an AM assignment AND have a major work deadline all in the same week – It’s not healthy!

Class 3 Week 7

Daniel Lim — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:20:43 +0000

Polish pass for my latest shot. Still a few things that could be better – the swinging at the end was incredibly difficult to achieve good results because I didn’t do an IK switch on the spine and an FK switch on the legs.

Now it’s time to do the final shot for the term! Luckily I managed to find some footage of a strange man caught hanging around a children’s playground!

Here are the planning sketches for the next assignment. Stewie attempts to correct his bad jump by making sure he doesn’t fall to his death!

Really pleased with how these turned out actually. For the record, they’re done with REAL pencils on REAL paper! Amazing!

Class 3 Week 4

Daniel Lim — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 12:44:00 +0000

The polish pass on my previous shot:

Video reference compiled from various sources to describe the next sequence I’m working on:

The main actions from my new shot: the vault over some piping/AC unit and the leap across to an adjacent building:

The jump section of the animation broken down into key poses:

The last few key poses from the sequence:

Class 2 Week 11

Daniel Lim — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:22:07 +0000

Well, yet another week of crapping my pants trying to get my work finished. Next term I am absolutely not going to pick anything as complex as this again. If I try, please come over and beat me up. If I were not doing a full time job at the same time it’d be absolutely fine, but there really simply no time to properly polish and refine such a complex animation and be able to sleep now and again :)

So in theory, this is finished. I was genuinely concerned about the state it was in when I uploaded it to the website. It turns out that it was actually OK! I had a great critique from Shaun; he was generally very happy with it but since I had asked for some really specific pointers about how to make it better, he went through and gave me a few key frame numbers to go through and polish some more. So that’s what I’ll be doing with the remainder of this week – only have ’til Friday to get my revision in though!

I guess it really is difficult to step back from your work and look at it objectively. Something to bear in mind next time, anyway!

Class 2 Week 10

Daniel Lim — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 12:02:58 +0000

This is the first polish stage for the tap dance assignment. I thought it was going OK, but I got the impression from my critique that the animation hadn’t really moved forward that much from last week’s work. And perhaps that’s true. Unfortunately I didn’t have a lot of time for my assignment this week.

I started with the feet, then the body and finally the arms. Haven’t looked at the head, hands or knees (or eyes) yet (and I also haven’t been able to accentuate the ending yet either). This is the penultimate week – need to make some proper time to polish it up nicely!