Animation Blog

Rosie's digital sketchbook. 

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FINAL ANIMATION

This is my final animation. Overall, I’m really happy with what I was able to complete. Originally, I wasn’t going to add a cape but I had extra time and I’m glad I added it because it definitely adds to the exaggeration of the movements, appeal and completes my character. 

It definitely isn’t perfect and some things need to be fixed, like the eyes. I tried to fix them but any which way I tried to fix them it just didn’t work. The pin from the hair is also a mystery. For the fact that this is my first ever 3D animation I’m happy that I was able to fix the problems that I had, create the hair (even though I couldn’t animate it), move my character, make a cape and make a really cool environment that has a stream that looks like water. 

Animation Principles that I Set out to achieve: Appeal, Staging, Secondary Action and Overlapping, Squash and Stretch, Arcs and Anticipation

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The Animating Process

First I started with making the basic camera movements and angles I wanted. I eventually change them later on to make sure the movements of my character is within the scene.

I used a walking reference to make sure I got the poses accurate to the action.

And then after inserting the poses in a keyframe on the side profile, I would rotate around my character to double check the pose was correct everywhere.

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Modelling Part 7: The Cape

Below I decided to add a Cape after doing the animation as I was worried I wasn’t going to have time to animate if I added a Cape so I added it afterwards. I added Empty Spheres to each shoulder.

Then I added a plane and shaped it to be a cape. The overall design of it isn’t the best but I didn’t have the time before the submission time ot make it pretty or more like my original design.

Then I parented each side of the cape to the corresponding shoulder and added the cloth simulator to the cape. After the photo below I added collision physics to the floor and the character.

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Storyboard for Final Animation

On each frame I outlined each principle that will be applied to the shot. I forgot to add Secondary action and overlapping through the hair and cape. 

The animation will be super short but I don’t want to make too much of a difficult challenge for myself when it comes to creating the animation so I’m going to keep it simple. Principles that will be applied: Exaggerated Action, Squash and Stretch, Arcs, Anticipation, Staging and Appeal.

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Modelling Part 6: The Scene.

First Attempt:

Below is the first attempt I did at creating my scene. I followed a tutorial for the first part but it wasn’t compatible with Eevees and I didn’t want to render in Cycles. So eventually I scraped this idea and started created the scene in a completely different way. The second picture shows a Sky Texture that is available in Cycles which is really cool to use. 

Second Attempt:

With making it the second time I started with cutting out the shape of my stream and filling it with a plane. Then I sculpted the plane to look a bit to add a wave kind of texture. I then used a few nodes to create the colour, transparency and glossy texture to the water. 

I just textured and extruded a cube to create a tree in the background of my scene.

This is the environment in the materials tab. I like the effectiveness of the water, I love how shiny and reflective it is. 

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Environment Concept Art

This is a quick Concept Art I did for Lyra2.0′s house. Like you would guess she lives in a tress trunk. This was a super quick experimentation and I hope to do some more clean and complete environment concept art if I have time. The colours on this piece are super simple and muted, I think I can improve it but I will revisit it if I have time after finishing the animation. 

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Artist Research and Environment Inspiration.

Heavily being influenced by Disney’s Tangled, I took a lot of inspiration from there environments as a lot of the film is set in a forest and my story is mainly set in a forest too. Below I like how the colour is captured and the light is captured and directed towards Rapunzel. I liked looking at these because they’re all pretty different in style but are successful in capturing a certain style basis for the scenes. I love the particular compositions they’re very intriguing to look at. Especially the one by Kevin Nelson (the second one down). Kevin Nelson one inspires me a lot because I want to create a scene in my animation with a stream in it as I think it will add a lot of character to my characters setting.  

The images below show how during creating the Tangled environment the creators wanted to create the environment to be a mix between the environments in Cinderella and Pinocchio. As Cinderella had a lot of fluid and graceful shapes and Pinocchio ‘the thickness of Pinocchio’ (Lasseter, ‘The Art of Tangled’). This is interesting because it makes you think about the shapes and lines that are in the composition of a scene and their impact on the environment overall. 

I love looking at the colours they use on the water, this inspires me to think about how to colour my colour when I get to it. 

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Model Making Part 5: Rigging

Below was the start of me adding armature to my model. Adding the armature and rig was actually pretty straight forward. I just an issue with parenting the hair to the body and rig. 

Below shows the issue I had. After a lot of time researching I realised that as I used curves in the hair there were too many vertices for the rig to be able to understand what to rig. Again I forgot to screenshot the process but essentially I selected the hair and used the Decimate modifier and the Weld modifier to reduce the vertices in the curves and after that I was able to parent the hair to the body and rig.

Also, I added armature to the braids so that I could animate the hair. 

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Model Making Part 4: Eyes and Texturing

After finishing the body and I started to texture my model and create the eyeballs. The eyeballs were made with just spheres and adding an image texture on to them. 

When looking a them straight on they looked okay, but overall the placement of them and the shape of the eyelids around them wasn’t very good. I couldn’t fix it as I had an issue with some extra vertices that seemed to appear out of nowhere (as shown below). AS you can see I tried deleting the extra vertices but they were connected to other vertices so it didn’t solve the issue. I think to properly fix it I would have to redo a lot of things with my model. Which, unfortunately, I didn’t have time to do. So next time I would give myself more time to finish my model and potentially time to fix it if anything goes wrong. 

Additionally, I realised this was issue when I was really to make my character blind. I was following a tutorial of how to make her blink with the shape keys. 

Below is the finished texture before I added the boots and the top. As the trousers were going to be skin tight I didn’t make a separate mesh for it, I just textured the lower half of the body black.

Since the eyeballs weren’t working I wanted to add extra detail, so I added an earring on to her ear. 

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Model Making Part 3: The Hair

To make the braid I tried two different things but the first thing didn’t work so the screenshots below are of the second process I tried. The first way I tried was with arrays and then adding a skin modifier to the arrays. I don’t know what but I had some distorted faces when I did that. I didn’t get any progression shots. 

Therefore, I tried it a different way, which is what you see below. I added a plane to the file and placed it in this pattern. I the selected three different paths that would make the strands of the braid and separated them from the planes. Then I delete the planes to have just the lines left. I converted them to a curve and then added a circle and connected them together. This made the actual braid a braid. 

Below is the construction of me joining the braid to the model. For each braid I duplicated the braid so that the braids were made of two braids each. Rotating it and moving the braids to fit around the head took a lot of time but I eventually did it and I think it turned out well. 

Above are the finished braids. Below is the start of the rest of the hair. For the rest of the hair I main curves and connected them to circles (just like I did for the braids) then I twisted and shaped them all to fit the style I wanted. I did this process for all the bits of hair that covers the scalp.

Below is the finished hair with the Toadstool shaped pin in the hair. Overall, I’m really happy with how it turned out, making the hair was actually really fun just very time consuming so I think I would try to find a different way to do it next time that is quicker or I would have a simpler hair style. 

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Model Making Part 2: The Body

Below shows the body reference I made for my character and the lining up of the head in the blender file.

For making the torso instead of doing poly-by-poly I decided to make two cubes subdivide them and then shape them and join them together in the middle. Overall, doing it this way was a lot more efficient and quicker than doing poly-by-poly. Also, I like the end result. However, the second photo down to can see a strange edge that goes around the top bit of the torso. I wasn’t sure how it got there, maybe it was due to the subdivision but I ended up deleting the edges and it was fine.

Below is the finished body. I forgot to show the process of making the arms and legs. However, overall I like how it came out and the body doesn’t contain a lot of polys which is good. I didn’t make feet just yet as I didn’t need the feet just yet and I plan to give her boots as her clothes.

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Model Making Part 1: The Head

First I started with importing my reference and stared with making the top of the head. Just making the head and head shape was easy enough. 

Moving on to the nose and eyes were a bit more difficult but I managed to get there. I’m proud of the end result. I like how it came out, I think it looks good and similar to the designs and drawings of my character. I tried to keep it as low-poly as possible. 

Then I moved on to making the ears. This was before starting the body or even storyboarding the animation. Therefore, I made this ear below and thought to come back to it later on when my character has a body.

The image below is the edited ears I made after I finished the body. I elongated the ear a little and changed the shape a little to make them stand out a bit more and then I attached it to the body.

Up until this point I was quite happy with how my character was going and I thought it, overall, looked really good. 

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Finished Colouring of Lyra 2.0

Here is a rough sketch and colouring of my Alter Ego character which I am calling Lyra 2.0. I wanted to keep a lot of the colours similar to the original design of Lyra to show the connection between them. Therefore, Lyra 2.0 has a similar colour on the cape as the dress in the original character design. The hairs are the same colour as well as the eye colour. Furthermore, I added a little mushroom shaped pin to her hair to represent that before she was a toadstool.

Below is the colouring of the original character from term one, for comparison reference.

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Body Drawings and Experimentation.

Below is a image I found in Pinterest that I used to help me try to figure out the proportions of the body for my character

For some reason this time round, when I was designing my character I struggled with getting the proportions right. I kept on drawing and drawing but it took me a while to get the proportions correct. below are some of the drawings I did.

Once I finally managed to get the proportions right I started to play around with the outfit. Below are the basic lines and shapes I made. In some previous drawings I experimented with the idea of drawing her with a dress but I thought it might be too similar to the original character design. Thus, I decided to try the character with trousers instead. As I wanted to add a cape to accentuate the silhouette and create a more interesting flow to the silhouette of my character.  

Below is a more detailed initial sketch of the outfit. I like the mix of the curved lines with the straight lines on the top and shoulders. It creates my character to have this mix of a soft but strong and dependable appearance. 

Below is  a basic silhouette shape of my character. I like the overall shape of my character, the curves, the composition and proportion of it. 

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Artist Research and Inspiration: Character Design, Style and Colour.

The film that inspired me the most throughout this project is Disney’s animated film Tangled (2010). I recently bought the Art of Tangled book and since a lot of the film is set in the forest, and my story is also set in the forest, it became a big inspiration for me. 

Artist like Glen Keane and Jin Kim have such distinct styles of drawing that are super appealing to look at because they look so fluid, artist and as it the were done effortlessly. 

GLEN KEANE

Above is some of the expressive drawings that Glen Keane did for Rapunzel. Even though, I looked at Glen Keane and Tangled for my first character design. I decided to post about him again because I am inspired by him still. I just love his art style and the way his pencil markings are so particular in certain areas, how in some parts the marks are darker and some parts its lighter. His drawings always look so alive and they really capture light so well. 

JIN KIM

The sketches above are by an artist called Jin Kim. I discovered that he worked very heavily in the character development and designs during Tangled, when I was looking through The Art of Tangled book. I am not sure what else he worked on but I love his style and drawings. Much like Glen Keane he s able to capture light within his drawings even in just a normal pencil sketch. I love how he has well thought out lines and marks in his work. Both Jin Kim and Glen Keane have influenced me to experiment more and develop more drawings of my character and fill sketchbook. From these drawings I think it helps to draw more as you are more familiar with the character you have created and in turn are able to understand their personality more and therefore capture that in the simplest pencil drawing. 

BYRON HOWARD

This is a colour study that I was inspired by when colouring my Alter Ego character. I love the way the character is transformed with the colours and style of outfit. The red one is poised, kind of shows a strong figure in the character. The colour red definitely helps this feature as it makes the character stand out; and even though the dress is the same in all the drawings the green makes the dress suddenly look a whole lot more droopy. Thus, making the character appear more helpless. Overall, I love the style and complete composition of the work by Byron Howard. I think he has a great way of capturing the characters in way that enhances their personality while creating a simple colour palette that is harmonious.

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Original and Initial Character Hair and Face Designs

These are the original hair, ear and face designs I did before I did the hair designs that I showed in the previous post. 

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Alter Ego Lyra Character Designs/Development

This is Lyra’s original design from Term 1, when designing my Alter Ego I wanted the Alter Ego to still be Lyra but the true identity of her. Lyra grows up thinking she is a toadstool but then finds out she is actually an mystical elf. Thus, there were some elements of the original design that I wanted to keep the same. For example, I love the design pf her eyes in the first original character design so I wanted to keep it the same in the Alter Ego design.

Below are some of the initial hair designs I did. Following the inspiration from my mood-board, I wanted the hair to be completely different from the original design I had thus I played around a lot with many different designs. 

I actually really liked the design in the bottom left corner. I especially thought the fringe was unique and appealing if applied to my character. However, I thought there was something missing from the hair style as a whole. Thus, I decided to do some more development, and after some feedback from friends and classmates I decided to combine some looks and try out different styles

Above is some more hair development I did. I liked the mix of the curly and braid look to the designs overall. I actually like the one in the middle the most but decided to go with the one on the left after some feedback from my peers. I think the length and sleekness of the braids mix with the curly fringes adds a bit of contrasts and personality to the style. Furthermore, I chose this one as I thought it might be easier to animate/create in 3D. 

The look at the bottom is the final hair design. I wanted to draw a different expression and perspective of the look. I added flowers as I was experimenting with if I should leave it plain or not. Below is some more drawings I did.

To connect the two Character designs together more. I am thinking of adding a little mushroom shaped pin to her hair instead of flowers or butterflies. This will connect them together more. I will try the idea out when I come to draw Lyra’s Alter Ego’s complete design.