final animation - little and large. my neck and back hurt so much :(

Adding my sound effects to my finished animation wooooooo!

Rendering - what a pain.

I had to get loads of help with rendering i got IFF files instead of tiff's wont make that mistake again!

Camera angles away!

add camera angle play blast here - heres some camera angles i tried out whilst i was working i really like the pig one and using little and small to show whats happening

Playblasts

Here's 3 play blasts from different angles of my animation just so you can see whats going on more. I'm almost fully animated now, all i gotta do next is move the background in, animate the reactions of the birds and add the lights and camera's. Im gonna add 3 massive lights in so every things bright then dim the drop a little bit. I've got quite a few camera angles in mind i've thought up along the way and also my camera angles from my storyboard.
here's the blasts -

2D Game animation - RAYMAN :D

I recently played a demo for Rayman origins and I'm waiting for a copy to be in my store so i can rent it and complete it :)

Raymans so good in every way the graphics are stunning, the storyline is quirky and funny. The multiplayer mode is awesome and the characters, you just wanna hug em. 

The 2D animation works so well in this case i think if it was 3D it would totally ruin it. 

Camera angles are pretty basic stays at a long view shot most of the time but thats so you can see everything cause its like sonic. A level on a level. These types of games are fun that way, makes them what they are - classics :)

<3 rayman - thingymajigy haha

I'd like to learn after effects more so i could try out bait of 2D animation i'm gonna look more into tutorials and practise on it. 

Game animation - SEGA

haha this video is funny and very true - amazingly the guys narrating this aren't annoying as hell so it's a nice breath of fresh air to listen to someone on youtube and not cringe or get annoyed in seconds.

Sonic is one of the best games ideas of all time. It's story and characters are very appealing and make you wanna play more. My favourite was sonic adventure and sonic adventure 2 for the dreamcast. 

THEY WERE AMAZING.

Not only did they take sonic and make it look brilliant in 3D they added adventure mode where you could walk around and see more of the story. They made some really pretty sets for this game and added some great animation and camera angles in there too. Take a look at the vid below showing a lil bit of sonic adventure  2 - i want to play it now :(

and this japanese sonic commercial - haha! <3 sonic plushes go!

Here's my finished animatic with my recorded sounds.

Here's my finished animatic, this really helped be develop my story and i wouldn't have been able to do my animation without it. Throughout the animating process i was constantly looking back at the storyboards and animatic to see if i'd missed anything or forgot. It's really made me realise more how import these things are to animation. I took my animatic into photoshop first, got the pics then moved them into final cut. I added my sound effects id recorded in the studio booths at college and worked out the timing correctly and where the sounds would go etc... I did have a script in advance so i had a pretty good idea and was organised in where everything went. except my maya folder and groups haha :P

So yeah have a look! 

Inspiration from ReBoot

Can anyone remember watching this show when they were a kid? I was so into it i had the little figurines and everything. Here's a clip from the intro if you can't remember

watching that brings back so many memories. The series was from 1994-2002

It's funny watching the animation from back then to now. To be honest though i still like the old animation feel that ReBoot gives off. It fits with it's style.

 I would like to see a remastered version of it on the telly though, that would be pretty awesome. 

Here's another intro i found for the tv series it's the one later on with extra characters in it. You can see in it as well that time has passed cause they use split screens and stuff to try and make it look better. 

Listen to the first bit haha. How many times does he say 'To Defend!'

Haha such a classic, i love it :)

soundtrack & sound effects

Here's the angry bird theme tune I'm going to use in the background quietly. 

Over the stop of this I'm going to record my own sounds in the studio booths at college. I've already timed my storyboard to around 40seconds and I've wrote a script of what the characters will say to each other. I've learnt that these are all important things and to be honest i enjoyed doing them, it made my characters have more personality and seem realer. - I've tried to upload the sounds that i did and it won't let me so see them in my audio file on my disk. 

research animation - how birds move

So i watched some animations of birds moving this was the main one that helped me the most seen as they are little and blue and cute :)

The kind of wobble and hop, seen as mine doesn't have any legs from this i decided to make it hop but hop cute and small like these birds would if they didn't have legs. I really liked the facial animation but because i left it last minute, there was just no time to do it. 

Im definitely gonna continue my animation over the years though and add to it all the new things i leaner so at the end i can compare my original to the one I've been tweaking for years. 

Here's some sketches i did of how my bird would move. Matt also taught me something really helpful - think of the object as shapes. What shapes make up this object or character. 

Depict it. So i did.

lighting my animation

isn't very good. learn from this.
So i found this again from youtube someone had made it in blender i think and uploaded it. The lighting is really really bad so i'll watch out to light mine just right cause its totally ruined this persons characters. give it a quick watch.

After this i did mat's tutorial for 3 point lighting so i could get a better understanding of lighting and not make this persons mistake.

I screen shotted this from mats tutorial its a good example of lighting and easy to follow and practise. I liked working with the lighting, didn't find it too difficult and if you pressed T you could control the light much better. 

 Key light

 Fill light

 Back light

All lights

 how to change the drop light and add softens effects to the lights - nice little touches to add.

angry birds research

I found these from youtube, they really helped me with my pre-production stuff from colours to the way they move to storyboards to sounds. It was nice to see what other people have done to animate angry birds too.

stopmotion

See the one below this one really helped me in my animation it's created by the angry bird team and everything about it is awesome. The colours are great, fit nicely with the lighting and camera angles. The storyboard is entertaining and fits well with the sound effects and music. I like how they sound and the way the move i'm defo gonna make some ideas based off this. 

heres a how to video of the one above too really interesting - great video for storyboarding here. 

wtf...

blender

don't think i like the look of blender.

kinda slow to get into...

finished storyboard!

Here's my finished story board after matt said to add in like the pig hopping and stuff and camera 

angles i add some more scenes into it. It gives it a much better idea of what it will look like at the end. I will definitely add more camera angles into my animation whilst I'm doing it on maya i've taken screen shots as I've gone along of some of the ideas for these camera angles. Using close up's, long shot's etc... I'm pleased with the final outcome of my storyboard, it really came in handy and theres no way i could of done the animation without it. It's made me realise even more that the preparations are just as important as the actual thing and they make your overall work better. 

I

Principles of animation

Add scanned in pages from book here

mood boards of character and environment ideas

I made these mood boards to help me with my colours and environment

i took pics form my iPod for the images below from the actual game i really like the backgrounds there simple and pretty, defo gonna use one on an image plain i think. I tried to add in some blocks to that i created in maya but they looked out of place and silly so i kept it simple and went back to just using a few image plains. I also made a green floor with merged images in photoshop. 

storyboarding research

so helpful tips here from a guy who raises his eyebrows a hell of a lot. Any who i found the last one the most useful when he talks about not wasting time drawing the background all the time - just do it once - we still know where the character is. unless they go through a door or something obis, then change it. 

this second tutorial really helped me with thinking about storyboarding camera angles and how id portray the ideas down on paper. Remembering the rule of thirds and camera shots i've learned from the last module really helped me in this one to get a better understanding of where to place the camera and what to do with it. 

Here's my first mock up storyboard i came up with.

I'm gonna work on it some more add some camera angles in there, show how the characters enter and where they move.

UV mapping my characters

Now for the colouring and texturing - after i was shown this a few more times its actually really simple and easy I chose to stick with the colours of my angry bird toys because when i put textures on them they looked stupid and out of place. I found that they looked better cartoony cause lets face it there angry birds. no point putting bait of texture on them when it ain't suppose to be there.

heres some pics below of the proper characters and colours...

heres my first go :) I'm pleased with what I've made in such a short amount of time. 

I really like the sizes I've kept to cause it fits in with the story and animation. I wish i woulda added nostrils on my pig though!

modelling my angry birds

I had such a hard time at first i left maya in a corner for so long. I found it really hard to make the shapes do what i wanted to and the angles to pan and rotate the right way. It drove me totally insane. But i picked it back up in the last 2 weeks and tried and tried and tried. Here's some images from when i first started struggling to make a simple triangle lol i think i still can't make one though! triangle's are hard!

getting better! i did these all on my own - so proud at that point :)

The pigs body went funny though so i started again to get a more round like my model shape.

thats more like it for roundness. The image planes came in handy so much it was a pain in the ass to get the up though and keep them up in the right place. Mine kept disappearing! 

Now.... heres so tricks i learned later on from friends in the second year wooooo :D

Booleons! 

can't wait to use these in another animation i was like woowwwwwwwww

when i was showed. I got told to think of it like a cup it goes empty and you can put things in it. If everyone told me things like this it would be so nice and simple :)

Twilight... yeah thats right twilight haha

c'mon, you gotta admit, the wolves are done pretty good. take a look for yourself :)

I got this to show just a little bit behind the scenes of animating animals seen as though i was animating birds. I know there totally different but i was looking at the textures of the fur used and such. I did try this in my animation but it just looked silly, it turned out to look better just more cartoony cause there no way I'm any where near the level to make an animation look this real yet.