An 'Androgynous' dy is our new puppet for practice.
Seeing as some things to do with texturing didn't work, I decided to make him stripey...and a raptor.
This is just messing about with the rig we're using, Though his steps need more weight. Also, turns out that extreme rotations cause models to disintegrate...how fun is that. Also, flips are almost impossible with this rig, luckily the camera movement hides the jumpy animation...haha!
I'm currently doing my own walk steps and am planning some Fentil 'walk' cycles. The 3 I'm planning on first are: Lichen Loopers Flying octopoids Hexapod 'leather-backs'
Nice and smooth me thinks, though I think I could have made some frames fit in a little better. It's quite dainty, almost feminine. One problem, it's a bit hard to see.
3D:
A little jumpy for the first step or two, but after that I found a rhythm to it, and the walk smoothens out.
and now burt with back knees.
What's this? an orange square fruit? it looks familiar...
I'm looking forward to animating some Fentil animals and some species' more bizarre walks (at last, it becomes relevant) such as the lichen looper which runs in a looping manner like a caterpillar...a 5 meter-long caterpillar.
I wonder if the regular animators from the show did it, if so, it would have been a good opportunity for them to experiment with more fluid animation. I've noticed with a lot of cartoons nowadays that when they decide to do a musical episode, they usually reference or parody Disney films in some way. Though the creators of family guy took it that much further, and it's hilarious.
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After what we've been learning about construct and representation in animation, I'm gonna give this one a bash:
Stewie: Stewie looks like the typical child in a Disney movie; short body, big round head and big blue eyes. Seeing as Stewie is a child character anyway, a lot of what make him look like a child was already there.
Brian: The design of Brian makes me think of the tramp from 'Lady and the Tramp', though it's only 3 small things that do. Firstly, there's the shape of the nose, it's a wide triangle with a bit of shine on top. The other thing is the scruffy bits on his chest and chin.
Lois Straight away, made to mirror the typical woman in Disney movies, although Snow White seems to look the most similar, mostly due to the short hair and poofy sleeves and dress. She's also the first person we see when the music starts, perhaps again referencing to common singing female characters in the movies, although she doesn't sing much. To be fair, her voice is REALLY annoying.
Peter Peter is the typical bumbling, clumsy but jolly fat man. A big pink nose and large mouth look like the fat lazy drunkards often seen.
Quagmire Quagmire as a bird...not too sure how deep his conversion might be. Perhaps it's just because his long nose looks like a beak. Also, perhaps Quagmire tends to just appear and disappear in the usual series, how birds just tend to land somewhere, peck about and then zip off again.
Meg Giving Meg Ursula's tentacles is a great way to reference the show's recurring joke with her ugliness.
Joe Making Joe a teapot could possibly be because it's the same shape of his head. This is usually reversed when designing characters, often making them morphologically similar to the object, stereotype or job that they are associated with. The first example that comes to mind is the teapot in 'Beauty and the Beast'; it resembles a kind, podgy old lady. The round shape is 'friendly'. Less subtle examples are often used for humorous purposes, like some of the background characters in 'Corpse Bride': The clock-maker sweeping at the start of the film resembles the grandfather clocks in his shop; he is tall and thin and his broom swings in time with the pendulum, the grocer has an onion-shaped head and the town crier is in the shape of a bell. ...I'm going on a bit... Also, Joe in Family Guy is in a wheelchair normally, so making him a limbless, yet a mobile (anything can happen) teapot might also be a reference to that.
Cleveland A skunk. Flower from bambi? or maybe it's just because Cleveland is black and skunks are black. Perhaps his choice of character is just to fit to the song. I think most of the background characters have been chosen like this.
the end bit Old herbert is portrayed as the evil lady from snow white, and the characters comically knock him away with pies. Then Mort enters and is brutally beaten to death, followed by Stewie's "Oh yeah, I forgot, this is a DISNEY universe". This is probably to do with talk of Walt Disney being anti-semitic. I'll talk about that issue a bit more once I've found out a bit more about him.
Took me a while, but the little thing is finally done. If I could adjust anything,I would have added more scenery just to make it seem less barren. Although, in saying that, I would really like to render these out, make them look all nice and glossy. ...maybe for part 3, which is going to be a personal project. It should be interesting.
Also, some practice in pixilation here as me and Hughey Herbert made a little spooky animation involving a skeleton and a ghost.
He animated the bone man and I did the background and ghost. I twas all done on a vertical whiteboard so gravity was a bit of an issue, so was rubbing out and re-drawing the ghost and covered background. The video zooms out halfway through because the camera turned itself off halfway through and we forgot to zoom it back in again. Must make mistakes to learn, I suppose. I also learned the hard way not to rub out loads of dry marker with your finger then wipe it on your jeans...it stains.
I've been working my skin off on this little Maya experiment. cubey got a dimensional upgrade and now must be animated in 3D. I really wanted to show off with this one, and I WILL get this completely finished by Monday... ...if I don't I'll cry.
Will little cubey get the fruit of cube? Find out next week!
Been quite a busy day today, thought I'd show everything from today now instead of a massive build up at the end of the week:
This is my first go at Maya in terms of animating anything. There are two balls, one heavy, one light. Well, no. The task is to make them imitate these weights, as the balls themselves aren't real. (I'm so pedantic)
Pencil test for a bouncing ball. Stretch & squash.
Bouncing 'Cubey' character. The twist with cubey is the deelybopper on his head, providing a secondary layer of animation.
the whole dream is too confusing to explain, but these things were in it and I had to catch them. I really will have to animate some of my dreams one day.
I originally tried using Maya, that 3D thing, but epic failed. I sort of created a pointy robot with a paralyzed neck; It had bones and I could bend it manually, but it couldn't bend in the timeline for some reason.
To be fair, it's a lot different to the last 3D software I used, which was cheapy free thing. All I managed to make was a helmet for a model of Samus for Metroid DREAD....very optimized and pointy.
I'm gonna need a bit more practice with 3D methinks.
However, after about an hour or two of fail'd modeling, I moved on to the 2-D assignment, which I knew I'd have better luck with.
The task was to morph a ball (using only 12 frames) into something else. ANYTHING else! Me being the exobiology geek I am, I chose one of Wayne Barlowe's aliens, the ARROWTONGUE!
I'm quite proud of the result (as you shall see below), but using a lightbox and pencil as opposed to tablet and Flash was a strange, but refreshing difference.so BOOM...well, spppleooorggg (the smoothness of the morph) there was a ball becoming an arrowtongue...
...sorry, a REPRESENTATION of a ball becoming a REPRESENTATION of an arrowtongue.
Our first proper lecture about art's deeper messages and representations was intense... A complete and utter mind-f**k, but I loved the deep, philosophical nature of the discussion. An amazing variety of ideas and expression. See, artists are smart, too
That's all for now, Up next...stuff!
It's a bit jumpy, but that's only because it was lined up inconstantly with the camera.
(I spent hours trying to work out the HTML for the links and images etc...totally worth it, though)
