Animation Practice

Trying out this body mechanic rig set I bought from Joe Daniels.

Really simplistic, neat and flexible rigs for body mechanics!

Here I am trying out some character acting without any face animation for a change :) I figured it was important to nail the body language and move on from there.

Here are my initial poses in blocking.

Initial Poses

Excited_Girl_001 - Initial Poses from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

Initial Blocking

Excited_Girl_002 - Blocking from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

Blocking
Excited_Girl_003 - Blocking from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

New updates soon

Been away from blogging my work for too long. I will add some updates that are either unfinished works, WIPs and even artwork! Hopefully this will motivate me to do more personal work as I have been severely slacking in that department.

Dr Frankenstein

Oookay, it's been a while since my last personal project! I started doing a couple of little test anims but slowly lost interest in all that, mainly because I have started a job doing in game animations... So I'm a little bit tired of doing that sort of stuff. I miss cinematics >_< ... I think I like character animations too much!

So yea...  I've got hold of a good audio clip to animate to and with it being Halloween it gave me some ideas as to what to animate for it! Shame I only thought of it now and not earlier in time to animate for Halloween because it would have been perfect to put online at that time :( Oh well.. I'm still going to do it!

The audio clip is quite crazy/over the top which is always fun to animate to :D

Here are the face deforms for the characters so far! Going to set up a quick block of the set and I'll be ready to animate :)

Dr Frankenstein

Igor

Old Flash Art

Found an old CD with a few of my old flash animations and art! These are all 10 years old now!!! It's amazing to think it's been that long since I starting messing around with flash and then leading myself in to the field of animation :D aaah nostalgia! These are fan drawings I did of my favourite show at the time Dragonball Z! The other is of a stick man version of Street Fighter II The animated movie. These were not animated they were just fan art I did at the time :)

Final Version

Final version of my personal anim test. Not going to add more I feel I've done as much as I wanted to and can now move on to something new. :)

Gone Mad!? - 08 Final from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

Spline Time!

A bit late posting this, but here are 2 vids of my anim in spline. There are more versions but they all had very subtle tweaks so I just posted these 2 as they had the most change between them.

Gone Mad!? - 06 Spline from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

Gone Mad!? - 07 Spline from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

Personal Anim WIP

Just posting a quick animation i'm working on in my spare time! I wanted to try a more cartoony approach :)

So as I was posing the character I left the hands in IK mode. At first I was going to change that but I got quite into it and decided to leave it in IK to see how different it would be in spline mode etc. As long as the hands don't freeze up suddenly it should look ok :)
Gone_Mad!? - 01 Initial Poses from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

Gone_Mad!? - 02 Initial Poses from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

The reason for adding in the arms circling was that I thought it might make it look a bit more crazy! I wanted him to feel real worked up.

Gone_Mad!? - 03 Blocking from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

Gone_Mad!? - 04 Blocking from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

However here I've lessened the arm motions as I found out it was too distracting. I think the dialogue gives you enough to understand his frustration. I think this works better now.
Gone_Mad!? - 05 Blocking from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.