New name updated blog

For personal reasons I have gone through a deed poll to change my old surname of Saunders to James. This is something I had wanted to do for a while in honour of my mother and grandparents. It will take some time getting used to my new name and most of my past work will obviously still have "Saunders" embedded in to them which I can't change. It's not a big issue as I need to move forward and create new content anyway :)

Horse run cycle

Run cycle animation, need to break it up so its not so "loopy"

Horse_Run_Cycle_spline from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

Horse Walk animation

Had a go at animating a horse walking. Quite happy with how it turned out :)

Horse walk cycle

Horse_walk_Animation_Practice from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.


Horse walk added layers

Horse_walk_Polish from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

Created some artwork in photoshop for a change :) It's been a while since I tried! I find mountain ranges are quick to do as I just wanted to try a colour and light piece!
Here was my first pass, wanted to add something in the foreground but was not set on anything at the time.



Here is the final piece, I decided to make it feel higher up so i changed the clouds and thought some mountain climbers would give it some more scale :)

Higher res below.

Render and Progression Reel

Excited_Girl_015 - Render from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.


Excited_Girl_016 - Progression from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

Final Animation

Excited_Girl_013 - Polish from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

Excited_Girl_014 - Polish from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

Finished with this animation now, I could probably do another pass or change the run off, but I need to draw a line somewhere and move on to new animations :)

Excited Girl Anim - Splining

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

Really simplistic, neat and flexible rigs for body mechanics!

Continued progress on my animation :) I've actually finished it now, which you can see on my Vimeo account. But I will post the final stuff on here soon. I am planning on creating a progression reel for it :)


Excited_Girl_010 - Spline from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.


Excited_Girl_011 - Spline from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.


Excited_Girl_012 - Spline from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

Life Drawing

Found a life drawing class in the area, really glad to be getting back in to it!


10 Minute study

45 Minute Study

Getting back in to sketching

Been inspired a lot by my Fiancée lately to do some more sketching and doodling. I'm way out of practice but here is one of the pages from my sketchbook of some of the scribbles and studies I did today :) Felt really productive!

Final Blockout

Think I'm happy with all the blocking out now! Forgot to post earlier ^_^


Excited_Girl_009 - Blocking Final from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

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

Really simplistic, neat and flexible rigs for body mechanics!

Some screenshots of my workings;

Animation practice continued

Blocking continues :)

Got some good feedback and agreed that my animation was way too tightened up! It looked almost like the girl is getting ready to fight instead of being excited to see someone!

I'm happy with these more loose poses :D

Blocking 04

Excited_Girl_004 - Blocking from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

Blocking 05

Excited_Girl_005 - Blocking from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

Blocking to Spline - No adjustments

Excited_Girl_006 - Initial Spline from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

Blocking to Spline - Adjustments to timing

Excited_Girl_007 - Initial Spline - timing adjustments from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

Spline back to blocking - Adjusted timing

Excited_Girl_008 - Blocking revisit from Aran Saunders on Vimeo.

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

Really simplistic, neat and flexible rigs for body mechanics!

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.

Flash Art

Was up late, feeling a bit artistic! Decided to have a go at creating some environmental art in flash! Went for a wintry aurora borealis sort of setting :) (All created in Flash CS4)

Quick Face Animation practice

I decided to have a play around with the Malcolm rigs face controllers just to get the animation juices flowing again. I wanted to try in-cooperate a more squashy feeling into the animation.

Here is the 1st pass. Not much going on here.

Here is the 2nd pass, really tried to get a squashy feeling in the eyes and head. 

I may add some more, maybe another head turn. As well as polish up on what I have, such as the jaw slowly drifting upward at the end. All in good practice though :)

(apologies for the size of the vids)