knight course - 3MB

“Knight Course”
Maya 2009, Shake,
Photoshop, Motion

Knight provided by Full Sail
Obstacle Course by Full Sail 		Responsibilities:
background creation - took panoramic image and ran it through filters in Photoshop, separated sky from horizon and animated it in Motion, exported animation as image sequence then plugged it into background material.
modified scene textures - ran textures through same filters as background for a uniform style.
scene lighting
animate camera
animate character

april 23, 2009

I redid the ending because it wasn't reading the way I wanted it to. That's good because this reads much better than the old idea, thanks to my classmates pointing it out to me. Finessed the overlap and everything else needed in the scene, and it is now fully rendered and ready to put into the demo reel.

march 27, 2009

I've tinkered with the end scene a lot, getting the weight shifting and body movement from the slip down more. I'm very happy with it, but I still need to do some tweaking. I've added more head and upper torso overlap. I still need to run a few detail and finesse passes for certain, but all in all I'm liking the look. I will need to get some feedback for things I missed or still need to work on, because we all know that it takes more than one pair of eyes to catch everything.

march 26, 2009

I'm completely redoing the knight scene from Fundamentals of Animation. I thought about cleaning up the curves from the original file, but that was one heck of an overhaul job I was looking at, so I decided to start from scratch. I liked a lot of the ideas and poses I had from the original, so it's practically the same concept, just animated better now that I know a lot more about what I'm doing. I have all the key and basic poses, and nearly all of my breakdowns. I'm in the middle of the overlap pass now, adjusting timing of curves and adding keys for overlapping action. Still much to be done, but I should have it ready to put into my Demo Reel next month. I would like to cut it up and use it as a transitional element between my main assets.

With this project I also started a different way of animating by beginning in clamped curves instead of stepped. I've found it eliminates many gimbal problems, and it helps in placing the breakdown poses when the character is already in the general area thanks to the curves. I've gotten a lot done in a short amount of time thanks to this method, so I'm going to stick with it.