This weeks blog is about the previs for the final major project, something I’ve been struggling for a while due to my indecisiveness regarding the idea and script. Nothing really seems good or exciting enough so, I took some time to think and explore my possibilities considering the time we have to write a thesis and create a project. I tend to be overambitous but I don’t think I can afford to take such a risk now.
When I first thought about what i wanted to do for the final major project what came to mind first was either a dragon or any other creature that does not exist, the fact that I wanted to gather reference and learn how to put together so many diferent movements from different animals. Super exciting.
I found a really cool rig, blurgha. I can’t even say what does that rig look like, it is extremelly complex. I got a meeting with luke where he advised me to make lots of animation tests as well as test the rigs before start animating. So I did, also grabbed a dragon rig and made tests on it too.
Dragon:
Blurgha:
The first one I tested was blurgha, I wanted to make a small walkcycle but honestly I was having too much trouble understanding how that body structure worked, so I chose to make a punch, as it has such strong arms.
I looked up references from lizards, gorilas, frogs, crocodiles and orangutans. Some of these helped me understand it all a bit better but nothing concrete. Anyway, this is what the first test looked like:
Of course, it is still a very rough and raw animation but I got to know a bit of this character and how it moves. The weight is also an important detail as it is so big, can’t really be fast and there has to be a lot of overlapping action mostly in his upper body parts, belly etc…
Another thing that I tried to improve was the camera movement, it is important to give some relevance to weight and reality to the shot, even as a test.
After this, I went to test the dragon and made a small step also to understand how that creature moves as it has no arms but has wings which are sort of like an arm but with a different and much more limited movement. The hips also have a different way to move as it is more similiar to a bird.
I looked up reference footage from ostrich, snakes, chicken, eagles as well as game of thrones dragon shots and lord of the rings. Dragons have been something that one sees more and more on movies and tv series so there is actually a whole lot more to look at regarding reference footage. Of course, an animator must never copy the work of another artist but it doesn’t hurt to see how they did it and how they got to it.
I really wanted to show the dragon test but for some reason I have lost the data, on the maya scene where i did the test there is a problem with the model and the animaton waas lost. I will continue to try and solve this issua as soon as possible.
Along with testing and trying to animate something roughly I went looking for animators that specialize on creature animation and I found an artist called Daniel Fotheringham. He has worked for movies such as the hobbit (dragon animation) as well as game of thrones, the lion king, among others. I was impressed by his work and the way he gave some good tips on how to begin understanding and what tools could be helpfull to improve producivity and technique.
This video was a great way to understand some ways to animate creatures, one of the tips he mentioned was animation layers, short animation tests like the paw hitting the floor or a simple movement of the head. Small things that if improved on a simple test can become much easier to do when actually animating.
After watching the master class I did some research on animation layers as I had never really payed a lot of atention to it. A mistake of course, it is usefull in so many ways. I did use animation layers in my tests included in this post. The ability to animate on top of something you did on another layer without any problem or have some keys on a control out of your way, is extremelly helpfull.