Character Design

Project 02- Character art

So in this assignment i was asked to draw a concept art character and study the characteristics of people around me to push their charcateristics to create a stylistic, exaggerated, character concept.

This is suppose to be first of many and hopefully we will see some improvements in future. I'm just glad i don't have to draw glasses and cups with reflections anymore :)

So this is what i got so far with sketches ive done alot research and got a lot pictures which will be useful later on.

This is just the rough version of the character its not entirely finished but this is what i got i had to cut out some of the initial Armour i was thinking about to put on the character do to time issue. Most of the stuff is finished it just needs a polish!

Project 1

Project 1

The Lift

General info:

In this project we were asked to duplicate our Lift assignment and try to do it better and use some of the tools we didn't last time. The assignment was really simple make a character lift a spherical object and show that it's heavy without using the facial control in other word without showing emotional expressions.

Phase 1:

I started with looking over my old work from the assignment to see where i could push little bit more and see if i could get it right this time. I used some of the old files from assignment as example and i also wrote down some guidelines to follow. I encounter several problems along the way with the animation which I kinda fixed as good as I could.

I used the sketches from old assignment as example but i didn't follow it to the letter thou, when it came to animating I started off good but for some reason i had problems with the walk cycle. Tried to fix it in curve editor with adjusting the flow however i feel like the animation was too fast especially in the  end of the animation. Also i choose to use 5 frames keyframe format cause i felt like that would work but now im starting to think maybe I should have put 10 frames instead. And if I ever do this or something like this again I think I will do it differently.

Phase 2:

 When i finished with animating i started going through my animation and i notice it was very "spikey" like flow was at times popping and i remember my other teacher was talking about this and that this is something you should avoid having. This is where Curve Editor came in handy I mean it's still not good but it's much better then what it was. I started going thought the tutorial videos that Noroff had on their site to see if i might have forgotten something or maybe try out to fix some of my already existing problems. I cleaned out as much i could in curve editor but i doubt it was enough cause i was going through others work and they had a much cleaner animation which only means one thing and that is that i didnt use enough time in Curve Editor. Also saw that some people use inbetweeners to fix some of their problem they couldn't in Editor which i tried too. However i started getting more problems when i tried to adjust and smooth out the animation in editor i think i did something i shouldn't. Suddenly it was just getting worse so i just went back and let that one go i had couple tries but i just couldn't figure out what i was doing wrong.

Phase 3:

Last part smoothing and editing the flow which i did but i wasn't so happy with it, like i said earlier i felt like the animation was too fast and i tried to slow down the part where the character was lifting the object. Just to give it more appeal or a sign that object was heavy but i think that it wasn't enough should probably have done it much more.

I also noticed that in the beginning of the animation just before the character is about to get in place to lift the object when he steps forward his back foot is hitting the floor and sliding. Which means its connecting to the ground before the animation is executed and i tried to fix this but i couldn't figure it out. I had this same problem before and i asked for help about this and i though i understood it but apparently not. Also in the end where the character is lifting the object i slowed down the animation in Curve Editor so it shows that the object hes lifting is heavy, I also animated that hes using one of his legs to lift the object simple cause it would indicate that object was heavy which was the point of the whole project. 

Evaluating

I feel like i could have done so much better with this project it started off really good for me and im just a bit dispointed in the end. Cause i felt like i had everything under control but when i came down to editing and polishing the project it was a problem after a problem. I fixed one thing two other issues pop up and it gonna take some time before i get entirely used to Curve Editor. It wasn't all bad i mean last time i barely touched Curve Editor this time i actually did something and fixed some of the issues. However it is far from perfect which only means that i gotta work more with it and get used to using it.

The project it self was fun i enjoyed working it didnt take me as much time to do the project as the assignment even with being behind couple day cause of a misunderstanding. Atleast next time i will be more prepared and hopefully by that time ive mastered the Curve Editor to some degree. The tutorials on the website were of great help solved couple of my issues like i mentioned before.