Planning of showreel

I am beginning to plan out my show reel by finding clips on youtube etc. that link with what will be in my own show reel. This week dave said to choose videos as he will be giving us a tutorial on the after effects program so we can begin to put together our show reels.

I want mine to include:

• Push and Pull animations
• Walk cycle
• Lip Sync
• 2 x 11 second animations
• (possible jump animation)

These are what phil told me would make a decent animation showreel so these are the things that i am creating in advanced modelling and animation :)

Course improvements

This week we had a discussion about ways in which we could improve the course. We were told that if we had any ideas in ways in which we could improve it then we should post them in the blog. I had a couple of thoughts

• There was very little animation taught throughout the course. I think that this should be taught incredibly early as the course is modelling and animation and i feel that they should be balanced where at the moment modelling is a much bigger priority than animation.

• Better teaching of introduction to 3.D modelling. I was mostly self taught because the standard of the module was so incredibly poor. As a result i think there is still alot about maya i don't know or understand

• Proffesional studies should be alot more focused on preparing us for the industry

• A stronger communication for drawing and visualisation and the games industry, e.g setting tasks which could be incorperated into the games industry like perspectivly drawing a deathmatch environment rather than random buildings etc.

• Less Blogging and journals. This course has made me despise blogging and journal creation! i feel that creating journals is a little pointless as the model or end result is going to be visible with the hand in. Maybe a 2 page report about the model creation on what you found easy/hard and how you developed them instead of a tedious step by step guide with screengrabs etc.

•  2D Digital techniques should include photoshop teaching ie. painting over final renders etc. which we were never taught! 

Life Drawing Practice

Here are a couple of practice life drawings i have created to try and get more used to body language and anatomy. They where all about 10 min sketches

Future Technologies

This week we were asked to create a blog entry about how we think future technologies can benefit the field in which we want to progress in. For me this is animation.

I think that the main thing that will progress will obviously be the technology. Recently there is becoming more and more motion capture technology being used within animation, but this has pros and cons. The pros being that it can create a more natural looking animation and can appear more fluid but the cons are that you must rely on an actor and if they can’t perform then it looks rubbish and it’s a lot more difficult to animate non humanoid characters i.e. dogs/cats etc. I think that the future for animation will defiantly involved motion capture, maybe even being able to create movement from animals etc. however I think the biggest thing will be the technology available. Models are becoming more and more realistic and soon, animation shorts and movies will benefit from this with insanely high definition models, so close to human actors that you can barely tell the difference.

Also I would like to see some more motion capture software available. Maybe a portable motion capture lab will be created so that animation can be created everywhere and not just in a designated space. With the way in which technology is enhancing, I can easily see this happening within the next 5-10 years and with the un-announced graphical capabilities of the new xbox, playstation and Nintendo hardware which are said to be able to render incredibly life-like models and animations it could be coming sooner than we think!