3D Character Design
I loved making my weird mickey-mouse-rock-skeleteon creature, it was one of my favorite projects of this year. I started off sketching it, then modeling the base form in Maya, and then moving to Z-brush to sculpt all the details (add screenshot of this later), and finally went to Adobe Substance Painter to add all the colors and textures.
Click on any image below for full screen!
Walk, Run, Jump animations:
Finally some actual animation! It was really fun to make these, but also pretty difficult and time-consuming, because I wanted them to actually look good. I have massive respect for those who can animate super well in 3D, it’s so hard it gives me a headache.
Lip Synch:
I decided to use an audio clip from one of my favorite childhood shows: The Amazing World of Gumball. I thought this clip was pretty funny and had a lot of potential for facial expressions, which I tried to express in the final animation. Because I had very limited time and knowledge, I couldn’t really dive deep into animating expressions, so I tried to use other things I could control to make up for that, like playing around with how wide the eyes get, and the head/shoulder animations.
Narrative Animation:
This is like Junior Year’s team narrative animation, except in 3D! I worked with RyeD and EstelleS for this project. We were challenged to tell a story using all of our character models but no dialogue. We decided to make a story in which their characters, Clover and Pollen, were best friends and are fans of this comic of my character (“Dynamite Roxie”!), but are bullied. They make a mini-Roxie, hoping it can protect them from the bullies, and suddenly the Roxie becomes real! It was quite difficult to get everything finished in time, but we actually did pretty well!
Process: first we wrote out the story in a google doc, storyboarded it, wrote out the list of shots and props we needed, and then got to work. I made the book props (and drew the comic book), prepared the expressions for all the models, animated the first three shots, and edited the first third with music and sfx. Now I need to draw a comic to wrap up the story a bit better.
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Final product!
Reflection: I am really grateful I got to learn so much about 3D animation this year, it was really frustrating at times but also really cool, it’s like exercising a muscle that you never ever thought existed. I now feel a little less fear with the idea of 3D animation and would like to do some more projects in the future!