New Tricks Up My Sleeve

It's not everyday that you get to innovate new techniques in your craft, especially in pixel art animation. Although it's not true to the art style when animated, it's still just as fun for me to make. What we have here is yet another progress update on some of the personal content that I make on my spare time.

One technique for character rigging is to do turn-around's of each rig part. For me, this makes it so that you mix and match parts to get poses that you need in almost any view whatsoever in a 2D space. This can also create different perspectives of the characters in different shots, rather than it looking in a mere 2D space and manipulate it into somewhat of a 2.5D space. And since the sprites themselves are of a very small canvas size, the intent of making a diverse set of parts to use is quite easy to accomplish.

For some spoilers, the animation that I've been making here is a showcase of the character that you see in the image. You see that he's wear a suit of armor, yes? Me personally, I like to entertain the thought if this warrior were to fight with his fists rather than a simple sword and shield. I would like to give the atmosphere of this animation similar to what you would feel when watching a fighting game of some sort, given that the art itself is video-game-like.

However, I won't be getting to work on it for a bit, for I am heading out on a trip to Oregon for a small vacation to get away from things. There's just simply too much to juggle around at the moment. Even though I've gotten used to how things are now, one needs a break somewhere in all of it, right?

Turning Character Art into a Rig - Part 2

 At last, another step forward into our pre-production process to our "Eko Project"! What you see in the images of this blog contain the parts made for our character rig and the them being implemented into Adobe After Effects. For my first experiment, I will try and see if can make this still, standing character and make her run in a full and seamless cycle.

The whole process itself requires very meticulous planning and mapping, for I have to break the character down and rebuild it again in order for me to animate her. The reference I use for the walk cycle is from Richard William's Animator's Survival Kit. Because this is merely an experiment, it will allow our team to obtain additional information on how to go about the final designs of the character and the rig itself. As a fun fact, the art itself only took a single weekend for our digital artist. This counts the lineart, color, and shading!

The character rig itself consists of around 20 parts or so, with the head by itself having about 10 parts to rig for facial expressions and hair movement. To save time, the arms and legs for both sides have been duplicated and mostly consist of one color to save the details such as fingers at a later design. Despite having my foot in the door in starting the experiment, my everyday schedule will continue to impede the rate of progress made from day to day. Perhaps when school happens to give me a break.

However, this week is quite generous in giving me additional time to do things. So I definitely look forward to take advantage of that. Perhaps I can actually finish this within the week? Who knows?

Turning Character Art into a Rig - Part 1

Happy day! This week, our team has created a draft version--when I say "draft", it's basically a concept still in the works--of our protagonist for our short film! I work in tandem with our main digital artist and help her understand exactly how to format the character's body and prepare it for rigging. This is her attempt in mapping it out and it look pretty elaborate as far as the layers go. However, this isn't exactly a bad thing either.

The more layers I have, the more I can work with. Meaning I can obtain more parts for the rig and make the character animation more complex. I've yet to touch anything within the .PSD of this file, though I do have a plan in mind.

My intention will be to save each of the rig part individually and rebuild our character in a separate program. Possibly in After Effects to save time and frustration. I will then do simple animation like walking, standing idly, and emotional reactions. In addition to body parts for the character, her face will have the most parts to animation in a single space. Her blinking, eyes moving, ears twitching, all of these details will be important in discovering more about our character's erm... character.

This endeavor may suffer some delays as things within my work, school, and personal life have been heating up. No need to fret, for it's nothing negative. It's simply obligations that take too much of my time and I tend to spoil myself rotten with procrastination in my free time. I hope things will clear up in a reasonable amount of time and I can get back on this right away!

Solo Projects

Sometimes, there are ideas that are only worth executing yourself. At least, that's how I feel on that subject. The mere thought of it only leaves me to do but two things; scrutinize the hell out of it or roll with everything until it's done. Occasionally, it's both in that specific order. This week, I've been experimenting more with 2D character rigging and so far it's been quite an experience.

As I've been thinking about it, I feel as if this sort of process would be less stressful for me if I were to put this through After Effects. Albeit it's a heavier program and would take longer to preview, it has a parent/child tool that I fell in love with and would be incredibly viable for what I am doing right now. I feel that Flash is still capable of doing tremendous things as it is very light and can preview in a full framerate without much delays. However, it's still to this day very buggy and somewhat primitive in comparison to other programs.

From what you can see up top is a somewhat complex rig of one of my characters here performing an uppercut in the air. The picture below vaguely shows a variant of what part of the body are specifically animated.

  

Unfortunately, I do not have much else in mind as far as this animation goes. I hope that I can do more fighting animations with a full rig soon and can show it later onto my YouTube channel. I'm nearing 400 subscribers, which is yet another exciting milestone for me despite my recent inactivity with the channel. We'll see what happens, until next time!

Character Rig Setup

My current placement as to where my team and I are with our film is still in its early pre-production stages. Based on the image above is one side of the character sheet we have of our protagonist. To the right of it is a color-based key used to define what parts to break apart to prepare the character for rigging during the animation process. The way of how this this layer order works is what parts of the rig will be placed over each other when brought into rigging. Despite being roughly shaped, it's still a vague reference of how the character will be built. Between us, we are still trying to refine the final design of our main character as there are multiple designs oriented to our own liking.

The position during the development of this film is the animation, most of which will be constructed in After Effects, followed up with 2.5D environments and parallax. I happen to find it very fortunate that our group has strengths spread out across the board, where we are capable of executing the tasks and objectives needed to complete the animation. The only major weakness we have as a production team is our small number of people working together for this.

As of now, things have been piling up along with what I already have going for me right now. Not exactly opportunities, but they're things that I think I can push through. I still am well committed to doing this project with me and am definitely excited with what this pilot may bring.

Environment Concepts

As of late, my colleagues and I have encountered an assignment to our Background Design & Layout class, where our objective is to create an interior/exterior environment that is to be later created in 3D. So to start, we begin with making some sketches and brainstorm. The images above are examples of what my team and I will be using as reference for our environments. I myself will be focusing on the interior of the house. The multiple shots shown here will prove to be most useful to figure out the space and shape of the interior.

After asking my team for some suggestions for what sort of furnishing should be placed within this little house, my results were to be alike a scribes room would be like. Dozens upon dozens of books would be stored, archived, and even carelessly placed throughout the household. The next image shown was an example of one of my first finals during my first quarter attending the Art Institute of Las Vegas. (Upon closer observation, you can see that all of the objects reflect off one another, my mistake!).

What makes this project interesting in particular is that the environment resides in a rural settings, yet the property belongs to a rather studious-type of character. The house that they live in isn't just a plain one or two-story house either, you can see based off the reference images that there is a balcony, a patio, and even some smaller structures around it, possibly used to make the character's lifestyle self-sustaining.

In other words, this is an endeavor that I have yet to partake in. Background design isn't something that I haven't invested too much time in, but I believe that it'll be something that will be the most helpful in my journey as an animator.

Ambitious Foundations

Without many connections or opportunities for networking, it certainly would be difficult to make a name for yourself to a degree. However, it's not entirely impossible. A project that a couple of colleagues and myself have just started is now underway. Well, at a slow pace, as we just to juggle school, work, and our personal lives. The image above is one of the initial sketches for our protagonist done by our background artist, Bernadette Gochioco.

My role in all of this will be the animation (after the art has been done) and all things post production such as video editing, audio mixing, and additional animation. In order to keep the project at a more manageable state, there are only 3 people (including myself) involved with this project.

The idea is to create a short animated film for the sake of making something personal that is not related to school. There has been no intention to monetize anything and our intent is to make everything original, even the music, as we have musically-oriented friend who is willing to compose for our project.

Interestingly enough, this concept alone has us all speculating on the idea of making this concept into a series. However, my view on this is to simply focus on just finishing this one and make it into a standalone storyline. I believe this choice is a good to play safe, in case of the possibility of any lack of reception.

Regardless, this is something I am most excited for!