This week, I got a new assignment for making custom course graphics for the 301 Introduction to Astronomy class. Theres a lot of variety I was given with this regarding pictures and formatting so I got to make a lot of iterations.
Here are my banner iterations.
IPad and PPT layouts.
And I got to make designs for a digital wall monitor.
I’m still working on getting the graphics finalized but with the images I was given, I have a lot of creative freedom.
The walk cycle rig is complete! I may go over and make more edits to it as I learn more on after effects but as of now, I’m really happy with the result!
There was a lot of trial and error with this project as I had to figure out what methods were not only best for the animation, but also more efficient.
First, I did the basic After Effects rigging of just parenting all the limbs together and using rotation to make the figure move.
While this workflow worked, there were efficiency problems regarding having to move the other limbs. My first problem was having to be more particular about leg placement as the foot kept passing through the ground. My second problem regarded having to animate all the limbs the same. It became a matter of me having to copy over values from every keyframe to make the walk cycle look clean. Overall, this workflow was fine, but became rather tedious.
I was recommended to look at this Linkedin Learning course specifically for After Effects animation.
There’s a tutorial that talks about using the puppet tool to just move limbs in place rather than having to place, limbs only using rotation. I was excited to use this method as it looked really easy, but it wasn’t a method that worked for my design unfortunately.
The movement looked unnatural and would bend at joints. The puppet tools seems more suited to rubber hose style characters so I’d have to go back and find a way to make my original workflow better
One thing my supervisor brought up that could help my animation significantly was to just animate one leg and arms at a time and just duplicate the animation, offset it, and place it behind the body to replicate multiple limbs. This seemed a lot simpler. While there was a bit of a workaround to figure out offset the limbs to match up the animation, it turned out to be the most effective and still obtained a good quality in the animation
I had a lot of fun with this project and learning about different After Effects methods I can use in the future!
This week has been dedicated to my new animation training of creating a rigged walk cycle. I completed my character design and learn a ton ab Illustrator. It’s a very intimidating program at first but like all software, it gets easier to figure out. Here’s my final design.
I made all the limbs different groups and was able to organize the character pretty well. Next up is rigging in After Effects!
This was actually pretty hard to find a tutorial on surprisingly. A lot of tutorials on after effects rigging rely on an After Effects extension called DUIK. Apparently it’s one of the best extensions for After Effects, but I don’t need any more fancy tools so I stuck with vanilla After Effects (DUIK also costs money and I don’t think that’s the best move).
I found a tutorial on After Effects layer parenting and was able to attach all the limbs to the appropriate joints.
Here’s my progress on the walk cycle.
https://utexas.box.com/s/whr4jxsn20pprek068pwg98fh5wg45sq
It’s very robotic and kind of unsettling to look at, but I plan to just get the key poses done and then to add more aniation principles later.
I’ve been having a lot of fun with this project! I’m learning new programs, I’m designing a character, and I’m practicing something I really love! I’m excited to see the final look.
I completed the history of design training! This one was a lot of fun since I feel like emulating a style you like makes you appreciate it more.
I chose to do 2 of these since I wanted to do the Dada era art but that was more photoshop focused and I wanted to get more practice in Illustrator so I did the New Typography style too. Here’s how they turned out.
I got a new animation training assignment which I’m really excited about! I don’t have a lot of experience in using rigged animation and this training will really help me understand it better.
I need to design a character in Illustrator that I can then rig and animate a walk cycle for in After Effects. I don’t have great knowledge in rigged animation in After Effects and I basically know nothing about Illustrator, so I really wanna see what I can do here!
I started by practicing basic illustration in Illustrator. I used this youtube video to do a follow-along practice and tried to recreate the character design in the video. Here’s how it looked (I got impatient and didn’t want to do the body).
Then I moved onto following this video to learn how to sketch out my own character in illustrator. Here’s how it’s looking so far.
I’m trying to be very conscious that this design will be able to be rigged in the future so I’ll try to hold off on making the design heavily detailed. I look forward to how this will turn out!
I’m pretty much on the final steps of completing the UTFC 9.3 module. I uploaded all the approved images to box, updated them in the provided powerpoint, and now it’s off to be reviewed.
While it wasn’t a project that requires any artistic outlook or creativity, it was a very simple and somewhat relaxing project to work on. I’m also glad that now that I have experience with the image finding portion of it, I can be helpful with more tasks involved with it in the future.
While I didn’t complete this training this week, I learned more about where design elements come from and trends in design through history. For the training, we have to emulate our favorite design trend in history. I’m doing 2 as I like the Dada collages a lot but need more practice in Illustrator.
I’ll be able to show off those projects next week!
This week, I was assigned to make some course graphics for the Data Science for Health and Discovery class. It’s pretty simple stuff but it still had to go through some iterations. I got there in the end!
Iterations:
Final banners:
Finding images for the UTFC textbook is actually going a lot smoother now! I think once I figured out how to communicate with Yasmina and not stress about finding pictures, it’s been a much better process. I’m currently still in the process of finding approved images, but sooner than later I’ll be able to work on the slides.
This training was a lot of tedious fun! It was solely tedious because it took me I’d say an hour total just to figure out masking properly and I had to put it on hold for a bit to work on other assignments.
I created an eye logo in Illustrator which was a good amount of trial and error. These were the main images I needed. Pretty simple stuff for illustrator.
I made it an eye logo because I like animating eyes a lot.
Next was exporting it into After Effects. I was not prepared for this.
So After Effects uses vectors differently. I’m not sure how it works, but the amount of paths the design had in illustrator changed in After Effects. I also had to keep in mind that while After Effects kept the same amount of layers in the design, it made every component editable so I had to be REALLY careful that I was editing the right thing.
To animate it blinking, I had to manually animated the vector paths. This wasn’t difficult, but I had to keep in mind that the animation wouldn’t look as clean as I wanted it too. That’s why the closed eye part looks very choppy/raggedy.
Masking took a while to figure out mainly because I wasn’t entirely sure where I wanted it to be. I needed one to cover up the pupil when the eye closes, so I had to think about what layer would work best for the mask.
Here’s the final animation! I’m pretty happy with how it looks as this is my first time doing logo animation.