Making Flyers!

I started making flyers for the Introduction for Astronomy class! This is my first time doing a project that is so heavily design focused so it’s a bit daunting but I’m excited to tackle it.

Here were my first designs just off the bat.

They’re a solid first attempt but I have a lot to improve upon.

 

New Course Graphics

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.

 

Final Animation Updates!

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.

Rigging

First, I did the basic After Effects rigging of just parenting all the limbs together and using rotation to make the figure move.

Rig Test

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.

Puppet Animation

I was recommended to look at this Linkedin Learning course specifically for After Effects animation.

Very helpful tutorials

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.

Puppet Animation Test

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

Easier Rigging

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

Final Animation

I had a lot of fun with this project and learning about different After Effects methods I can use in the future!

 

 

Animation Training

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.

 

New Trainings!

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!