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!

New Course Graphics!

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:

UTFC

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.

Logo Animation Training!

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.

Final Animation

More Animation Training and UTFC

Animation Training

More animation training! This week was motion design focused which I mainly had fun with because it made me use more after effects features and puppet animati0n.

The first assignment was to fix a “broken” file which was mainly just using masking and reordering the assets. I think the biggest challenge was waiting for it to render since it’s over a minute long. It’s also a rather slow paced video, but nonetheless, I had fun figuring out how to fix it!

Broken File Link

Next up was animating a banner and animating Illustrator assets! This was actually really interesting as I used the puppet pin tool to essentially create limbs and mesh for the banner. I think one of the main things I learned is that it’s really easy to lose track of the proportions of an asset when using the puppet tool so I had to be very cautious the animation didn’t look too unnatural.

Animated Banner Link

I had a lot of fun with this one since I got to work with premade assets with an already established style. I’m used to just working with my own art so I look forward to projects like this.

UTFC

I’ve actually heard about the UTFC assignment before and that’s it’s mainly finding photos for the textbook. It’s a rather straightforward and meditative assignment. Some of the words can be really similar so working around that or figuring out the main thing that differentiates the words. However, I look forward to the feedback I can get so I can see what I can look for in the future.

Animation Training

I figured out how to make titles!

Anyway this was an exciting week as I got to practice my favorite medium, animation! I had a lot of fun with these training, but there were a few bumps.

I’ve never animated in photoshop before and I don’t think I’m used to it yet. I ran into some problems because there were steps I didn’t keep in mind completely. But all worth it cause I got to make an animated GIF!

It’s so satisfying to watch.

Next, I completed the online course graphics which was also really fun as I got to use After Effects!

That program is very intense and overwhelming but I’m surprised to say I’m getting used to it. The training was to make an animated intro for a class of our choice so I chose the RTF class, Comics and Cartoons. Here’s how it turned out.

Link

Some of the assets I had to make in procreate which wasn’t a problem at all. Some effects I used weren’t very straightforward and looking up tutorials wouldn’t get me anywhere so there was more experimenting with this project than I thought.

I’m currently working on the motion design animation training. I’ll upload those to my blog next week!