Polar Bear Walk and Run Cycle

To continue practicing some animation basics, I decided to follow some walk and run cycle tutorials using this cartoony bear character!* I started off with the walk cycle, then created the run cycle on an override animation layer. The 'turn and reaction' was on an additive animation layer:

Through this animation exercise I feel that I have become much more familiar with the graph editor, learning how to use the infinity curves, creating nice curves but also learning where best to use linear curves, especially when creating walk cycles:

*Rigged character model created by Gary Welsh.

WIP 'Mocktails' Animation

This is my current WIP for a new piece of lip sync animation. The clip is the same one being used for the March 11 Second Club. I really liked it (probably because I am very familiar with the source of the audio clip!) and hadn't tried using the Kayla rig yet which is a Josh Sobel rig - which I think fitted well with the audio.
I modelled a cocktail glass with a straw and umbrellas to make it look like a very fancy over-the-top drink; as there needed to be reason for the young girl to doubt whether this drink was alcoholic.
I then filmed some reference footage and have starting animating and getting familiar with the rig.

Original thumbnail sketches

Stills from reference footage

Final Jurassic Jess playblasts for deadline

As I am about to start semester 2 of 3rd year tomorrow, I thought I'd better update this blog.

Here is a playblast of shot 4 from Jurassic Jess that I animated. Jess has just discovered a tooth on the ground in an old museum storage room, then looked up to find a giant T.rex skeleton! She grrr's at it then suddenly it comes to life!

The next shot that I animated was Shot 6 where the T.rex moves down to sniff Jess, and ends up sneezing!

Here's our final film that we submitted for our deadline. This is the playblasted version and we plan to do a proper rendered out version with some of the animation fixed. I am very proud of what my team has achieved in a short time scale with limited support. This is the first 3d film I have ever been involved with making and directing - I hope that you like it :)

This is definately not the end of Jurassic Jess! It's still an ongoing project - here is the link to the blog specifically for Jurassic Jess: http://jurassic-jess.blogspot.com/