a Vampire's View

This is just a quick creation to update my showreel, I intended to animate the vampire turning into a large bat and flying off as well but due to time restraints after a recent essay I decided to clean up with what I had and get an animation made. everything after the line test took me day but I plan to go back and add the vampire's shadow.

LOLTR nearly there!

The parts yet to be completed are the Title, Credits, possibly a short shot of Frodo's reaction and adding the river sound Foley, which I want to try and record myself if I can find a secluded enough river. Also I might see if I can make some music for the introduction or credits, I don't think it really needs music for during the animation.

The Character Designs and Watercolour Parts were made by Kasia Prujszczyk for this project, the characters and events are based on J.R.R. Tolkien's book, 'The Lord of the Rings'.

Life Drawing Again

These are my two favourite drawings from this session. I didn't have much time because once again the sessions clashed with lectures, but I am trying to organise a drawing opportunity at a different time so hopefully I will be able to get a lot more done after this week.

LOL Teh Rings: Arwen's Armature

Here is the current state of the LOLTR spoof animation I've been working on with Kasia, who is the watercolour artist. I have just finished articulating the model for the woman, Arwen. Note their breasts and Arwen's hair and ears. Below is a comic I drew to explain the story I want to animate.

I came up with the idea at one point and thought 'ah, that'd be funny to animate' but I wanted to make it a beautiful animation, so I decided to collaborate with someone who I knew could paint in watercolour, and now I have the opportunity and time to, as an exercise manipulating Adobe Flash.

Click to enlarge

Photoshop Practice

Click to Enlarge

A painting I did in Adobe Photoshop, taking two hours. I was inspired by coursemates' digital work and after the success animating a quadruped I thought I'd give Photoshop a proper try. This was done referencing a photograph of a wolf in the same pose.

Wolf Animation

I started the day thinking "Let's do a nice animation about an animal." I wanted to do a dog but there were so many different kinds and all different shapes, and then thought that a generic wolf would be a lot easier to study.

Click on the Images to enlarge

These are most of my wolf studies, first of their skeleton and articulation, then just drawing images from the internet with consideration of their skeleton in mind as I drew. Even though I couldn't get a video of a wolf jumping the way I wanted, after the studies I was still able to make a nice looking movement test.

This is just a movement test, the intention is just to get the limbs moving in the right way with the right timing, so that I can animate it later at a nice or dramatic angle and more in proportion. My only criticism with the movement in this is that the Wolf doesn't seem to put enough energy into the jump and almost just flies over, but I didn't want to over emphasise the movement or make it look cartoony. I must say though, for not having drawn wolves before and being so afraid of animating quadrupeds, I am very pleased with the outcome so far. 

Life Drawing

I'm treating life drawing classes as part of the developing practice module,
where I am developing my draughtsmanship.

Two drawings from each half of the life drawing session, before the second half,

I heard some quite good advice to draw without using outlines, just shading,

to concentrate on form and volumes. Whereas while animating I want to give the

illusion of volume by using just an outline, if I can master this it will help my

understanding of the outline, and help me draft the forms when roughing animation.

Nick's Man Wakes

Here is the second try at line testing the man waking

up from standing. His left elbow joint is a bit rigid and

I don't know if his head has enough follow through.

Getting Started on Exploring

For Exploring animation I needed an animation to do, make move beautifully

and then clean it up beautifully, I got too scared of wasting time deciding what

to animate so just drew a generic person and made him do what I first thought of.

The position of his right hand is erratic and his shoulders aren't in the right

position for how bent over he is meant to be at the start.

However this animation is a start and it satisfies my intention to practice

character animation. Also it can be touched up and then be used to

practice different clean up styles and media on.

REVELATION! Regarding the manipulation of Armatures in Flash

As I suspected, with just a little more experimentation into the IK Bones in flash, I found I could control the the armature the way I wanted by holding Shift to rotate a segment manually and Control to translate a segment manually. Also in the timeline, that I thought at first was uneditable without cutting and pasting every keyframe, I can select and move sections by holding Control. I still need practice with them but I am excited that it is now possible and that the IK Bones are now to my mind a very viable tool for any flash cut out animation.

Using Inverse Kinematics in Flash

On the 21st of Feb I set out to learn how to animate in a cut out style using flash.

I found that there are two ways without placing each piece in each frame manually,

on is using inverse kinematics and another by using pivots.

The animation below is using Inverse Kinematics. It was a very quick test of
the process which I found to be very quick but difficult to fully control.

Dragon Roar from Nick Thorne on Vimeo.

Dragon Blast from Nick Thorne on Vimeo.

My new blogsite!

Not new as in the other is old, but a new, separate one that my course tutors can follow what I'm up to on. I just wanted a simple template, and it just so happened to be pink. I know having a colour conflicting with my main blog site isn't really that much of a good idea, but I think I want to keep it pink.