Mogra
An animation production I worked on with agency SME in NYC to help promote the re-branding of brownjordan.com. I was responsible for animation, and final audio mix. The storyboards, design, and direction was done by the awesome people at smebranding.com.
More info about my process in a later post.
Avatar the Last Airbender is on of my favorite animated shows, and although the series has been done for a number of years now, they have been producing comics about what happened after the series was over. I have personally been really enjoying these giving us fans a look at what happened to our favorite character as they get older and what helps shapes the world that we see in Legend of Korra.
In the latest comic The Search Part Two we are following most of the gAng with Zuko on his quest to find his mother and at the End of the Book we find a meet a new Spirit the Mother of Faces which I really like the design of.
I wanted to do a simple cut out animation of the character and make a simple gif animation that I could quickly post online. It turned out not quick to do since I expanded my original idea of the project. I was simply going to break it up and place the parts in 3D space in C4d then bring them in to After Effects using the new Cineware plugin and animating them in AE. Creating an animation in only 2D space. But I wanted more control over the Spirit and cineware to work to slow for an efficient workflow.
I ended up doing a full rig for the Spirit in C4D and a more involved camera move that required me to recreate the whole background. I also added some music from audio jungle to add some atmosphere to the animation. I also learned the limits of gif sizes on various sites due my full gif being to large for most site to be posted on so I edited it and made a shorter gif in addition to the long one. Check them out and tell me what you think.
The main reason behind this project was to take a simple vector image that seems 2D and animate it in a simple and interesting way. This image was in a newsletter as a free vector stock graphic from shutterstock.com.
I broke it apart in Illustrator for the various parts trying to keep the original design as much as I could intact while making it easy to animate. I built a simple rig that allowed me to easily control the wheels spinning, their visual spinning appearance, the handle bars, and the movement of the bike. I created a similar rig in C4D for the 3D bike as well. I did however forget to flip the visual appearance on the wheel in the render so the wheels look like they’re spinning backwards(which is how they look in real life).
In addition I used some expressions in AE to link the location of the bike with the bouncing ribbon so that it always stays on top since there is no way that I know of to parent it. I did this using a linear interpolation property in AE and Xpresso and spline point linking in C4D. The rest of it is just straightforward animation.
I did some research on this type of bike and according wiki it’s a women’s roadster bike. I recognized it as a dutch (European) bike for some reason and the name it has in the Netherlands is Omafiets (“grandma’s bike”) which is where I got the text for the title and the name of the project.
More info about why I made this and my process in a later post.
More info about my process and why I made this in a later post.
Personal project using particles to define a word.
I have had my eye on these set of character models over on 3Docean for a while now. So in my list project ideas I had the idea to create a simple story around these characters. Something similar to what would be on a mobile phone game cut scene, “think angry birds cut scene”. It would be playful and light hearted and convey some simple premise. I came up with a little battle versus idea between the two types of characters. I made a quick written outline/story board, then I started a quick 3D animatic of the story.
I soon realized (after procrastinating to do it) that this was going to take more time then I wanted it to so I amended my idea to do a quick smart phone video game intro animation. As an animator I all ways like these sort of scenes before the game I play even if there only 5 seconds or so long. So with my new idea I went into production of designing my game’s logo.
I first sketched a hand full of ideas before trying to create them illustrator creating various version of the my favorite ideas. After I was able to pick out which one I like the most I posted it on hunie.co, the newly revamped design critique site for some feed back. After receiving some good response and ideas, three versions later I had a design that I liked enough to bring it into C4D.
Building it when straight forward as building any standard 3D logo. I keep the subdivisions low on the text shape to fit in with the low-poly style I was going for. After building it and texture it I started buying the models I would need and animating them in my scene. I had a rough idea of the overall animation sequence written down so I as I got each model I started animating it to the end of the sequence before getting the next one. Some of the models came with animation on them but for most of them except one I re-did the animation since most of their movements are just a repeated loops of a simple action. After animating them I did a quick lighting setup using Maxwell render to give it a sunlight feel with a strong shadow overhead.
My last step was to do some composting in after effects and some sounds effects. Originally was going to find a music track for the background, but thinking back on some of the games I play not many of them have music for this part. Usually the music doesn’t hit till the main interface so I went the route of using only sound effects which I got from freesound.org. In the end I like this better especially since I had fun mixing the stereo sound the various creatures and vehicles. I really want to try a 5.1 mix just to see how it works and hear sound all around me.
More info about my process why I made this and my process in a later post.
After following this quick low poly tut on cgtuts I was inspired to do my own little low poly model. The best thing out of this tut for me though was the tips and shortcuts the author give for modeling in C4D. I used some of his tips and when ahead and modeled this bird statue in my house. It looked too plain by itself so I added a quick design behind it as well.
