Tag: after effects

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Daily 365 Downloadable

Nickelodeon Hand Clapper

 

For some reason the other day I felt like I need to model something. So I went to my basement and digded through 3 or 4 bins of old toys and I wound up with three; Leonardo Ninja Turtle with spinning arm action, Old original mini transformer, and Nickelodeon Hand Clapper from McDonald’s I think. I ruled out the Ninja turtle from the beginning, it was just to play with, and went with the Hand Clapper.

It took me about me a while to get the base of  it done. I tired to model this the more correct way rather then my normal quick way of cutting everything using booles. Adding some details and getting the edges right took another hour or so. I was going to keep adding more detail to make it as close to the toy as I could be then I got the Idea for some Xpresso and finished quickly and jumped into that. That might have been the reason I didn’t model the hands ( model from turbosquid ).

The Xpresso in this project is not too complicated, I liked all the moving parts (trigger, applause sign & hands) together so they move in tandem with each other like the toy does.  I also have an automatic switch that allows the hand to clap on their own without any keyframes. Originally I had this setup planning to use if statements to switch it and increment the value, then I found this forum post which showed an easier way. All you have to do is choose the speed and range you want it to clap and hit play. You can also adjust the curve to create some unique claps.  There are switches for high quality as well.

That’s pretty much it. You can download the model with the Xpresso setup and use it anyway your like. I’m rendering out an animation with it and will post it when it is finished.

Nickelodeon Hand Clapper

 

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General

Lower Third Project

This past week or so I have worked on a project file that I plan to put up on videohive to sell. It’s garbage truck lower third to be used in any video. You can see a early work in progress I did on my 365. I also made a standalone render of just the truck.

I have most of the functionality of the third setup and ready to got.  I have about 16 total that allow you to control everything without needing to go look for each item in the comps. You can even change the color of the rear compactor.  Now I just need to render the final truck and put all together and make the files so that I can submit it.

 

 

Categories
General

New Blog + AE Flame

As you might have noticed I have changed the theme for this blog and my portfolio website.  Both of them have the same theme  SimpleFolio by SmashingMagazine and Slimmity.

As you can probably tell from the screen shot I did quite a bit of modifications of the overall theme. I designed the base of the layout in Photoshop then re-did the design to my liking. I think my favorite part is the texture for the background. I really liked the one in my old theme so I found one and added it to the background for this one.  I’m sure it slows down my site a bit since it’s a somewhat big image but my site is a bunch of images and videos any way.

I also did some modification of the actual html pages of the site as well. The original theme displays the long image on the home page and in the portfolio items as well. Since my portfolio items already have a big image to display the video or design I thought this was redundant. I did some other minor ones while figuring out the theme but I wound up not need to use most of them.

As for the future I’m not sure I like the home image slider. I may change it up with another slider where I have more control. I have looked at slide deck since I like how it works and the ability to play video with in it although I’ll have to see how it looks in my actual layout. The only other thing that bugs me is using this layout on this site for my blog. Originally I wasn’t going to use it here but it made sense to have both of them connected i thought I should have them look similar.  I may change this layout up a bit so it’s not exactly the same.

In other news I made a quick little animation using AE Flame an old plugin recently made for cs4/5 of after effects. It is a beta so it is a bit buggy but after a bit of playing around I figured out what not to hit for it to crash. You can check out what I made below. You could make some really cool fractals with this.  There also is tut for this which I completely missed in the ae script page. Now the question is how to use this in a project? Backgrounds, lowerthirds,  title sequences, hmm.

 

YouTube Preview Image

 

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Daily 365

I Kill Giants

 

This is my final animation for the I Kill Giants spot for a fictional motion comic. In my previous post I talked about my reasoning behind the project so for this one I thought I would just pick a few scenes from the animation and talk about them and the overall animation.

Overall the animation process went well, I worked in a bit pretty much every night in some fashion. You can see my progress for each day on my 365 project, it pretty much took over for the past week or so. The animation in the beginning up until the action scenes stayed pretty much the same from my original storyboard. I didn’t have any big issues working on those scenes. I did have to take out the artifacts, moiré patterns, which came when I scanned some of the images. It wasn’t big issue on these images but on later ones is was very noticeable.

The I Kill Giants scene that begin the action scenes stayed true to my storyboard/animatic. I added some sfx for the word bubble that might seem somewhat out of place but they match up with the ones that I have at the end. The giant in a row gave me a bit of trouble, the way I envisioned it didn’t translate as well in after effects. So instead of showing each giants full body I opted to just show their heads/upper body. I put a sky from another part of the comic as the back ground so it wasn’t just plain white. Having the motion blur on I think makes it look pretty cool although you can’t really see any detail about any of the giants.

The scene after this with cool perspective looking up at the monster is probably on of my favorite scenes. It was pretty much setup for the way I wanted to animate it and of course it had to roar after you zoom in. The sfx is actually from boss from duke nukem video game. [Random side note: Duke Nukem Forever, the infamous vaporware game for the last decade or so is actually coming.  Check out the trailer for some typical duke nukem vulgar awesome action.]

The next scene that gave me some issues was when the hammer comes out of the purse. This 3 part sequence I felt might be kind of quick, but then again I did want this whole part to be quick. The glow out of the purse was another issue with the mask flickering but with the blur it seems to cover it up. I hope I’m not trying to depend on that too much.

The last part I want to talk about is the stillish action pose part where Barbra is holding the hammer. My idea for it was to make it look really cool and somewhat 3D like even though it’s just a 2D plane. Originally I thought of doing some camera projection but I decided to just stay in after effects. I went with have a camera pan around the image plane and had the main part of the hammer on a higher z depth. The made is seemed like it had some dept to it but move way too much. So I just did some key framing to reduce the movement a bit. I think the background gave me the biggest issue as far as what to use. I wound up using a background from another part that was the sky storm.

So above is what I ended up with this was a cool project to work on and I figured out and learned a bunch as always.

 

 

Sound effects from:

www.freesound.org

www.partnersinrhyme.com

Background Music from freeplaymusic.com

 

 

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Daily 365

Reel 2010/2011

I felt that I need to update my reel with some of the work that I’ve done recently so I decided to crank out a reel so that I can continually have something to work towards updating this year. Granted most of my work is geared toward that end but having a new one for this year makes it seem more significant.

So it’s time for a personal reel crit…were to start.

Let’s start with the beginning, the opening slate so to speak which is actually a third of my whole demo reel. I sketched a few idea’s based around my new logo that I developed and I decided on what I dubbed the “Platonic journey”.  I wanted to have a platonic travel through my logo and then transition in to my reel clips. Overall I thinks its good, the style is somewhat backwards in terms of mograp with the matte colors and ambient occlusion but I wanted to try something different which for me is no shiny stuff. I also ran into a bunch of technical issues but those problems will be saved for another post.

The reel it’s self I feel is decent for where I’m at right now. My level of work needs to go up but it’s better than my previous one. I attempted to keep the pattern of 3D to 2D work until the end. My strongest pieces I feel is the beginning one, although I have gotten a crit about the shadows, and the grooveshark, although thinking about it now it seems very similar to the standard circle logos with a swirl thing around them. Although I did it from scratch (I don’t even have particular, I wish I did) and the swirl thing I added at the end it seems kind of typical, so maybe it’s not so strong.

The weakest I would say might be the anime mx or the woot one at the end. I though of cutting either one per the GSG instant demo critique but it wasn’t the weakest thing I had laid in the timeline. When I create some more stuff those will probably be the first to go.

The ending I went for the simple text on black. I thought of bringing back the G2B from the beginning but it seemed like a bit much. I opted instead for the simple clean name and year at the end with my logo.

So now its time to post it and get some feedback from people about what they think needs to be changed.

 

Random side note: my spell checker is trying to make me type British with colour instead of color. I always though colour was just a cool way some people spelled color, learn something new all the time.

 

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Daily 365

I Kill Giants Spot Animatic/Story Board

I read the comic(graphic novel) by Joe Kelly + JM Ken Niimura called I Kill Giants. I got it when I went to comic-con last year and I got it signed by Joe Kelly. The story is very good and the art is cool black and white stylized comic style for the drawings.  It sort of reminds me tekkonkinkreet as far as animation goes.

My goal is to create a 15 second spot for a fictional motion comic. I picked 15 seconds because I thought it would be a reasonable amount of time to give a little peek into this comics world. My inspiration for this the unofficial titles of the walking dead tv show. I really like the 2.5d effect in this animation and how it all flows together.

I began by re-reading the comic and picking out cool parts. There where few key scenes that you will see in the PDF that I thought where epic and had to be in it. After that I started breaking it apart so I could have all the parts I needed. I started out trying to make it fairly good then I thought this is just for my own personal storyboard so it can be messy and quick so I can just get to the storyboarding.

I made an out line of what I wanted to show  Home–> School –> Giant Fighting. As I progressed with the boards I realized I wouldn’t have enough time so it got scaled down to School –> Giant Fighting.  My goal was to go from calm to chaos.

You can check out my pdf storyboard if you want to see my notes. It may have some(a lot) of spelling error since I just type my thoughts quickly and and theres no spell check in the program I used. I still need to tweak some parts like flash after the hit so it’s more noticeable. I also seem to need to fix the scene numbers.

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Daily 365

James White Rocker Head

James White Rocker Head from G2BProductions on Vimeo.

This is a quick little animation I put together of James Whites’s(signalnoise) design with his Character Head  for his nomination for Faces Magazine in Halifax for their Faces Choice Awards 2011. Vote for him on the voting page.

Originally I wanted animate his character head that he has up before his broadcast. I had the idea to have it do sort of the typical talking head thing, probably sync it to him saying “Keep the metal alive”. Then I saw this one and I just had to animate.

I recreated the design in Photoshop and Illustrator. Then I animated it in After Effects. I made sort of pseudo rig that allows me to flip the eyes down easily and open the mouth. The tongue I animated with the puppet tool. I designed the tongue by looking at reference of Gene Simmons tongue…I also looked at some Youtube videos for the tongue animation…(I would not really recommend doing this, I should have used a safer place).

So in the end I got this James rocker head poster animation that rocks out to the music as the text comes in with a little tongue action at the end.

I got the music from http://dig.ccmixter.org/ – ruin roads-Basement 8.

 

Categories
Animation News Daily 365

Cool Golf Mini Prev + Legend of Korra

So apparently I made  the mistake of rendering my cool golf animation at my preview render instead of my full render so I have a mini preview for now until I render the full thing.

Any avatar fan will probably have good guess about what this is. It’s a image from the upcoming series Legend of Korra the follow-up of Avatar the Last Airbender. Other than one other image of Korra’s back this is the first time any one has seen her up close that I know of.  It’s a pretty epic picture showing her already using fire with her natural element of water.

For Avatar fans this is highly anticipated show which makes this new image sweet yet sour since it seems now that the show won’t air until 2012 instead of late 2011, November.  So fans will have to wait a little longer for this to come out. One can only hope that I will be as good as first series with anticipation so high who know what might happen if it’s not as good or better than Avatar The Last Airbender.

 

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Daily 365 Downloadable

Minion Character Rigs

I thought it would be cool if I cleaned up my my rig for the minion character and posted it so people can play with and maybe make their own cool characters. It’s noting to pretty inside so this is one of those as is type of files.

The rig has the ability to control the eye(iris) position, the eye lids for the top and bottom independently (lazy eye), both lids at once for a squinty look, and a full close. The mouth has 4 poses including smile, which I fixed now so that each range corresponds to a pose (ie: 0-.99, 1 to 1.99, etc…). Before I just had 0,1,2,3.

The arms are fully IK and so is the feet but it only allows for small movement since he has now legs… There is an also controllers for the middle top of the head and the bottom by the legs to add some extra movement.

It’s self contained in a zip file.

My other quick submission is my style frame for the cool golfers logo animation. I finished all of the animation correctly now which looks pretty good. I was planning on rendering it to today but I ran out of time.

My goal with the final design is to try and make it seem on top of the grass or some what coming out of it without a light really beaming down on it.

I still need to work on the lightning of the logo and I notice some errors in the text.

The biggest error that I missed though is that in all of my previous submissions I spelled golfer golgers. It’s funny how you can miss things like that. I wish cinema had a spell check for times like this. I’m sure someone made a script for this.

 

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Daily 365

Tuts+ Minion App Intro Final


 This is the my final tuts+ minion app intro animation. I submitted it aetuts+ contest since I was inspired by their Despicable Me tutorial. I made it seem more like an app by adding a finger that clicks on of the minion and he starts dancing. Not sure how this would work in the real app though….

The animation for this final part went pretty smoothly. I was able to rig the second character fairly measly know what to do from rigging the first one. I also notice some flaws I missed before such as the teeth actually taking the color shift of the character and not staying white. Not a big issue but its noticeable on the red minion.

The other flaw I noticed is the shadow on vector minion is a little off. I have expression setup on the cg one to follow just the x but it didn’t apply correctly to the other so I just animated the shadow.

I really like how vimeo keeps the aspect ration of the video regardless of its size unlike YouTube. I’ve seen it done on other videos but not to this extreme on the vertical axis.

Now the only thing left is for figure out how to get this in the app and the rest of the app working. If only the app inventor would stop disconnecting after 5 mins.

 

Sound Effects from flashkit.com

BG music from music-for-video.com