Mission Status... Failure

Some people say that you only fail if you refuse to get back up. From falling or whatever. In this case, I'm failing as an animator because I've decided that it's time to pursue a more lucrative job position. Contrary to what I believed and what some people still seem to be insisting, there just aren't that many animation jobs available. Granted, I spent much of my time in 3D graphic areas outside of animation, so I'm not quite as specialized as some of the animators I'm competing with. But I'm really not seeing many job openings weekly, and I just can't compete with the international community of people who have gone to school for animation or have been practicing it much longer than I have.


So starting in January, I will be taking classes in Web Development and Design. I've already had several classes regarding the design elements of web pages, but there's some new stuff on the programming side that I need to learn. When I started the art program at UW Madison, I was expecting the market to be completely saturated with web designers by the time I graduated. That's definitely not that case. A friend of mine has so much work as a freelancer, he's nearly doubled his hourly rate in less than a year.

But most importantly, I think I could enjoy life as a web developer. The thing I love about art is creation. From the first painting I did in the very first art class I took, I was so happy to have something I completed that I could step back and be proud of. I'm sure I could get this same feeling from designing web sites in an artistic way.

And just because my situation dictates that I put the whole animation plan on hold for now, doesn't mean I can never go back. I'll work hard as a web developer, and if I have the chance I'll return to animation with the funding and resources to work even harder as an animator. In fact, I was just intending to use animation as a stepping stone. The part of animation that I really enjoyed was the storyboarding, concepting and design. But I never really thought my drawing skill would be good enough for that. Now I can keep working on drawing in my free time and maybe return to the entertainment industry as a level designer or storyboard artist.

Though I do consider this attempt at becoming a professional animator a failure, I've lost the battle but I can still win the war. And this loss will motivate me to work even harder.

Environment Art

I did some work on level designing after the Dominance War finished. I got a couple levels working and I'm designing a 3rd to be more unique and original. Designing game levels is really fun. Creating something more interactive than a typical piece of art or even an animation is really rewarding. It's hard to decide which one I like more, character animating or level designing. I'll keep working on both for a little while.

I'm still working on the cloth simulations. Trying some new techniques today that hopefully will help. I may invest in a $50 book online that seems to be a more advanced explanation of nCloth. It's hard to find something that really goes through and describes the attributes and features in detail. Every now and then I'll be stuck on something until an overlooked attribute catches my eye and I do some experimenting with it. Seems like there's always something I missed.

Dominance War V - Work Completed

The Dominance War Challenge is finally over. Here's the video:


It turned out pretty well, and I got it in just an hour before the deadline. However, the whole competition website got screwed up, and voting didn't actually begin until 3 days after I posted. So I could have worked on it for an extra 3 days. Lame. I was really stressing out about getting the render finished in time. And actually, the lighting didn't turn out quite how I wanted it to... Oh well. At least I can put it on my resume as an 'Extra Activity'.

The cloth simulating is going well, I'm working on a cape for the character that I made a robe for.


Capes are pretty hard, since they're flapping around so much and not tied down. I think I've got some good ideas on how to put it together though, hopefully this weekend I'll be able to send it along.

I was going to participate in the 11 Second Club competition this month, because I really like the audio clip. But the Dominance War competition was extended a week, so there wont be time. Here's a storyboard for the animation I would have done.


So now I'm working on a new character that I can rig up and animate later. Then I'll try some composting live action footage with 3D. I think that kind of thing is really marketable. I might even try to set up that MoCap system that uses the PS3 eye.

Bleh

I'm in kind of a rut. I signed up for Digital Tutors, a website with a bunch of tutorial videos. It wasn't exactly the best time to do that, but I thought it would help my cloth simulation... It didn't. Then I found another tutorial about the trax editor, which I thought would help my animation. It didn't. So I basically just spent $45 for a month of tutorials that I shouldn't be wasting my time on, because I have 3 other projects I'm working on. Here's some status updates:

Aiko's Bopeep - Kind of on hold because it's the least crucial of the 3 projects. I need to do a lot of work on the animation to make it look more natural. It's 960 frames, and I'm having a hard time breaking it down into manageable chunks.

Cerebus Cloth Simulation - I was enlisted by a guy in California to do cloth simulation for a team animation. I was really excited at the opportunity to work on a team, but I'm not sure I'll be able to get the job done. It's simulating the cloth on a jacket, which is really hard to do cleanly. The animation is obviously not set up to properly work with the jacket, and even with some tweeks I still run into problems.

Dominance War V - I just deleted my own thread, which is embarrassing. I'm pretty sure the moderator will be able to bring it back, but I feel like an idiot. Plus new animation threads are popping up all the time, making my chances of winning slimmer and slimmer. As I mentioned before, the Trax Editor tutorial I went through didn't help at all, so that will slow down my progress, once I even get to that step.

The stock market is completely confusing me, my parent's puppy is turning into a spoiled brat, and I'm back up to the same weight I was at Christmas. And it's snowing. Not a good week for me.

The Big Question

Do I press on with this animation using the techniques I started with? Or do I go back and try some new techniques that might turn out better? It's hard to say at this point if I'll even be able to finish it using the techniques I started with. But I don't know that these new techniques are going to solve all those problems. I guess I should sleep on it. But I'm not sure if I'll be able to sleep well, since I took a nap at 9pm :\

Aimless

March wasn't as productive as it could have been. I ended up ahead of schedule, and just kind of messed around rather than taking full advantage. . I didn't spend as much time on animation as a should have, instead I dabbled in some MEL scripting, rigging, and this other program called DAZ Studio. DAZ Studio is a really odd program... I can't really tell what it's meant for. There's a bunch of content available for free, so I just ripped as much geometry to OBJs as I could and uninstalled it. It was taking up a lot of space in some temporary folder I couldn't find on my hard drive.

Now I 'm kind of dabbling in cloth and muscle simulations. I have the Aiko 4 character from DAZ all rigged up in Maya, so I'm going to try animating some of the dance sequences I've drawn out. It should be fun, but I'm not sure how to set up my deadlines for April. Maybe I'll have to see how much work I can get done in the first week and them make some approximations.

I did get a lot of drawing down in March, which I think is really good for me. Hopefully I'll be doing a lot in April as well.

Reformatting my workspace

Well, I did a pretty good job on my tutorials in February. I was able to get through everything early, and played a little Gran Turismo 3 today and yesterday. I lost the disc a while ago, but still had the case and instruction manual. Then I found the disc and gamestop for $2 and picked it up. It'll be a while before I can bring myself to drop $50 on the newest GT5.

Next month I have a hodgepodge of tutorial set up, going through bits of the 3D process I'm not as familiar with. It should help me produce some finished products that I can put in my reel.

There are some pieces in my reel that I'm proud of, but nothing is really finished. I haven't done a good job of showing that I understand the elements of composition or principles of animation. So I need to just plug away at some short, 10 to 15 second pieces that really show I know what I'm talking about. I've really improved my technical abilities this month, so I should be able to produce some fine work in no time.

I moved my workspace into the bedroom, where I have more space and better lighting. Now I can utalize the full width of the table my computer is on, giving me plenty of room to draw and set back my 30" monitor to a comfortable distance. March will be a good month.

Living between the keyframes

I've having a lot of fun studying animation this month. It's a lot less stressful than trying to keep up with the competition, and I feel like I'm learning so much. I've been missing a lot, in my attempt to just jump in and learn from experience. I'm sure taking a break to build up my fundamental skills will really improve my work.

I've worked out a new timeline, which involves having a new demo reel and looking for a job at the end of the summer. In the meantime, I'll keep busy with short clips to make me reel appealing.

January Finished

After a month of false starts, glitches, errors, and re-rigging, my animation is finally done and submitted. It's not perfect, but it's better than before and should make it into the top 100 in the animation challenge.

This month I might take a little break from animating for the competition. I have a lot of of animation tutorials to go through, so hopefully I can improve my abilities and get into the top 10 in March or April.

Goal

This guy makes some great 3d models:
http://stroggtank.cgsociety.org/gallery/

I hope to some day be able to model, rig and most importantly animate some characters like that.

I finished modeling and rigging the bodies of my characters for this month's animation competition. I wish I had some better instruction on modeling cloth for animation. I might have some tutorials buried somewhere on my second hard drive, but I'm not sure which would have exactly what I'm looking for. Most tutorials deal with simple characters and no accessories.

Animation Club

I haven't had much luck in the 11 Second Club competitions. I ended up pretty much at the bottom, behind a bunch of other animations that weren't even finished. Well... Mine wasn't really finished either, but still. I'm developing some theories about how to get a better score, but in the end I really just need to submit a fully finished and polished animation.

There were a lot of problems in December that prevented me from doing my best on that entry. First of all, I didn't like the dialog. As soon as I heard it, I knew it would be hard to animate. Nothing really came to me, but I was able to come up with an idea that wasn't too bad. Fortunately for my Dominance War V submission, the deadline was extended to December 15th. This was not beneficial to my 11 Second Club work. Then I got a PS3 for Christmas. And will all of my extended family hanging around playing that from the 24th to the 31st, I didn't really get much work done to finish up.

I also had problems with my rig. I went through the Character Rigging for Production tutorial from Digital Tutors to complete it, which covered a lot of techniques I wasn't fully comfortable with. I thought I got a good understanding of what I was doing, but I didn't always understand why I was doing it. As a result of some error along the way, the female's finger ended up not responding to my keys toward the end. And the blend shapes didn't deform properly when I tried to use them with the characters in different positions, so I had to try and hide my lip syncing as much as possible, because it didn't look good. The arm IK(inverse kinematics) didn't work either, so I had to do it all with FK(forward kinematics). Which meant the hand was wiggling around all the time.

To sum up, my problems were:
-Not giving my full attention until Dec 15th
-Not giving my full attention after Dec 24th
-Bad blend shapes
-Bad arm IK
-Glitches in the fingers

With all those excuses out of the way, I shouldn't have any excuse for failure this month. Hopefully I'll be able to break into the top 50. It's all part of the process...

Here's a video of my entry, if your interested:

December Competition Entry from Shaun Martin on Vimeo.