Ninja animation WIP2

An update on the animation.
I did a few changes and just generally put in a few more hours to polish the poses a bit more.
Check it out here, by clicking the picture:



I gave the lighting a shot as well.
Still a lot to tweak, especially in relation to the characters which are underlit, but I'm trying to keep rendertimes way down which is going great so far. Rendering with Maya Software render at around 1 minute a frame in 1280*720 at production quality (no motion blur, though).

Ninja Animation

It's been a while to say the least.
I finished first year of animation school, and 2d animation is now history - at least for now.
I can't wait to start on 3d!
I think 2d has been a perfekt background and starting ground, and I feel blessed I got a chance to learn animation this way.

I'm still busy with my shortfilm, but after modeling characters for a few weeks I just really need to do some animation, so I started this shot yesterday.
It only a few hours into it, but I think it could be a sweet piece if enough time gets invested into it.


Also first time i try to embed quicktime into a blogpost, so hopefully it works :)

Have a nice day

animation shelf

Hey guys.

A non-animation update... sort of...
I have an animation shelf in maya, that was populated with a bunch of standart maya shelf icons, for opening different animation related editors, and a few neat commands.

There is really NOT much to it, but maybe someone can find it usefull.
The icons looks like this:






Probably not the prettiest icons you'll ever see, but they are better than the standart maya ones.
It's for Playblast (last settings), toggle on/off playback rate display on screen, open graph editor, toggle on/off frame count display on screen and open dope sheet.

You can download the full pack here, plus the icons, and even the psd in 320*320 so you can edit whatever you want and scale for your self.
I trust you know where to put what ;)

Link

Hope you can find some use to it.
Oh, and the base of the Framecounter was found, I believe, on the 11secondclub.com forums awhile ago.
I just modifed it, added toggle on/off, and based it on the playback speed script.

Cheers

Bernard at bar

Another animation created about four days with lectures and such.
This time around I chose Bernard from The Rescuers to animate.
I had a hard time keeping it on model, I guess my 3d preference came through pretty clearly ;)

anyways, the story layout was, that the character is sitting in a bar waiting. That's it!
And it HAD to be five seconds. Nothing more, Nothing less. I added a few frames after it was done, just to hold that last pose a bit, so it ended at 125 frames or so.

I had a great time working on it, and got a chance to do some more subtle animation, which I absolutely love to do!
I had focus on not doing to much pose to pose animation. Hiding the keys is probably the wrong way to put it, but floating smoothly through the keys rather than key-hold-key-hold.

'Nough said, here it is:

Bernard at bar from Christoffer Andersen on Vimeo.

More short film concept

Okay, sorry for the lack of updates.
It's been a while since I posted anything on my short film, Deep, partly because it now has it's own site over at Deepfilm.blogspot.com but even there, it's pretty vague with info and updates.

The lack of updates doesn't mean I've stop working on it, it just means most of the work I do is falls under the pre production category, and those things I'd like to keep for myself and a few selected friends.
To sum up on the production, I've got the character design of the main character pretty much down, but I expect a few changes.
I'm still working on the storyboard/animatic, but it's getting closer and closer for sure.
Then I've done a few colored storyboard panels, to see where I wanted it to go - color wise - and that's what I'd like to show here.

So here you go, four colored story board drawings (carefully selected, not to reveal the story) and a logo :D
Please enjoy, and stay tuned for more updates :)















Cheers

temporary animation reel

So here is the reel as it looks so far.
It's not finished yet, even one shot in there is only blocked in.

The finished reel should be finished around april.

Temporary animation reel from Christoffer Andersen on Vimeo.

Midway test

This is the first test we have had at school.
No teachers to guide us, only our peers.

The rules were that he should lie down across the door, change mood from sad to determined/angry, get up and try to open the door.
The whole thing should last no more or less than 120 frames (five seconds).

It was quite a challenge, first of all to hit exactly 120 frames, but later on the room we were given, was very small and a big challenge to get him in an interesting way from one side to the other, as there wasn't really enough room for a run.

I shot some reference of my self, and based a few important pieces on that (the was he gets up, and the slide in the end).

he are my initial thumbnails:















And here is the final animation, created in one intense week:

midway test from Christoffer Andersen on Vimeo.

Quadroped

A couple of four legged shots I've animated in my sparetime.
I've never touched (studied or animated) four legged creatures before, neither their anatomy nor their movement, so this was a pleasant break from the usual biped stuff.

These are done in my sparetime.
I take only credit for the animation.

The rigs can be found on creativecrash.com

Running dog, final version from Christoffer Andersen on Vimeo.

Scared deer from Christoffer Andersen on Vimeo.

Deep shortfilm look exploration.

A new picture is up from my shortfilm.
It can also be found at it's own blog: www.deepfilm.blogspot.com
This time I'm exploring the look of the film, further.

The background is a mixture of a lot of different stuff, but mainly a water color test.

The storyboard of the film is close to tied down.
More updates to come soon!

Get Up old man!

The next animation assignment I'm giving my self, is an old man getting up from laying down to standing.
I shot some reference, tried to analyze it, find the weight, the force, the motion, the timing, all the small subtle stuff that makes animation come to life.
Find the keys, the breakdowns and so on.
Here is a chart of my Keyframes:

















I have set up my maya scene, so it's ready to animate with!
Hopefully I can start blocking my animation tomorrow. We'll see.

Cheers

Oh! btw!
I've open a blog for my everlasting short film project: "Deep".
Check out some pre-prod. stuff here:
www.deepfilm.blogspot.com

cheers again