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