I have recently been taking more time to try and get more familiar, and also get faster, at making different animations in Adobe After Effects.

I started with some basic tests mainly focusing on transitions that could be applied to pre-comps to keep things visually interesting from one screen to the next. After this I started looking at some tutorial videos where I saw one guiding on how to put together a 2D character that gives a 3D feel.

I then gave this a go myself. I was reasonably happy with the result. I put this together using a plugin called Duik Bassel, which lets me determine the rotation of the head using a custom x and y axis slider. I wasn't, however, very happy with how the face on this rig looked, with the rotation angles not quite matching what my brain said looked right. Looking further into this I then decided that the best method for this might be with the utilisation of the actual 3D layer toggles in After Effects, not for the whole character, but just for the face itself.

Using this approach I put together a very quick character and tried it out. I am very happy with how the effect looks. The face is labelled 3D, which means although it is still a 2d image I was able to move it further towards the camera than the other layers, and have it rotating on the x and y axis as the head turns. However, the head itself is a completely stationary 2D layer with a 'set matte' effect on it to mask the other layers to it. Similarly the hair layers making up the front and back of the hair are 2D layers, masked to the head layer, that simply move left and right. and up and down, depending on the angle of the head slider. While putting this together I also tested and confirmed the ability to set up the eyes on a different slider than the head, while still being affected by it, allowing me change where he looks independently. 

The culmination of these tests is that I was now able to take what I learned and apply it to an earlier character rig I put together for Break The Mould. I now have two fully rigged characters with IK rigging on the limbs, a slider to move the hair and shirt for the Aaliyah model, independent sliders for the eyes and eyebrows, flip toggles for the noses, two mouth options for open and closed and now finally the ability to angle the heads in all directions and angle the bodies slightly left and right to help with any animations where they need to be facing to the side. I am very pleased with them, and while I will likely continue to build on them, or even rebuild them from the ground up if I feel I have learned enough that they would benefit from that, I think I can get some really fun use out of these new upgrades and will now be putting together a little library of chroma keyable animations for use in Break The Mould projects by other volunteers.

I may yet add more polish to the video, for example a thanks for watching screen or a reminder to subscribe, but the animation is now fully rendered and I am pretty pleased with the final result. For future projects I'll continue to learn more about modelling and texturing, especially for a character, as I feel that is the weakest aspect, however I am still overall happy with the look and I think keeping the texturing consistent with the scene objects helps.

I have made some first tests with putting all of the assets together in a scene and also tried to learn a little about lighting. I think the overall look of it is coming along nicely and should be usable for the animations I hope to make with it.

This is my first ever attempt at applying and smoothing out motion capture data. It's far from perfect, but I'm fairly happy with the result and it is at least an excellent starting point for getting better and faster at the process. I used motion capture data generated from the website Deepmotion and transferred the rotation values from the imported data to my custom character rig with the help of a Blender plugin called 'Simple Retarget Tool'. This required a lot of trouble shooting, with the main issues seeming to stem from the motion capture expecting different axes to be considered up and forwards, however I am confident I now know the correct sequence for applying this data without running into these errors again.

I have been creating a collection of assets for a planned Youtube channel for Break The Mould. So far I have been making some to-scale furniture for a classroom setting, while also creating the character for these animations from scratch.

Below are a couple of test renders of the character and the face, which I have put together using Blenders UV warp modifier and the pose library, allowing me to easily and quickly select specific mouth and eye shapes using 2d textures.

I have been playing around with Adobe After Effects a lot this week and decided to try out creating a few different animations based around recreating the Steam Logo using Shape, Mask and Text Layers. The Logo turned out great and the animations were fun to make.

As part of preparing for my placement, before checking what software I would likely be using, I decided to do some test animating in Opentoonz. I taught myself how to rig a skeletal model using multiple Levels as well as how to set up a drawing with a deform-able mesh using the Plastic tool. The last step was then learning how to parent these layers together with the correct pivot points.

This is my first animation I have made in After Effects. I have previously used it to compile renders from Maya and learned how to set up tracking on video footage while in University, however I haven't used After Effects CC before, only CS6, and have never used it as an animation software itself. I followed this tutorial from Evan Abrams:

​After following through the tutorial step by step I then used the knowledge of how to set up the pages to set up a new, separate page on which I could put text or images without those images appearing on the other pages in the book.

I decided to playblast the different stages of my recent skipping animation being made and compile them into a video together. Notable changes during the creation of it are:

• The smoothing of the arm swinging over time, through correction and the help of the euler filter
• The gradual correcting of foot timing to eliminate foot sliding when the character moves forwards
• The animation of the hair as I decided what would be the best amount of sway and how strong the wind of movement would be.

If I were to evaluate the different animations I have made for this module as a whole I would say that I'm happy with the overall quality of my work but wish I had been working on this idea from the beginning of the module so that I could have made more of it.

My favourite animation of the animations I made is the run cycle. I put a lot of time into getting the feet to follow the correct arcs and even added missteps to the loop where her feet land further left or right than the previous step and her body adjusts for that. If I were to do it again I would make the loop longer so as to make those steps further apart and therefore feel more natural. Doing this would also make the blinking less frequent and less consistent in timing.

I feel the weakest of the animations I have made is the walking animation. I feel that the animation is simply boring; there's very little secondary motion and the animation feels a little robotic as a result of both this and the lack of variation to each step, with each step being in exactly the same spot as before in exactly the same timing. I feel this was probably because it was the first animation I created of the collection and was mostly to help ease me back into animating with maya after a long gap working on the Endless Runner game project.

When it comes to the other animations I am reasonably happy with how they turned out. There are some things I would like to fix and that look a little wrong to me but I believe they all clearly show what they are meant to be and look natural. Some things I would change include the juggling animation; I feel the movement looks a little odd as the balls don't quite have the right timing, the speed of the lip-sycning attempt as I think I was too focused on getting the mouth movements right that the character animation suffered, and the movement on the fighting animation as I feel his body should move more than it does while he goes for the punch.