i'm not dead

...just really busy with school. This is a screentone test for a two-page comic spread for my rendering class. I'm aiming for a black and white manga style:



(Maya + Photoshop; model provided by the teacher; various screentones found online.)

bezier interpolation

I just got my Bezier interpolation working:



This thread was very helpful, and I stole the code for the cubic equation solver from here. The code to draw Bezier curves is from here.

Now I have to apply it to my animation curves.

animusic loop

A looping musical animation:



I was working on this all week - 14 hours straight on Thursday to get it in before the end of the day. It was heavily inspired by the Animusic videos.

Here are some lovely curves:



[edit: made it loop 4 times instead of once]

love letter

Dear Maya Animation Curves,

I'm hopelessly addicted to you. I can't stop thinking about setting your keyframes. I want to run my cursor over your splines. Let me unlock the weighting of your tangents, and manipulate your control points. I'll gently scrub back and forth along the timeline, and then we'll edit until our motions are in synch with the music. We can cycle to infinity all night long. Or at least until after the buses stop running.

Love,

Anna

musical primitives

This is a Maya animation I made for school. I had to animate some primitives to music:

lack of progress report

yay for Bezier curves
Despite having been out of school for two weeks, I have not managed to make much progress on my project. I did a lot of thinking about my animation system though, and I've decided that I will try to implement a simple version of Maya's graph editor.

My original plan to do frame by frame animation with linear interpolation between frames doesn't seem good enough after animating with Maya. I need the smoothness and slow in/slow out that gives the movement weight and makes it convincing. Also, the ability to set keyframes at any point in the animation, rather than regular intervals, will help with the timing.

Hopefully I'll have something interesting to show before I have to go back to school in two more weeks.

texture

I was given a model to texture in rendering class:



This is my first time texturing a 3D model. It's two 1024x1024 colour maps, spec maps, and bump maps (for a total of 6 images).

I gave her my eye.

character design

An assignment for my drawing class:



And yeah, that's a shovel.


[edit: flats]

cutout animation

Yesterday I learned that the style of animation I'm going to use in my game is called cutout animation. Two examples of it can be seen here and here. The best example of the use of this technique in a game is probably Odin Sphere:



My implementation is going to be rather primitive looking compared to this though.

inverse kinematics

After discovering the Joint and IK Handle tools in Maya, I decided to implement IK in my animation editor:



It works much better for animation than the particles and constraints; it's like a cross between that system and the bone hierarchy in the old version. I used Cyclic Coordinate Descent for the IK solver.