Continuing on from my Rig Research I also began looking into existing rigs for animation with the aim of learning professional workflow, presentation and practice. With most of these pages I have been observing the control systems for each rig to better understand how to present them in a user-friendly and approachable way. I found the most effective way to do this was to design them in select number of colours and building them in curved shapes, like circles, ovals and other shapes with curved edges.

Additionally, I tried to note the areas of the rig that were effective and those that were not effective and learn from their mistakes with the aim of producing a more efficient and friendly rig that the animators would want to work with (which includes myself!)

This is the first set of pre-production work I would like to show and it displays the early stages of my rig design for the centaur character. Here I'm looking into different limbs and skeletal structures to understand the inner workings of both horse and human. By realising and learning how the skeleton and muscles work I believe it can only enhance my rig construction and in turn allow for more flexible and believable. animations.







Sorry for the mostly uninteresting and text heavy work first but I think it's important to see where my original ideas and research started and where it has ended. There is more pictures to come, I promise!

It's been a very busy few weeks with both my Pre-Production and Business Studies projects needing to be completed but I've submitted them now and over the next couple weeks wanted to show some of the work I've created. Some of it I'm happy with, some of it not so, but I think it will be good to reflect on what I've created and learn from my successes and my mistakes - so time to start looking at The Good, The Bad and The Ugly!

First up, my business cards both the front and the back:



Generally, I'm pleased with them, I think further work could be done on the front of the card as I'm not too keen on the big blank space hovering in the right but overall pretty happy with them!

After many months of being in a prototype shape - and generally just gathering dust - I have finally created my animation blog! Yay. There are still a few changes I want to make and the design may change in the near future but for now I think it works alright!

I will be using the blog to document my progress through my third and final year of being a computer animation student. At the minute I'm half way through Pre-production for our Final Major Project so hopefully in the next few days I'll upload a few design sketches and thumbnails that show off some of my animation ideas.

So here's to a (hopefully) successful blog and my Animation Journey.

Watson Matt Industry Reel from Matthew Watson on Vimeo.