Still keeping busy with all my uni work, I'm currently working on a rig for a character in our upcoming game project, I'll post that up in the next few weeks once it's finished but so far its looking good, much better than any previous rigs I've done!

This week though I thought I'd show off some more of my pre-production work. These are a couple of little facial expression sheets I did for a character I'm hoping to animate in the coming weeks using the Morpheus rig. The idea was to have a fairly caricatured guy who's a tad on edge so is fits in with my dialogue choice.

There's also one of my animatics I did for the death animation of another character I'm animating as part of our game project. So far I'm fairly happy with the idea but I may push a little more in the final thing to really sell his dramatic fall.




Death Animatic from Matthew Watson on Vimeo.

A very brief little animatic I created for my single character acting piece I will be starting in the coming months. I just wanted to throw down some rough movements and poses to get a better feel for the character as a whole playing with subtle changes in the way he holds his hands and grasps the objects around him.

Below, I have included the piece of dialogue I will be animating to. I chose it because I feel it supplies me with a lot of the different elements that can make up a great bit of dialogue - the subtle nuances in voice, the long thoughtful pauses and soft yet sinister voice which hides a hidden intent. With all these elements together I think it provides a great canvas for my animation allowing me a lot of creative freedom with character design, environment and overall acting choices.

As part of my production I will be animating the Bark Basher character (modelled by Fen Evetts) throughout the game providing a range of different weights and movements to best portray the character.

The Bark Basher is a natural predator that acts on instinct and becomes the final boss character for the player to defeat. He uses his two huge 'shields' to protect himself from attacks whilst also using them as battering rams to deliver powerful blows to the player. With this in mind I began to concept a couple poses and action sheets the character may take whilst in combat - which is where the majority of my animations will reside.

They are very rough drawings and in hindsight diverting more time to cleaning their perspective and the weight of the character would have been ideal so as to better portray the character I am trying to deliver and the actions I wish for him to take.

These are a few of the thumbnail sheets I created for Pre-Production. They play around with some of the ideas I had for the Fae's animations so looking specifically at the attack, death and damage animations I would be dealing with. As it turns out, most of these animations are now being done by others and the overall design of the character has changed since then but these little sketches still provided a good grounding and basis for my work and helped develop into some more interesting designs.

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.