Rendering Idea

I had an idea for the start of my animation. Just after the character has been born, I could basically record each frame being rendered, so I would have the finished rendered animation as 1 file, and as another, I'd have the recorded rendering process. I could then speed up the rendering animation and mix it in with the finished animation which could give some really mental, but quite interesting effects.

Anaglyph 3D Test - 25/09/11

I found a plugin by Nitro4D called Magic 3D, which creates a camera set up for rending your animations in Anaglyph 3D. I modelled up a quick basic character, rigged it and animated a basic run cycle so that I could see what it would look like and here's what the outcome was:

Obviously the anaglyph settings need to be altered a little more, but I think the effect looks pretty nice, even without 3D glasses. It adds a surreal feel to the animation. So anyway now I've got some basic ideas floating around in my head, I just need to get the character nailed. 

My original character looked OK, however it wasn't as weird as I would have liked it to be. I think what I need to do is increase the length of the body, maybe shorten the legs and add some length onto the arms. I also can't decide how I'm going to do his face, whether it be animated in 3D using Pose Morph or just 2D Pose 2 Pose, and then placed on top of the head. I don't really need to think about that now anyway... It's something I can work on later on. Another thing is how I'm going to texture the character.. I think I want it to be shiny, high poly and very 3D looking, whereas the environment and other characters will look 2D, low poly, flat & dull. I'll probably need to do some more experimenting. Also it's probably going to mean rendering out 2 separate animations, 1 being environment and other characters, and the other being the main character, and then compositing the main character into the environment in After Effects. 

I have loads of ideas, I just need to make sure I take note of them all so I don't forget stuff. 

24/09/11

So after watching Newcastle thrash Blackburn 3-1, I had a little browse on Motionographer, and came across this really cool animation by Minivegas Studio:

F5 Twitter Visualiser from minivegas on Vimeo.

Looks as though they might have just used the shatter deformer with triangulated polygons and then moved them around on a spline wrap deformer. I've messed around with stuff like this before and got some really interesting results. I'd love to incorporate stuff like this into my character animation.

Check out the Minivegas Studio website here:
Minivegas Studio

Updates... 23/9/11

I've been looking at a few interviews from David O'Reilly;
Motionographer
Film Ireland

In these interviews he has mentioned a couple of people who have influenced his work. He says that he got the idea of animating animals from John Arne Sæterøy, who's character designs are very basic, yet somehow very likeable, as you can see below:

Another artist who influenced him was Ryoji Ikeda, who's work is all very distorted & pixelated. You can see straight away how similar his art work is to some of the effects added in David O'Reilly's animations.

David O'Reilly Interview

Found this great interview which gives a lot of insight into how David O'Reilly animates.

David O'Reilly

David O'Reilly

I've been looking at a lot of work by David O'Reilly for some inspiration with my own animation. I love the style of his work. His character designs are very basic, yet the viewer still gets drawn in by them. I think this is down to the style in which he animates in. He doesn't focus so much on the look of the animation, but more on the feel of the animation. The distorted effects may seem very random, however if you look at Please Say Something, you start to realize that it's actually a very clever and easy way of getting the emotions and feelings of the character into the viewers mind. For example, when a character is confused, sad and angry, rather than your typical cartoon-like dark cloud over their head, he places a deformed jagged animation. If the character is crying, he replaces the actual tears with the word Tears. I think this gets the viewer thinking a lot more about what is going on. This is what I ultimately want from my animation. I want to get people thinking. Rather than telling the viewer what's going on, I want them to come to their own conclusions.