Intro to stages

As a final project for my third year will be making a showreel so I will have something to leave with. The project consists of three stages:
Stage 1 - types of cycles, e.g walks, runs etc
Stage 2 - Mimed animation, which means two acted pieces with no sound
Stage 3 - A dialogue piece and animal character piece

So hopefully this will explain what each stage is about.

Dialogue piece - Stage 3

This is my dialogue piece for my stage 3 as part of the major project, its currently in working progress. The dialogue is from "Rumor Has It" and features a couple at a table in a airport cafe. The guy is feeling a little down, so his partner comforts him and then it kicks off from there.

I've worked on this as much as I'd hoped so far, the good thing is I'm happy with the camera setup and shots. So now its just time to put in the details.

Dog & Rabbit - Stage 2

As part of stage I wanted to animate more animals so I animated a duo of a dog and rabbit. Basically the puppy is lead to a hole in the ground where his ball bounced into, he is surprised to find a rabbit in the hole and only wants to play with him. However the rabbit isn’t having any of that. I was going to have the rabbit bite his nose so the dog shakes it off, but it didn't seem such a nice idea.

The animation is still in working progress, though I'm pleased with the results so far.

Heavy walk - Stage 1

This walk is from stage 1 of the major project, the purpose as it says is that it’s a realistic heavy walk of a creature or troll in this case. This is a successful walk so far :)

Lioness walk - Stage 1

Here another walk for stage 1, it's a lioness carrying her cub. The animation in this one is not as flowing as well compared to the heavy walk. Still need its improvements, I need to check out the curves, but there is still time.

Motion builder

Instead of learning XSI software package, this year we got to learn Motion Builder. Which was great to learn but didn't enjoy as much as I would of liked. But still its a great gain. For the first part of the project we had to string together already made motion capture but also add in our own little bit of animation. So it should flow quite nicely, I need more practice.

For the second part of the project we needed to animate an animal walking, a trasition between the walk and a stop and an idle, in my case a dog. Then string those animations together as before.

New to maya

For an ease to get back into the swing of things, to start the new and last year in uni, we were introduced to Maya. This evolved a series of short exercises which was great as I was a bit rusty after the summer hols. So these were the animations I did.