Advanced Character Animation Pre-Production

In my first post I shared the progress made on a Subaru model, and mentioned that it was part of a larger project that will end in an animation alongside a character and an environment. I also said that I would come back and introduce the rest of it, which will be the only time I go backwards and post work that has already been done (although it’s only been done a few weeks ago).

I decided that as I go about expanding my horizons in the car universe and creating a vehicle-based portfolio, this assignment would be a great opportunity to do a car-themed project. I had just finished a break from school during which I spent a good month playing Gran Turismo 5 with my folks and watching a bit of Formula 1, air racing, and rally racing, so being freshly inspired I wanted to have a go at a rally animation. I had to do some research to familiarize myself with some of the basic terminology, and then I created a parallel world with non-existent racers each with their own background. The personalities and motives for these characters is all background information that may or may not be evident in the final video to the outside audience, but having an idea of who these actors are has helped psych me up for the project and makes animating them a lot more fun.

Now that the characters had their own voices and a world to exist in on a simple level, it was time to sketch out some storyboards.

I already had a blueprint for the Subaru, but I had to generate my own modelsheet for Daren.

All of the above was taken care of in week 1 of the quarter. For week 2 I modeled and rigged Daren, and then later unwrapped him. Texturing is still to come.

Also completed for week 1 was a simple blueprint laying out the track, camera angles, and what would be seen in the background, done to scale. This later served as a sort of modelsheet for the blockout environment, and surprisingly few adjustments had to be made; the plan in my head was concrete enough that everything fell into place quite nicely in 3D.

The concept and pre-production phase is always my least favorite part of any project, given my stronger interest in 3D (and therefore weaker skills in 2D). However, I’m always grateful to have everything figured out before diving into the fun stuff, and I cannot stress enough how important this first phase is.

The one part of pre-production that I do like is making a schedule for myself. Knowing right from the get-go what needs done and when prevents mass chaos later. It also gives me the warm fuzzies when I get to mark things off as done every week. Green rectangles for the win!

As you can see from the production schedule, I have rough animations of idle/360-turn’s for Daren and the Subaru as well as a rough of the final animation, all freshly completed today. I’ll share those as soon as I get them uploaded to the YouTubez.

Also! Unrelated to this post, but new logo today, whoohoo! I figured it would be best to just sit down and revise the thing today and get it out of the way, so I’ll be closer to feeling that this blog is presentable enough to start advertising.