LIP SYNC ANIMATION

This is the first lip sync animation I've worked on, and it taught me a lot. The audio is a clip from Portal 2, and I chose it because of J.K. Simmons' loud and expressive voice. I started this animation by filming reference footage of myself mouthing the words and acting out the motion. After I had my reference footage, I imported it into Maya along with the audio clip and did a first pass on the body animation. At one point, I imported a Move.ai clip I'd acted out to see if 3D reference in my scene would be useful (it wasn't that useful). When I was satisfied with the overall movements, I worked on the mouth and face. After that, it was just clean up and trying different things out with the camera and key poses. Once I was happy with the animation, I lit it and rendered it out using Arnold.

WALK CYCLE ANIMATION

For this walk cycle, I knew I wanted to do something different than a standard walk. As always, I started by filming myself for reference. I also created a 2D animated gif to get some of the key poses down Originally, I wanted to have the character step on an object and run away, but I decided to cut that part to have a clean walk cycle loop. As this was only my second walk cycle animation (and my first assignment in Character Animation), I didn't really break it up into passes. I jumped around working on different parts of the body as I was learning the rig, and eventually I ended up with the animation above.

"HERE 2 THERE" ANIMATION

The objective of this animation was to, as the title suggests, have the character get from one block to the other. Originally, I wanted to use a “flour sack” rig and have it jump across like a cat, but I opted for a more traditional animation instead. After acting out what I wanted to animate, I sketched a few frames of the animation I knew I wanted to hit. This one has some rough edges still as I was super busy during this time, but overall I think it reads well.