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kinda wanna make my own tarot cards

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Carrying Weight 🎁🚶

Brief 5: Animate the character from the character design brief picking up a heavy box from the ground, carrying it across the screen, and placing it down on a surface.

Animated in TVPaint

I really fell off here. I do want it to be known that it was supposed to be left as a pencil test.

So I visualised her finding a box of cats but she SLAMS that box down at the end so that's a bit of a major flop 😔

I sketched out some thumbnails but by the time we got this brief, I had my one essay of the year due so I didn't put much care into the research/development stage here. Definitely could've been stronger if I did manage my time better.

I started animating it before I had an idea of my final character design so her hat had to be completely redone halfway through.

I really don't like her anticipation before she bends back up but I was on a time crunch. I animated her walk first and it was dreadful - I'd show but I can only add one video per post. I also realised my entire walk was way off-model by the end so I had to go and redo it, but I had such little time so the size fluctuates so much 😭

One part that I'm really proud of is when she reaches down to pick up the box, I was quite proud of the arc her hands make. Is that crazy?

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3D Modelling and Texturing 🧰💻

Brief 4: Model, sculpt, texture and render a design of a 3D box.

Created using Maya, ZBrush and 3D Substance Painter

I'm OBSESSED with this process, I just wish I managed my time better. I followed lecturer tutorials using his design of a treasure chest before I pulled myself together and created my own design. Well, it's not really my own design obviously, these types of boxes have long existed.

I had so much fun creating the base model in Maya, it's just squares and lines and corners and it's GREAT. I think I spent a bit tooo long perfecting it, I was putting off moving into ZBrush. We were only instructed to use ZBrushCoreMini as there's a very limited amount of licenses of ZBrush proper in the art school. However, we had to install a script to be able to export objects from Maya to ZBrushCoreMini and it was just too much faff for me. It was a good opportunity to try out ZBrush.

The interface of ZBrush is overwhelming, it was explained to me multiple times and I still can't wrap my head around it. Maybe I should get Blender and try messing about in there to decide if it would be worth investing in ZBrush and coming to grips with it?

So, we sculpt our models in ZBrush with a large amount of polygons. But that's too many polygons for Maya to handle for when we move it back, so we need to export a low-poly version as well. So we put a really shite looking model back into Maya.

It looked way better in ZBrush but I forgot to take screenshots and now I can't access ZBrush.

So then we need to UV unwrap this box. UV unwrapping is so odd and I don't think I can explain it. The box is the box, and its texture is like a sticker. UV unwrapping allows you to control how the sticker is placed on a surface, it can be stretched across the face or scaled to fit. If that makes any sense. I'll find a tutorial.

This then needs to be taken to 3D Substance Painter. Before throwing textures on this, we need the high-poly version to make sure the texturing is accurate. The high-poly version is too much data however, so the information from the high-poly model needs to be 'baked' into the low-poly version. This results in a low-poly model that looks high-poly. I honestly don't understand how it works, I'll learn one day.

Someone with far more knowledge is sobbing at my explanation 😭

I textured this box by finding a 'design' I looked and altering the colour, shine and damage on the texture. Not too hard. I then went in on brush mode to add little slivers of silver - just enough to make the box appear as though it's been scratched a few times.

I thought I was overzealous adding dents and scrapes in ZBrush but it wasn't even noticeable when I added in this texture.

All those black bits on the exterior were supposed to be silver and it turned black, but it stayed black in rendering so I'm not sure what I should've done.

Then I had to stage this all and render it. This part was really fun, I just wish I knew how to make lighting good. I played about with lighting for a bit, I used spotlights but had to widen up the cone shape to the max to make it look nice-ish. You really have to up the intensity of the lights to make it actually effective.

What version's better?! The final renders or these?!

Anyway, carry on.

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Character Design 💁✏️

Brief 3: Design a different humanoid character each in a research group and produce 5 character sheets.

Created in Autodesk Sketchbook

I think I put more time and effort into this project than I thought.

I hope you can kinda discern what type of person she is just by looking at her. I wanted her to be very kind and caring, but she has a bit of a bite - she won't tolerate any nonsense. Think of Katara from ATLA. I was aiming for her to be about 15/16 but I fear she does not read as 15/16. Maybe the slut strands age her?

We were thrown into groups and randomly assigned a setting and two genres - we ended up with skate park horror/adventure. We definitely could've developed the plot more cause I think our final outcomes are probably all a bit different, but literally only 3 of us out of 6 contributed consistently and 2 sent one single message to the chat each :/

We had the vague idea that our cast is a friend group of monsters that meet at a '90s/2000s skate park at night and get up to whacky shenanigans and they're also human haters. But like,,, my character doesn't really look like a monster - maybe I could've given her pointy ears or a more monstery face?

I didn't choose a character immediately, we thought up character types and sketched them out to work out which characters we're drawn to.

I really, really wish I stuck with the werewolf jock I drew, I thought the idea was so fun. I also liked drawing this druid stoner guy but someone else in my group was more attached to the concept, so I didn't design them.

When I was drawing the witch, I originally had the Hex Girls from Scooby Doo in mind, edgy quirky girl.

We also looked into fashion trends for the time period, everyone knows y2k fashion and all that. We also looked into style and decided on Jamie Hewlett's style for Gorillaz.

^^^I drew out my group's characters to work out the style.

I DRAGGED my feet creating these character sheets. I created a turnaround but it was just poor, her positions didn't match up between angles.

She looks a little cheeky with her tiny skirt here.

Call me crazy, but I was quite proud of her 3 stripes from her choker, bag and belt. I also wanted to maximise her stripiness and I later gave her socks with stripes like Winnie the Witch. (I also was gonna say the witch from Room on the Broom but I just realised she doesn't actually have stripey socks :o).

I wanted her to have a fringe like Sapphire's from Steven Universe, fluffy and round? I over-complicated it too much though and realised I could make her fringe compliment her hat!

SPEAKING OF HER HAT !!! I could not get that cunt to look right. It started as a rigid bandana and then my advisor and friends told me to make it a beanie but I wasn't sure how to draw it for ages.

(I swear I'm almost finished ranting)

I also thought about drawing a star on her top but we were told these designs had to be easy to animate and I can't draw stars.

When I was deciding on her colour scheme, I knew I wanted her to wear blue but she was a very warm character - and I am terrible with colour theory. I think it looked pretty good in the end though! I originally envisioned her being blonde but I wanted to differentiate her from another character in the group so I made her ginger. I really like the low contrast between her face and hair, call me crazy.

Do we like how she skates on a broom with wheels guys?! I can't upload anymore images but it's in my final gesture sheet. I really tried to make sure all her poses were nice and rounded to communicate her sweet personality.

We actually DON'T talk about the construction sheet.

How do you make a construction sheet? We had to animate these designs so I drew this sheet up after animating her and I still didn't know what to say.

Anyway, sorry, this is really long. Again, I thought longer and harder about this process than I realised and I wish I got this in-depth with my submission video but I forgot to mention half of this and there's still thoughts I have that I've not written down here 😭

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Quadruped Walk Cycle 🐎

Brief 2: Animate a looping walk cycle of a horse using the provided rig.

Animated in Maya

This was beyond complicated, I could not get it to look natural but I guess that's just due to the limitations of this rig. Its knees kept popping if they weren't bent enough, but if you look at horses they're not super bent other than when their feet are actually leaving the ground.

Whatever. 😒

I should've added movement to the ears but eh, I ran out of time. Contrary to the vibe of this post, I really enjoyed this brief, I should've given myself more time though. I should've done more sketchbook work before diving into this brief as well, maybe would've had a better idea of what to do from the get-go instead of wasting time.

Why doesn't he have a mane 😭

I do really enjoy the 3D process, I'm probably gonna specialise in it. It's just interesting beginning to end. And it's easy to fix errors. I think the process just meshes better with my brain.

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Superpugician!! 🪄🎩

Brief 1: Create a 4-10 second 2D animation of Superpugician performing an assigned magic trick.

Animated in TVPaint

Can you tell what magic trick he's performing ?!

Bros definitely off-model but yknow, I think I did an okay job of him being consistently off-model. This actually took so so so sooooo many hours and it probably doesn't show 😔

I definitely should've added something more when he pauses after his failed trick but I just wanted to be done honestly. His hat at the start is actually upsetting me so muchhhh.

The best part of this process was in-betweening cause you don't need to think lol. I wish I could understand timing and spacing, but I guess I should do more research and just gain xp. The line work could definitely be stronger, why are they such weak lines 😭

Any pointers appreciated!

Sketchbook work below 👇👇

Maybe I should've thumbnailed a bit more before starting but it is what it is I suppose.

I need to get better at the research stage in the process, it could definitely help strengthen my ideas and final outcome.

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ahhh perfect, gonna anonymously and courageously try posting any artwork

at some point