16/3/2011… So it was a Wednesday

So I thought I might do a sort of upload of what I had done for the day. I decided in this quite late on (like now-ish) because I realized that I actually got a fair amount done today. Which was nice. So to start of I’ll show you the progress of the 3D model I am working on for some 3D animation:

Then later into the day I attended my usual life class on a Wednesday and did the usual art stuff. Only I didn’t. Instead of using generic charcoal with the boring and dull black and gray textures, we dived head first into COLOUR. My lord the lesson was the brightest and most enjoyable i had ever had. I managed to churn out some pieces I was also happy with for once (I’m a skeptical artist and also dislikes using any medium that isn’t a 2B and pad). here are the pieces that I did in order of completion:

Not too bad in my opinion. the idea was to use colours to portray the various tones of the model without using shades or other black tones. I used yellow for the brightest points, red for in between tones and the dark green for dark tones.

Then finally the designs for our upcoming stop motion animation. I decided to have a go at putting together a schematic for the cupboards. honestly, I don’t like it. It doesn’t show enough information for it to be accurately designed and also its my first attempt at making a schematic so it was kinda shoddy. Well here it is anyways but i hopefully will have a better designed one by tomorrow:

Well that is all the stuff that I accomplished on this faithful (it’s technically Thursday as I finish this) day. Hope to accomplish more tomorrow.

Stopmotion development… Late… Part 2

Here is the design for the house, including some but not all (still may add more) the appliances and equipment in the kitchen. I also coloured to give an idea of what it may end up looking like but as this project is a group collaboration, things can still be changed.

The next upload (Yeah this one was kind of short) will hopefully include all the schematics for the kitchen so that it can be accurately built. This is important as it needs to be done fairly soon as we only have about two weeks to get the models built, kitchen built, anamatic designed for the animation and the models tested for animation before our first official shoot.

Along with the kitchen design, I am also trying to build my model. That is about as far as that goes.

Stopmotion development… Late!

I think its two… maybe three weeks since my last post. either way I simply haven’t posted much because I haven’t really had anything relevant to post. Well I have but minute that it would have been no more than a few sentences long for the post. But now I have pictures.

So a couple of weeks ago the animation group (That is me and these guys: Tom, Alex and Maddy) began some designs for a stop motion animation. The week before this we all put together our own models and gave a try animating them, which I showed in my last post I think, Stop Motion in Motion. Needless to say this character was scrapped. As i mentioned in that post, there was many things wrong with it, not a bad thing but still needed changes.

So here are some various ideas I had for my next character. Modeling has been considered but I haven’t drawn it down, going to get the materials on Wednesday when I have a bit of free time:

That is the concepts for my character. This was actually a character that I had been working on while i was at college and was never intended to be for stop motion (I was and still am really big into writing a novel), but decided it might be interesting to use him for this. If you want to know more about this character then just click here: Post to be made. The structure of the armature will be made out of metal. I am thinking of using a 1.5mm-2mm wire as this should be easier to bend the 3mm wire used on my previous armature.

I plan to use tape or a type of mold that I can wrap around the forearms, legs etc, to act as muscle but to also stiffen the parts of the armature that should not bend. I planned on using material such as clothing from dolls to cover the armature, with an adapted jacket to fit the obvious appearance of Mr Briggett. I decided that using just straight up material would give him an unusual human like appearance and also to make him look thin. Alternatively, if this does not work as I hope (I plan to test it before it is required) I will go back to using clay, although I am not too fond of it.

We also discussed the narrative of the story that our models would act out. It will be a short video, about three minutes long, of each character waking up to a typical day in the community flats that they share (the kitchen and living room are shared rooms… basically a student flat without it being for students). Each of the characters wake, get ready for work, have breakfast and leave in their own unique ways which involve large amounts of hilarity.

I have more developments in progress at the moment but as it is getting late, I am going to wrap this up for now and continue this in a part two post. The next post will include what I have done for the design of the kitchen for the kitchen scene. Development on the storyboards that have been done by all four of us and also, if I have managed to find the time to do it, an anamatic of the kitchen scene. Until next time.

Stop Motion in Motion

After putting the second armature together, I then took it into University so that i could get some help from my friend Alex in putting the clay on it. It doesn’t sound like a complicated task but honestly I wasn’t really sure how to approach it from the beginning.

After it was finished (to the best of my ability) I and all the other animation students then used our models to animate. Not a high fancy, eye startling animation that would make Wallace and Gromit look bad, but a short sweet animation (about twelve frames long) to establish how good… or bad our models had been developed.

First off, here’s my animation. Just click the right arrow at a rapid rate and you’ll get a sense of the motion. I’ll work on trying to find another way to export into a working animation:

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Okay so it was incredibly bad, but it was the second time I have ever done that. This however make good establishment of what went right, which was very little, and what went wrong, which was a lot.

To begin with, the armature was designed with the wrong material. I kind of picked up on this from the beginning of design but I didn’t think too much about it. But the wire that i chose for it was indeed too strong, even when un-drilled. There was a lot of effort put in just to bend the arms and legs, more than would be considered reasonable. SO the next model needs to have an armature that is either easier to move (straight wire with a pivot for the joints for example) or a wire frame that is easier to bend (like copper wire etc).

 Also the type of material that was used to cover the frame and make the body, which was modeling clay, didn’t seem to want to stay stable on the frame. As a result the wire armature kept ripping out of the clay as though its skeleton refused to bend with the rest of the body, although this maybe another point to the armature being too tough. I would probably go about fixing this by either considering a different type of clay, more practise with the clay currently at use or by using a different type of material altogether (Such as latex such as Tim Burton‘s models, an actual model structure with fully opposable limbs such as the ones in Robot Chicken or by using unusual materials like what Jan Svankmayer did in his animation Meat Love).

Most importantly, I have to better plan my animation model for the next design, with better ideas of how I expect it to move, what will be used as the counter weight, what its heaviest point is, what positions will need aid, its height, strengths of its structure, weaknesses of its structure, colour, movement, expressions, complexity of animation etc.

Making an Armature Part 2

The frustration of developing new skills. After Drilling the last rods of wire, I clipped of some more wire and knotted it (with great difficulty) into what could be described as a crude noose. I did this twice, this would serve as the feet. I hot glue gunned these to a drilled piece (clipped to size) to act as the hip. This proved a little ineffective as it had great difficulty standing up.

I then glued the long drilled wire to act as the spine, which in turn had the arms glued to it about two-thirds up. Pretty much straight after this point I scrapped the original armature.

I trashed it mainly because it was loose, fragile, difficult to bend without extreme pressure and all in all a poor first try at designing an armature. But this did not stop me.

I began construction on  designing a different model that I had sketched out and planned in case this one proved to have severe complications (The legs are way to small and the arms are quite large, putting the whole thing out of proportion).

I again drilled a long piece of wire, but applied the pliers half way down so that only half of the wire drilled round itself. The part that wasn’t drilled bit would then act as legs:

I then wrapped a single piece of wire around the top part of the spine, to act as arms which was glued to stop it from moving (it was tightly wrapped first so that all the fixture would not be just from the glue as it can be slightly unreliable).

I then took small, finer wire and span this round as well (This was done by hand as it would have been desecrated by the drill) and then wrapped round the ends of the arms to act as fingers for the hands. Each arm had three fingers for each hand and also glued to keep them in place and to act as a base for the hand. The top of the spine was bent down so that I would be able to support the head.

This seemed to work out much better, which is good because I really didn’t want to make another . This is what this armature should end up looking like once its fully covered in clay:

Making an Armature

There are a number of ways to design an armature. You can cheat and buy a professional one from websites such as AnimationSupplies.net (Not cheap). Or building it in a similar design using odd materials, such as modelling foam and screws, nuts, bolts and wires etc. Another is the primary wire method which is the approach I plan on taking.

Here are a few videos to the approach I plan to take to making my armature:

How to Make Wire Armatures for Stop Motion

Building a Stop Motion Monster: Making an Aluminum Wire Armature (part1)

Building a Stop Motion Monster: Padding the Body (part2)

Building a Stop Motion Monster: Finishing the puppet (part3)

Building a Stop Motion Monster: Making the Latex Skin (part4)

Everything you see in the Building a Stop Motion Monster video is pretty much everything I’m going to do. I’m writing this as I construct the model.

First off, use none rusty tools. Pulled out a set of pliers opened them in great effort to close them again, I caught my finger in them and now hurts like heck.

Secondly don’t fire the drill too fast, besides losing most control of it and it spins the wire in less than a second but it also winds it over its self so it’s just a mass mound of messy wire. Also try to make sure that the wire is as straight as possible. The more bent it is before the drilling, the more curves it’ll have in it. Also as you drill the piece, try to gently pull the wire away from the drill with the pliers. This straightens the wire more as it curves on its self and will make it easier to use for the model as it will have less bends in it to worry about.

I’ll be adding more information later within this post… Or I may start a new post marked part 2 with the continuation of how i have developed the armature. First, I have to go buy the other materials to finish it off as I couldn’t get hold of them before.

Clay Model Design

So in the second semester, most of our focus is towards stop motion animation. Specifically, what comes under the term of claymation. Well I think it’s mainly claymation but it might be everything else but to keep life a little easy I’m going to stick with claymation because I know a little bit of it. I’m not going to start animating Meat (Jan Svankmajer “Meat Love”), that would be difficult and unusual.

It’s not large on the amount of details, but it establishes the image of the character and also the general model design approach I plan to take if I decide to go with this character. Specifically, the shapes of the clay around the wire framing and masks that represent the faces.

EDIT: It had been recommended that I base the body clay around a ping-pong ball, or something of a similar object and light weightlessness. Then the plan is to either wrap the wire, acting like the spine, to the back of the ball or insert it through the back-bottom of the ping-pong ball.