Environment

As I have created the basic elements that I need for my animation, the next few days I will working in After Effects. I hope I will have the result that I want.

Experimenting...

I wish I almost finish... Although never use this software before, it was interesting. 

The followings show when I was experimenting AE...

Finally, what I have done today...

And:

animating my character...

Audiences

These are the audiences that I designed in illustrator.

Then I have duplicated them and changed their skin, hair and tops colour in order to save my time to creating many different audience.

Character expression and Hamster ball

 Angry,             Normal,                Wondering

Layers of the character.

The hamster ball

In the hamster ball

Character design

At first I was unsure what colour of the character that I should used, so I have compared them. I found the left one looks like an pineapple, and it seems weird to have a fruit character in this project. The right one, it looks like a "water-man" but the game that I decided is on the water which the character have the same colour of the environment. Therefore, I decided to have a human character, it looks like this...

"The Chess Player" final piece

Please enjoy my 6 weeks project, and I am welcome for any feedback and comments of this animation:

Project Rationale:

In this project, I need to produce an animation of at least 30 seconds that showed a self-defeating chess-playing robot. To fit the requirement, I have produced two robot arms with a robot body. I have used the skills of IK chains and the reaction manger in order to rig and animate my project.

In this animation, I was worrying at the beginning of the project, because I don’t how to play chess at all. Therefore, I went to Youtube and search some tutorial and I found a very short tutorial that taught me how to win the game. The pink player wins within 2 moves. I have used the character gestures to show their emotion, as I decided not to include a robot’s head. The story of this animation was the blue player was very confident to win the game, and being arrogant by having “come on” and “V” gestures. However, because the blue player was too confident and there is a chance for the pink player to win. At that moment the blue player realised, so he was unhappy about the result. While the pink player hasn’t finished the game, the blue player was very angry and punched the floor. As the arms are connect to the body, so when the arm has a big movement, it cause the chessboard jumped up and all the chess pieces are flying around in the air with the slow motion effect. The end the animation, the pink queen (that who beat the blue player) drops on the floor, rolling and hit “The End”.

I feel that I have learnt a variety of animation skills within this project. I found the most difficult skill to learn was the IK chain and reaction manager. I have experimented with these skills a lot in order to get the right movement. However, this is good, because I did learnt a lot during the failure experiments. In this project, I have learnt the modelling skills as well such as lathe modifier and attaching shapes to objects to make it looks like the one we want. I have understood the importance of lighting in order to give the realistic texture of the objects.

The problems that I have during this project, mainly was my Mac doesn’t support 3ds max properly. Therefore, when I animated the chess piece is hard to see what I got. And because I have using the virtual machine “parallels desktop” to run the programme, and there was a limitation of t ram. This causes me when I tried to render a single frame out, it doesn’t allow me to do. Other than that, I haven’t go any big problems on modelling and animating.

After finished this project, my confident of working in the advertising animation industry has built up, as I felt that I would gain more animation industry skills when I finished my second year. I believe that at the end of this course I will have professional skill and will be able to work in the industry. 

Storyboard

Rendering & Premiere editing

Animating...

Animation Layout

Storyboard

After I watched the tutorial, here is my storyboard! So I can animate my animation...

Everything done... just need to animate!

I have modelled everything, and now I just need to animate my chess player. But the problem is I don't know how to play chess. Therefore I found a tutorial in youtube, and I will use this for the step of my chess game.

Assets Design

Chess pieces design