Progress Update – It’s Clay Time

By April 18, 2016 May 6th, 2016 Honours Project

Production on the final animation is full steam ahead. The wire armature character in my story has now found himself in a pile of modelling clay. This scene and those ahead deal with the character exploring the material properties of the clay.

Compared to the last few animation sessions, I was able to animate quicker due to the less challenging armature animation. However that doesn’t necessarily mean the animation quality was less. The animation I’ve achieved in the past couple of days have been more character than action based. The character is given an opportunity post-tumble to explore what he has fallen in to and what is possible with the clay.

I decided to add in an additional actions (that weren’t in the storyboards/animatic) where the character has clay on their face upon sitting up. A quick visual gag but something that also brings the character’s attention to how the clay stuck to something. He then picks up a new piece and lets it drop. Adding in these actions just helped to slow the narrative pace down and let the audience process what’s happening easier. It also enhances the character’s personality and allows you to understand what the character is thinking.

The character attaching clay to his arm went as planned however the animation was able to show what the animatic only did to a certain extent and that was the flexing pose with the character seemingly proud of his new arm piece. I’ve had fun animating the clay drop on these three occasions giving it a fluid but still “chunky” feeling to it. Having it still be firm to a degree will help later on when the character gets stuck in the legs he’ll build himself.

On the blog side of things I’ve also re-uploaded some videos hosted on this blog to YouTube as Blogger was reducing the quality in addition to not displaying thumbnails or resolution correctly. Previously uploaded videos will be swapped out for the higher quality versions within the next couple of days.

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