The reason I am showcasing the animations here rather than on the artwork page because these projects taught me the process of animation the hard way. By this, I mean that the result was not as desired but I still consider these projects as a valuable lesson. In the end, I did learn keyframe animation and motion capture.

Animation - Keyframe

I had made a decision in my head that I would never learn how to do 3D animation. One day on my third year I walked into the classroom being all excited about the upcoming 3D course that was hopefully going to teach more about modelling and texturing . What I did not expect was the fact that I had taken a full 3D animation course. By accident. The teacher explained about the project that we were meant to do and she said we could pick our own group members. I decided to work alone since I didn’t want to sabotage anyone else’s work with my useless nonexistent animation skills. In this course, we were supposed to do a cutscene/trailer/game-ready animation set and come up with a game concept where the animations would be used. During that time I binge-watched a ton of lousy dance movies on Netflix and I decided I was going to animate cutscene of a couple dancing (even though I have zero experience in dancing). I came up with a game concept for people who wish to learn how to dance. The players would wear a smart suit that tracks their every move. They could mimic tutorials, create their own routines, record their progress and share it with their friends. (Obviously this wouldn’t work since smart suits cost a loooooot and million other problems)

I am not sure why on earth I would think that animating a couple dancing would be easy peasy lemon squeezy. It was not. However, in the end, I did learn the basics of keyframe animation and it wasn’t that bad after all! It’s a shame that at this point I didn’t know motion capture yet…

Character meshes are not made by me. They belong to MakeHuman.Org

Animation - Motion Capture

On my last semester I decided to take one more animation course. This time it was Motion Capture. I teamed up with my friends and we started brainstorming for some ideas. My friend said that she would really like to motion capture her cat but the was way too small for that. We decided to motion capture a dog instead. We came up with a story for the cutscene and then we just needed to find a dog to help us out. And we found one! The dog was one of the nicest dogs I have ever encountered and she was awesome. The recording went fine except the markers were flying around when the dog moved and our home-made marker suit for the dog was a huge failure. Since the markers were continuously in weird places, the data that we got from the recording was not so great. Meaning the cutscene that we created from it was also not that great. Even though everything was a complete disaster, we learned a lot. We knew exactly what to do better next time (if we were ever to mocap a dog again) and how to prepare for the recording. It was cool to try it out. In fact, no one before us had done it before! And don’t worry!!! The dog Jenka was in a good hands during the recording. :)

Fun fact. Because the markers were all wobbly, the data didn’t look good on the dog mesh (too many joints) and we had to find another mesh. After importing a whole zoo of different animals into Motion Builder, we found one that worked decently: a tortoise without it’s shell. Our original plan from having a cutscene with awesome dynamic dog animations changed to having a cutscene with silly animations.