Here we go again

Looks like I arrived at the same point like some days ago. Hurray. Finally I can create some decent animations.

Fixing again

Okay, I saw, that I can't get on without some decent clavicle controls, so I had to fix that one plus the fingers, which arent working very well in their current state.

Cleaning ma' Bar!

Doing the first animations for our NPC Stan. He`s obviosly cleaning the bar.

Dynamics

Today I m doing some exercise with this guy. I am trying to achieve dynamic poses and getting to the right timing for hack n slay animations ;)

Rigging action

Got the charcter a rig now.
It´s not finished yet.
I`m having problems with the joint orientations of the hand joints, especially the dumb thumb >___<

'Merica!!!!

Yeah, ... today instead of moddeling, I had to draw some wonderful colorful concepts for the project presentation tomorrow. The setting of the game is an american Diner, as you can see ;D

Shiny Shiny!!!

Finished that guy so far and got him a shiny material. Tomorrow I have to produce some small items for the Milestone presentation on Thursday and maybe do some concepting,we 'll see. :)

Shame on me!

Since my studies rebegan I totally forgot to do my daily posting. *cries*
Sure, at the beginning we had to do a lot of polishing for Yours Truly, but there are no excuses for this.
So.... What am I doing right now? Moddeling a super simple low definition character for my new Games Academy project. He will get a rig and some small Idle animations, nothing more. Just a super glowy blurry NPC. But better than nothing, right?

Internet connection problems

Before Internet connection goes down again: here is my daily post! :) finished the head so far! Tomorrow I will see how to build the body for this handsome still hairless guy ;D

Topology problems

This is what i did today.

I am not that satisfied with the topology around the nose, also the cheeks have to be redefined. 

Tomorrow hopefully I'll finish the basemesh.

Again, too slow

Jap, I have to work faster. Although I am working only two to three hours every evening it still seems to slow for the outcoming every time I post here.

At last...

I started today with the 3D model of the head

Got dat side view!

So in the end I did it. Concept is ready. Now I'll start modelling the head. Hopefully it won't take as long as the last time ...

Side View

Started today finally with the side. He got pretty big feet, though.

Yeah....

I`m not satisfied at all with what I`m doing, tried some things today, but it did't work out. So tomorrow I´ll create the side view and then I will proceed to moddeling the character.

Horrible work in progess

I was laughing so hard today by trying to get my character dressed, I am not happy with anything I did, but that is no problem, at least I gave it a try. I am pretty sure my future lies in making animation or maybe modeling, but absolutely not in creating character concepts ;D ahahaha

Work in progress, if anyone reads this - dont judge it

Da Face!

As you can see I got lost by trying to give him an authentic mirrored face, that will make creating the 3D model afterwards a lot easier. I'm not satisfied with the strange nose and lips parts, but I don`t want to waste any more time, so I am going to improvise that parts of the face when modeling. Not sure with the hair either that one would be tricky, so most likely he'll get a new haircut. AND - Tomorrow finally I'll get him some clothes!!!!

New personal Project

Yesterday I wasn't home at all, but today I got more time and decided to start a new project.
I began creating the front view concept for my first human character Aidan. Tomorrow I'll get him a face and clothes, allthough I'll keep the nude character for the modeling afterwards.

Holidays? They belong to the past now.

After my last post I went home to Southtyrol enjoying a little time out after all that project and exam stress I had aaaand today I decided to get back to work by making this suuuper super rough run cycle wih the dog rig I downloaded a while ago.

 

Environment exam

Made this today for my environment exam :) It's a lowpoly wall rendered in UDK. Although there are many visible errors I'm pretty proud that I made it in time to finish my last exam. (And in just one day!)

Finally

Had some serious problems with attaching the ear, sadly I destroyed some of the topology ... baaaah. Next exam. Besides, anatomy went very well, could'nt stop drawing muscles and bones xD

Whoops

Friday I forgot to post. The Head is still not finished, because the ear was pretty tricky... The only thing left to do is to attach the ear to the head and create a proper neck and clavicle for this guy, but for now I have to prepare myself for tomorrows anatomy exam.

Still not finished, dammit!

I'm truly angry with myself that I did'nt manage to finish the head today.
I definitly have to work faster.

Examination

Finally I have time to do my exams for this semester end. In digital Character we have to make a human head in 3D. Believe it or not, the thing in the screenshot below will be a head. Hopefully tomorrow.

Back from GamesCom

It was a super exiting time I had with my team at the GamesCom in Cologne. Everyone who played our game on the exhibition gave us positive feedback and I'm pretty sure, that we will continue polishing our game as were`re eager to win some awards with the special experience we've created. ;D Enjoy this short video with a few glimpses at the GamesCom version of our game :)

  

Polishing for GamesCom

If I didn't said that before: Yes, we are actually going to exhibit our game at the GamesCom Cologne next week. That means that today and tomorrow we have to polish as much as we can. A screenshot from the intern of the cave at the beginning of the level, without shadows as you can see:

GOLMASTER!

I didn't post anything in the last days, because they where super stressful (and still are) especially today, because it´s the last days before Goldmaster, It´s gonna be a looong night but afterwards I can finally post a ideo with ingame material :D hurray looking forward to that. But for now I have a bunch of polishing to do...
Arrrgh wish me luck!

Again teeter and Idle

Changed the teeter animation and made a new more simple one, because the old one was too long and did not match with the rest of the animations. Afterwards I worked a bit on the second characters texture and made a new Idle blend animation which I'm still working on.

Teeter and Idle animations

Yeah so today I made new Idle Animation and a teeter animation. I'd show you a Video but currently I'm working on another PC where I can't install bandicam without the owners password. Hmm... for the rest... it´s polish time

One week left

Yesterday I forgot to post, noooo D: I went on working for the project and polished the run cycle, made finally this awful "blizzard walk" and now I have to go on with Idle animationsssss >_< If there is somebody following this blog and also interested in my project, check this out ;D => https://www.facebook.com/yourstrulydev

Additional Animation Layer

I've got now three different animations which we will randomly blend over. Next step will be the  Snow storm walk animation and aftherwards new Idle animations


    

This and that

Today I made a small tremble animation which will be played randomly while you walk through the level and a really basic run cycle for our second character.

Getting closer

Today it went pretty good I think. I love to work with animation layer. Still some things to fix but pretty satified today:

Layered animations and stuff

So today  I worked on a normal walk cycle for our character (yeah I know, he still seems pretty drunk, thats because I exagerated slightly with all these curves I made xD) aand I tried to use animation layers as you can see in the video. He's suposed to freeze and to wrap his arms around his body, another layer will be the walk with his arm in front of his head like the one I was trying to make the last days.

New plans

Today I've decided : I'll animate that whole walk cycle thing in layers. Because in our 5 minutes of gameplay you ll find different weather situations and layering the animations will be the best solution I think. That means I have to start over again.....

tricky situation

Lost one hour of my life looking for a possibility to make gif animations for this blog xD I learned that in this case a videoclip is still better, sorry r3AdY
Got also some feedback from my teacher. He said it's gonna be pretty tricky since it is a twisted body moving in a reeally strange way. I have just to keep on trying. But for today I'm K.O.
Good night.

He walks like a lady

I'm still far away from the actual result I'd like to achieve but we're getting there. There is still a lot to tweek especially in the upper parts. But thats my first real walk with the cycle tecnique: Tomorrow I'll ask my animation professor for some feedback.

Too slow..

This tequnique is a pretty tough job. It seems I am not getting anywhere these days. On Wednesday we've got animation lessons. Hopefully I'll get some useful input to be faster with my work.
I'm not satisfied at all.

Saturday night

Instead of making party or meet friends I just sit here in front of my Computer doing this walk cycle for our main character. Surely someone with more experience had finished that work in less than an hour but thought its something new for me it takes its time: Still it doesnt look like it should, but I'm on a good way.

Cycle all the things!!!!

After todays animation lesson I decided to start all over again with the windy walk animation. At the beginning I chose to do a pose to pose Animation but recognizing now, that that is total bullshit for a walk cycle I'll cycle now every single animation. That means: more Control!!! (and more work, but good exercise ;D)

Hello again

Oh no, shame on me D: I did'nt post anything in the last two days! :-/ maybe thats why we had lots of discussions in our team about how to proceed with the production of the game. But actually it shouldn't be an excuse, because I could have done something anyway...

Yeah, so what I did today was redesigning that one special walk against the wind for the main character. I began also to set the first keyframes and hopefully i'll upload a nice video soon :D

Dog Run Cycle

During some research I did for a next project I fell in love with Wolf Links run cycle in Twilight Princess, so I tried to do one by myself. Mesh and rig are free downloadable at Creative Crash. Tomorrow I'll post a Video when it´s done :)

Back

After two days of total unproductiveness tomorrow I'll be back at work! Many animations are waiting to be done until Goldmaster! GoGoGo!!

Chillout action

Well, finally I got some rest before the final spurt. Today I just read my new book, made some rainbow monster sketches and played with my DS all day long ;D

Three more weeks to go

The milestone today went pretty well. Now there are three weeks left until the Goldmaster and lots of animation polishing to do. Looking forward to it :) But now i need some rest. The last days were super stressful. Good night

Last day before Milestone 2

Rig is set up and now i'm doing the skinning while listening to Pirates of the caribbean soundtrack ;) yeah. it's  gonna be a looong night!

Rig changes

Yeah, as I said before we wanted to use the rig from the other character. But because of minimal differences with the proportions i decided now to change the old rig a bit and to renew the legs. Nice exercise though.

Milestone fever

On Friday our team has it`s second milestone. So we're working day and night to bring the project as far as possible. Currently I'm helping with the environment stuff and the second main character by getting him ready for the game and the cutscene ;D

 He will get the same rig as the other character for time reasons.

Rocks and stuff

Hopefully next week I'm going to continue making some animations. But since then I have du model rocks for our Level, yay

.... nothing to post :(

Since I don't want to post any ingame screenshots yet from the project im working on, there is nothing I could post on this blog :-/ because the last three days I only did some tests with shaders and painted dummy textures for our game.

New arrival

Yeah, yesterday came the awesome book I ordered.
576 pages of finest animation knowlegde

Battle plans

I just returned from a day full of discussions about what to put in our game before the goldmaster. Sadly I can't post anything I did today, because of all the talking. But it turned out to be a very good idea to decide most of the important things for our game and to clear up questions.
I think it will be nice to read this Blog in a year from now and to remember how it was working on that project. Looking forward to that. :)

Le Unwrap!

Yeah, today I spent my time staring at the UV-Unwrap Editor in 3Ds Max. We had Digital Character lessons and went on working on a head in 3D. Now I'm doing exactly the same: unwrapping some flowers for our awesome game =>

Working on it

So, now the run cycle is much smoother:

But I see, that the video quality is´nt the best, because it seems like that there are still are some serious flipping Problems... >_< any suggestions for a good (free) tool to film my screen? 

Moar anatomy

Yeah, today i´ve got photoshop lessons all day long, so in the meanwhile i did some anatomy study. I think i´ll need that in the future when doing facial animations.

Terrific weekend!!

Ermergherd!!! Check this out!!

So my team spontaneously decided to go to the Munich Filmfestival from thursday to saturday, because there they had some kind of "Game Special". It was a big deal because ThatGameCompany partecipated with a lecture about their games Flow, Flower and Journey, the ones, that inspired our student project the most. So there was no way we should not cross whole Germany to get there!

An it reaally was worth it! The first day we followed a lecture of Quanticdreams co-CEO Guillaume de Fondaumiére about their new game Beyond: two souls and heavy rain (one of my favorite Games of all time!) and afterwards we also got the chance to change a few words with him and take pictures. :D

Saturday finally Sunni Pavlovic, studio manager from ThatGameCompany, came to perform a both breathtaking as inspiring lecture. We all really were left there with our mouths open when she finished.
And now the clue! We got also the chance to talk with her AND to show her some screenshots from our game. She was really happy to see, that we were also trying to show the player a whole new way to make and experience games.:) I´m super motivated now to give my best to get the most out of our project :D:D

These three days: Just overwhelming, i swear! Memorable for my career as Game Animator!

Run Cycle

The run cycle so far. Still a lot to fix

Arrghhh...!!!

Yesterday I didn't post anything! That was because in the evening I went to the cinema and watched the new Superman film. :-/ But actually that´s no excuse, I should have done things earlier.... So I wanted to adjust the jump animation, but although i tried figuring out how to do the landing is still have no clue. For now I just imported the animation without landing in the engine and it kind of works, not as I wish, but it works as a dummy jump.

Today I have to create the "pushed run" animation for our character. I'm using a 2D rough animation as reference, that our Concept Artist made for me, all credits for this picture go to her. :)  Maybe later I will upload a video :)

To start over again

I was testing the jump in the engine early today when I realized that the timing I planned for the animation, wasn't working for a game. My animation needed some extra time before the character could really jump in the air, but after some research I learned that in games a Jump anticipation ruins the game feeling and I had to start the animation over again in a whole new way. But like with the other one I have problems with the landing, hopefully i'll figure out tomorrow how to fix that.

Some anatomy

This evening I did some anatomy exercise for my next project. Although i wanted to draw the whole concept already, but there is still a lot for me to learn.

Jump, jump, jump

So today I restarted with the Jump Animation for little Loki (it's the name the team gave our main character). It went better than yesterday, on the video you can see how far i came with the animation. There is still a lot do.

Hmmm....

Today I wasn't really successful with my work, because i had lessons all day long so afterwards I was pretty tired and the jump animation for our game character didn't really worked out. Tomorrow i will start all over again and hopefully get better results.

Work in progress...

At the moment I'm working on a project called "Yours truly". It's my task to bring the main character to life. Currently i'm stuck with the jump animation.
 

Hello world - here I am!

My name is Miriam, i’m 21 years old and currently living at Berlin where I study Game Art & Animation. I created this Blog for one simple reason: I want to become an Animator and to make myself do at least one exercise everyday i’ll use this blog as my diary. I want to see my progress by uploading every day something of my work hoping that one year from now  i’ll have the skills to start my career as an Game Animator.

So let’s get startet: