I produced this an example for our animation students to demonstrate the use of Maya, Moho, Photoshop, GarageBand as visual and audio elements that could then be composited together in After Effects (in this case) or Final Cut Pro.

This little test animation was done with Moho. A great, intuitive 2D programme that I was working through as it had been recently introduced to the course curriculum. I thought I’d create something that would compliment the current Fox project that was on the go at the time. There’s a great feel to the programme, which is something that’s rarely said about the digital environment, it really wants to animate anything in it.

The idea for Wally Worm was for a series of short animations that involved the character being in different situations, that more often than not, ended in an unfortunate outcome for Wally. However, in the tradition of classic cartoon characters, he’s invulnerable and always returns in a new scenario non the worse (Or wiser) for any prior misfortune. Later I thought he looked too likeable to suffer such adversities, and therefore the pathos in the humor wouldn’t really work; he looks more like a character you’ d laugh with than at. Everyone who’ s seen the storyboard likes the frame shown above the most – you can see the rest of the storyboard here…

Quick demo for a series of animation shorts.
Professor Bigheadbrain continually experiments in his lab on experimental experiments that always go wrong. He was born in a lab from a genetic experiment that went wrong and in the interests of pointless academic science he’s used for observational purposes. He’s demented and so unsuccesfull in his work that he accidentally made contact with an alien life form that thought he was a primordial distant ancestor until he blew up the alien planet while experimenting on the spaceships Turbo Time Displacement matter Extrapolator which simultaniously transported Prof Bhb back to Earth where he was originally; incarcerated in his laboratory which is really a cell in a psychiatric hospital.

This little animation was done on the spot, in a manner of speaking, for a company who were looking for artwork to test the 3G (Or 2G as it was then) mobile phone network before it was opened for commercial, public use. They asked me to put something together and the next day I took it to their office on a CD (no memory sticks back then) because their internet connection was temporarily down and so was the website. They had quite a lot of 2D artwork which had been tested and wanted to try broadcasting some animation. I’d previously sent them some abstract animations which were very low file sizes due to the then narrow bandwidth and this piece was a little more adventurous.

This was modelled using 3DMax’ s Patch Modelling technique, which I preferred for creating characters to the Box Modelling method. I thought it would conform to the computer games requisite maximum polygon count for a main character of 1000 polygons but it ended up being too high.

Because I got the first Fox model wrong and concentrated too much on realistic detail, I built another model; took the complete opposite approach and went for stylization, constructed it using triangles and ended up with a very low resolution model (250 polygons) that had much more character.

Using triangles is not the recommended approach to modelling but I thought that using such an economical method would then allow me to quadrangulate the mesh afterwards to keep the polygon count to a minimum.

[initial drawings for fox character]

I then thought it should work so I looked into 3DMax’ s Pyrotechnic options, created a flame and animated the whole process.

This was the best hand I’d produced using the box modelling technique in 3DMax. My previous attempts using this approach had a tendency to result in a hand that looked like it was wearing a glove, even with the fingernails and knuckles added, due to the overall profile. With many hours of tweaking the model – a convincing hand can be produced.

The most characteristic features of a hand are the fingers and this part of the anatomy has the most detail which will give it a realistic look. Drawing a hand is a common exercise given to art students followed by drawing different types of hands, female, male, young, old, strong, gentle, hard working etc. There are so many observations to make, which is why it is a good exercise and not as easy as one initially thinks. After successive attempts I eventually found that a better, more efficient approach was to start with one finger and getting the profile and details right at that point, would lead to producing a good model of a hand.

The examples I had previously seen at that time were based on the artists own hand as the reference for their model and mine is no different.

The image above is accompanied by a very short animation:

Taking on the challenge of reproducing an actual real product taught me a lot about the programme and was good eye training. The approach was to look at something and then recreate it in 3D without making it a long drawn out exercise as I still had course assignments to complete, therefore only had limited time to spend on modelling the lamp. The exercise also was good for applying the thought process to the programme as when you are trying to achieve what your eye can see the translation of how you think you can do it and how you actually achieved the end result are often very different. I placed the twister lamp in front of my desk and studied it as each part was modelled with the aim of reproducing the proportions and scale of the original. The design of the lamp is quite intricate and is a challenging task for a beginner.  Many mistakes were made and so many lessons were learnt.