Cat Animation

I designed a 2D animation cat that was skinny so that you could see the movement in the shoulders and legs when the cat walks. These are the three improved animation of the cat walk cycle and the jump.

The first animation is of the cat walking and then jumping into the air:

The second Animation is the cat walking slow and then jumping into the air and turning into a bird:

The third animation is the same as the one above but a quicker walk. I think the third animation is the best out of the three because the cat walks smoothly and then goes into a fat jump and then become a bird:

Practice of a 2D cat walking; Hand drawn by me and made in Premiere Pro. I think it needs some more work but it's getting there. More animation at the end needs to be added.



These are the drawn walk cycles that I put together in Premiere Pro and made the cat cycle into a small animation clip:

Changes in Sal Project

Sal's Group has changed the idea of there story production. We were gonna have 3D models made in Maya and then have the environment done in a program called View, this was to make the environment realistic. But due to come problems our group is now shorter and have decided to do the whole film in 2D along with my 3D secondary animation models. The film is now a moving image piece. Chris, Sal and Bart have done some practice animatics to show what our new film would look like.
From the animatic the group asked me to finish animating the butterfly and bee, flying in different directions and then add them into the backgrounds on after effects, also they asked if I could animate in 2D a cat walking and jumping into the air. From the animatic you can see what the Sal and Chris wants the cat to do. I might be also animating the drawn birds I have done.



My list from Chris and Sal:

• Animate Bee


• Animate Butterfly


• Animate 2D cat


• Draw different flowers from a front view


• Draw individual petals


• Draw some cat positions


• Draw birds in different positions

Below are some designs I have done so far from my list:

I want to colour in the birds and add a fur effect on them to make the 2D birds look real. I found the 3D bird I modelled in Maya really hard to texture but because of the change in the design of the film the bird will now be 2D, which I think will be easier for me because I am a strong drawer. By Monday I will have the bee and butterfly animated and then I just have to finish off the cat animation.

Daryl asked the group if they could contribute into colouring in the 2D frames and then put them in Flash to key the animated frames.

For this we used illustrator and live traced the frames with one colour logo. Then we copied the frames into Flash, with the PAL setting of 25 frames a second and 720 by 576.

The three short animated clips below are the ones I have done for the group, but I will also be doing more of these frames when Al and James have finished there 2D animation. I had to tidy the pictures with rubber so that the images looked crisp and not rough round the edges.

From my experiments I took these three images that I liked during the colour pallets. I wanted the bird to be red and I thought the red fur worked well with the model; I also liked the contrast between the purple and blue mixed fur and the brown fur worked well. Because of this I am still unsure which one I would use, so I shall ask my group mates. But after speaking with them on Friday they are doing 2D animation and having my 3D animation in the background. I think that if I can not make this bird work then I might do the animation in 2D.

I felt that the bird texture I had originally was not up to a high standard and I wanted to re-do the texture by added fur to the bird. This is because birds have fur on there bodies and feathers on their wings and I believed that's why my bird did not look right. My texture was too tiled, So in Maya8 I used the fur tool to begin trying out tests on the bird model. as you can see from the pages below, these are some of my tests (making the fur shorter and ticker) also a range of colour pallets to see which colour suited the bird better.

This model has both the original texture and the fur tool applied. I like the idea of being able to see the feathers underneath the fur but I also think it doesn't work. So I applied the fur without my texture and I used the colour black Lambert as a base colour, and then used the fur.

The bird went from this image below to the images above to make the bird more realistic, I found the texture I had was to tiled:

Bee Playblast

I have blend shaped the bee because it is secondary animation and may not be seen up close so I did not rig the model. The films I have watched on you tube of bees show that they move everything apart from there bodies. These plablasts are pratices of the animated bee, to see if the blendshapes work and also if I need to work on the bee more. By doing these playblast give me the help I need to make the animation better, to give the film a better quality.