Lately

I've just completed my submission for the 11 second club competition this June. I have animated all the poses for the doctor and the patient character. I also managed to finish modelling and rigging the stethoscope, although I'm still not entirely satisfied with the outcome. Overall, I feel quite pleased with the poses in this piece, although I don't think I will be working with the Blake or the Nimo rigs again.

The competition closes around the beginning of July, at which point you can start voting for the submissions, so I shall let you know when the time comes ;)

Other than the 11 second club, I have also recently enrolled in life drawing classes at Lewisham Art House. I have also been doing some sketches for some character designs, as well as reading up on drawing of cartoons and caricatures; because I also want to take my drawing further.

I think the next step for July is to develop my understanding of rigging as this is a core skill for an animator. Mike sent out an email suggesting that we practice our rigging by designing a character, and then modelling and rigging it. I think this would be a good exercise to take on, as I am not so good at modelling in Maya and this will improve my ability to apply my designs and creativity to my CG animation work.

After I've worked on rigging, I think I will try making another dialogue or action driven animation piece, either a short film or another 11 second club entry.

I am also up for working on group projects with any animators, so if anyone is interested, give me a shout ;)

11 second project so far

So far, I've done the lip syncing for both characters and I've also animated the poses for the "doctor" character. I haven't done all the poses for the "patient" character yet.

I've made a playblast of what I have done for the animation so far, so please let me know what you think...

First lip sync using Blake

For the 11 second submission, I have chosen to use Blake for the Doctor character. From using it, I've found that I don't really like the facial controls, because they are quite restrictive and I've found it's quite tricky to bring life to this character.

I chose this rig because he resembles a "doctor" character and I thought using this rig alongside a more generic rig would be quite comical.

I've done some lip syncing, so tell me what you think.

So it looks like I'm shit at 3d modelling then :/

One of the props that will appear in my 11 second club entry is a stethoscope. I couldn't find any decent models of stethoscopes on the internet that would work in Maya or that I didn't have to pay for, so I had a go at modelling a stethoscope myself.

I've just found that I'm not very good at 3d modelling, so I think I'll be better off focusing on the animation side.

What do you think?