Torran Rodgers, BA (Hons) Computer Animation Arts, UCA Rochester

  Character Design Research After the first character design session I researched other interpretations of cartoon sharks as well as UPA characters to better understand how they look and what my character could look like. The main take away of this early research is how little the character design for the shark is in the grand scheme of achieving the look of a UPA animation. The important parts are Colour ,Layout and the economy of space in the scene. Focusing on achieving dramatic almost surrealist images with the characters being a focal point of these minimalist designs. After speaking with Justin we have decided that understanding the layout of the scene is more important then the design of the character themselves. The main reason being the designs are build to be economical and will develop more as I gain a better understanding of what I need them to be doing in my scene.

  Character Design Research: UPA Animation After initial research on the UPA animation prompt I found a series of informational videos on UPA. The second video in this 3 part series discussed what made UPA Animations so individual and recognisable to the animations that surrounded them at the time. This gave me a fairly good understanding of how I will approached designing my character. And why making choices in its design will bring it closer to the UPA Style. The idea's of UPA branch from a few key ideas being creativity, ideology and financial necessity. The people at UPA found cheap ways of showing there characters and there art form not shying away from showing the audience what there watching is animation animation, an ideology that would be the core of this style. Animation as Art is the principled idea for UPA. each frame was animation not trying to be realistic instead a picture reminiscent of great painters and comic strip artists. When it came to designing there animat...

  Character Design : Session 1 I was given my set of criteria for my character design for this unit. I got a Shark, Diva in the UPA animation style. That is set in a 50's MGM Dance Musical, having a musical night out on the town while dancing. The first part of the session was researching a object, before designing it to look like it belongs to someone and seeing that character in the object. During this first session I researched my conceit, this being UPA animation while doing some drawing of sharks. Mainly I was trying to understand the style of UPA and trying to apply it to the character I was given in the class and my character as a shark. Attempt 1. Second attempt. Second attempt.

  Tool Kit 2: Caustics This tutorial taught us how the tutorial up to this point can be used to create bigger more complicated effects such as caustics under water. Also it showed us how to create caustic animations from a generator and how that can be used to create a great effect in Maya. From using the atmosphere volume to the use of a gobo other light setting, the effect shows that when you layer effects the result gets more detailed and potential more realistic if thought and planning is given to how to create and what outcome you want to make.

  Tool Kit 2: Motion Blur In this tutorial we got taught a few ways to create motion blur when developing our projects. One in camera within Maya and the other after we rendered our footage in After Effects. The tools Maya gives you in the rendering of motion blur seem useful for creating motion blur accurate to the motion in the scene, something the post production way struggles with. This was really useful and something I could see myself using in the future.

  Tool Kit 2: Stand Ins Stand in's seem like a really powerful tool when creating large scene. The replication of interictally modelled assets at no cost to the viewport window seems extremely useful. It would make it easier to animate in or continue to contract large scene with highly detailed assets. I'm excited to leverage this in creating scene in the future and to be able to do it in a way that would lower the strain on my pc means we can push it to an extreme that is further then without this system.

  Tool Kit 2: AOV's The tutorial was really useful when thought about in terms of future projects and video projects. Understanding what these maps are and how you can use these in post production has inspired me to think more about what I'm getting out of my Maya renders. And the fact that you can set these up to come out along with your beauty render, and not needing to re render the footage is really good information to know, and something I will defiantly be using in the future. The use of After Effects to composite EXR footage is something I'm really interested to know more about after finishing this tutorial. It seems like a powerful pipeline step that could easily be under or over used if not thought out properly. Diffuse. ID. Specular. Beauty. Final composition.