Current Showreel: May 2014

Will give  a  better blog update soon!
In the mean time please check out my new showreel:

See you soon,

Claire Hodges

Horse development - Prance

We have to make making of videos... So I thought I would give you guys some thoughts behind my process!

(Sorry for English, Sleep is for the weak, is my latest motto)

See you soon,

Claire

Ffresh 2014 award for best Game/Interactive goes to!!

So you know last year... Around about this time, you saw the guy on here with the spade staff and the hood. He was part of Form Wars, a project directed by Conor Moloney and Pavel Tsihhotski. I had the amazing chance of animating one of the kings on the game, the one leading the nature fraction.

So all that, and we won a Ffresh award for it! How fantastic! Will get a photo up of us with the trophy as soon as I get one. In the mean time take a look at the game:

See you soon,

Claire

White Tiger: Rigging - Leg test

Using some MEL based scripting I have just started creating my leg rig. Please check it out.

The difficulty of this rig, with regards to the feet, is the use of bipdeal rigging methods on a digigrade (?!) leg... So... a human leg rigging method on a leg with a mix of quad and biped features.

See you later, check back for more Rigging fun times in about... well... TONIGHT!

Claire

PMF: Producer

(You should be able to HD this...)

So I had to reduce the time for PMF... Because we're only meant to do 20seconds of animation for each project, and the lecturers liked this segment, which was fine for me.
The whole point of this exercise was to prove that I could animate a character who reacts to things being said for 20 seconds... In a subtle way... this was the point. This was artistic intent as, if you've seen the other vids, the Director is incredibly cartoony and hyper-active!
This was a lot of fun to do, as I am not a serious, or subtle person (I am the Director).. well apart from when I have to be...
Anyway! Lavs will be up next week for laughs!
Morpheus @ Josh Burton

See you later,
Claire

What have I been up to?

RIGGING!!!
Which is insanely fun as I am applying some MEL script I have been learning, (incredibly basic, mostly variable naming then recalling and stuff.) But really cool, have more or less done a Rig in two weeks... which would've taken me four last year! It's also more robust!!

Anyway, deadline is approaching, so I thought I would briefly update.

So while I was completing other pieces, I was communicating with Pierre Laffoux, an amazing ex-grad of Glamorgan, who made just about the most bulky, broad and well built character I had seen that year! Obviously I wanted to rig it! Please check out his website.

We both communicated to each other ways to improve the mesh for better deformation, which was a learning curve for both of us, as I am not known for modelling and Pierre seemed to enjoy what I did know.

Just a few notes I sent to him after one model evaluation session!

I have now got a fantastic model to rig, and I hope my Rigging skills are up to the standards of his modelling!!

See you later,

Claire

Website is ONLINE

Hi all,
In prep for FMX, and because I needed it done anyway, I have completed my website!

Any constructive criticism would be loved - what draws your eye, what repels it? Is it warm and inviting, or just plain chaotic?! Would love to know.

Website is HERE

Also my latest showreel is up and active, so take a look!

Also... that lady's voice? Yeah... That's mine!


See you soon,

Claire

Practical Process: WIP - Editing

Hi all,

Thought I would add some more progress shots of my PMF project.. This time of the other character, she's a director, but I need more props to show that... Anyone got any recommendations?

A new part of my process is to take my latest playblast (When I can't think of anything else to do to it, but it doesn't feel right), and draw over it in photoshop... This helps me produce more exaggerated shapes, follow lines of action easier... and just generally have more fun!

Ta for listening,

Claire

Deer animation

Hi all,
I don't believe I posted that deer sting I was on about... So here you go (please view in HQ!):

I was in charge of (in Pipeline order): Research, story idea, pose ideas, storyboarding, being a camera woman, deleting rolling shutter, working as a team to matchmove, Rigging, Animating, Rendering and post production - including colour correction, roto and shadow correction!

Thanks for visiting,

Claire 

Industry Indent: Double negative

Established in 1998 Double Negative, or Dneg for short, have worked on several exciting projects both for
major studios, Harry Potter, Skyfall, Man of Steel, etc. and independant film makers for films like Shaun of the Dead, Paul, Attack The Block, etc. 
They have won an academy award for Inception, as well as four VES awards (three for Inception) and two BAFTA awards, one for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, and the other for Inception.



Their pieces range from Character animation (Paul) to vehicle animation (Rush) and crowd animation (John Carter), again another diverse range of work that thrills me when I see it. Double Negative was another studio that visited USW in 2013, and gave a fantastic talk on their involvement with the animation of the Tharks in John Carter. Specifically they talked about the crowd scenes featuring the Tharks, such as the gladiator ring scene with the White Apes... Who are petrifying! For all those who paint John Carter with the 'flop' brush, I urge you to watch the film again with fresh eyes, the VFX are glorious, the realistic character animation on the Tharks is fantastic, and how they solved the whole four arm idles is brilliant. The film itself is well worth the watch just for all the Thark scenes, as you can see the heart and soul poured into the characters, each bringing a believable human aspect to the film. If you believe the story has influences from other Sci-fi hits like Star wars, then read the origins for the script, as the book 'John Carter of Mars' was produced early 20th century, and is in fact the stem of the other Sci-fis! Anyway, I'm detracting!
In fact this talk was the one to get me into rigging, due to the sequences they showed of all the facial animation, and how the deform shapes, and underneath muscles, were triggered by controls. However the main appeal of this talk to me how they interpreted the motion capture data for four armed characters, describing how the arms were arranged for dominate and recessive actions. This blend between motion capture and realistic key-framed animation is what drew me towards the studio. I approached the team after the talk and I was very fortunate... and very cheeky as I asked... to arrange a visit to Dneg late last near when they were in full production of a film I cannot mention because of reasons... However I am very excited to see it in the Cinema!!
If you cannot tell from my typing, I have been very inspired by the realistic animation Dneg has produced over the years, and cannot wait to see more! See you later, Claire

PMF - Producer Dialogue

So much for those sketches the other day right? Sorry, I had a couple of deadlines to attend to, but most of its out of the way now, so I get to host more stuff for you guys now! Including this:

My current version of the Pigs may fly lipsync... I'm a bit worried because I am only meant to be doing 20 seconds for each topic.... HMMMM... Oh well!
Hope you guys enjoy,
Any feedback would be appreciated!
See you soon,
Claire

Background textures and scene setup - Office

So you guys do not know about my projects for university as of yet, however I want to show you some of my render tests I have been making for my personal project... As well as texutres... Turns out I'm going down a generalist route, I only need to add modelling to the CV!

Following images copyright details:

Morpheus rig, suit,

Following came with no textures: Darts and Dart board, Clock, Chair, Desk, iMac, Desk Caddy.

Room Texture

City texture

Textures made in photoshop for this project include the 2D textures on the walls (inspired by 101 dalmatians backgrounds), and the background cityscape. The city was deliberately coloured to contrast the blue cool colours inside the office. Blue being the character's colour scheme, as he is a very calm, collected character.

Glass test render

Final room render

I also installed large areas of glass into the walls of the room to allow better lighting of the character.

CG assets, like the dart board, originally came in untextured, texturing selected faces of the object quickly rectified this problem. Tacks and paper were made and textured by myself as well.

Final Desk render, came out better than I thought, the 2D city image being reflected nicely in the table surface added to the texture of the background I think!

Now to progress to animation!!!

See you soon,

Claire

Production Pipeline : Pre-Production

A third year university collaboration project, working with Modeller Beks Rootes (link for her work to come), we were tasked to make a short sting for a TV studio. This involved making the characters, background, story, basically the whole sha-bang of production from scratch.

As the animator/TD (technical director) of this project, for preproduction I created character concepts, ideas for poses, but most importantly the story itself. 

We originally looked towards an E4 sting, as most projects worked to the E4 criteria, but as the look evolved we aimed for a company where we could explore cute more. We kept in mind the modeller's sculpting criteria for her brief, so the simplistic designs were scrapped.

 If I am honest here, maybe one of these poses originated from a deer? Most came from pouncing cats and dogs, hence why in some pictures I am struggling with proportions... although back flexibility (or lack of) was kept in mind while making anatomy adaptations.

However thumbnails above did come from deers...

This sequence was turned into an animatic.

As a TD I was in charge of creating a rig for this project as well. This was a basic rig diagram I created for reference in production.

Soon to come - The sting itself!
The process of production as well....

Update on that Gallop animation from yesterday... Getting there... I think.

Whooops! Better update you guys!

Hi All,

Been a mad time as of late with so much going on, preproduction, dissertation, production.... The list goes on. However what remains the same is I did not update the blog.

This does mean there is a back log of things to post however!

So to begin with, take a peak at my Work In Progress animation of a horse, for one of my major production projects.

See you soon,

CartoonClaire

Showreel so far

Latest updated showreel for 2013, including some things that I have done this year.

Progression

Animation point two... Need to get faster...

Figurative

Body mechanics pieces made in my first year of Computer Animation at the University of Glamorgan

Thumbnails:

Second year: Hand project

My hand that I made for my advance tech project, second year, at the University of Glamorgan.
Modeled in Maya and sculpted in Mudbox