Promo pack

Annecy Job applications

As i'm going to Acceny this year i used their website to apply for jobs. As i can only use one cv and showreel for this i'm applying for more 3D Artist, modeling jobs.

Plans for the future

I contacted Christopher Coleman who has a very interesting and helpful blog all about the animation industry in China. His response was very helpful for me, i took his advice onboard and started working on work for my showreel.

After getting my showreel sorted i applied for an internship at Disney which unfortunately i got turned down for but viewing the quality of the work on the showreels that get picked, i am a very far way off from that. Which is ok, at least now i have better revaluated the level of my skills.

I also applied for a 3d artist internship at Blue Zoo, i have yet to hear a response from them.

In terms of my plans to move to China, i have set up a meeting with an ex Leeds college of art student who worked at a foundation school in Beijing, this is to find out more information about this opportunity.

To be honest i'm not in the best position because my skills need to be improved a lot because i can get a job in a studio and to do that i need more time which i don't have. But i'm sure something will work out.

Social networking platforms

Throughout last year and this year i have used Instagram as the main platform for displaying my work. This year however i still use Instagram a lot for posting my work but i have created an Art station because this is what a lot of professionals use for their portfolio. Especially 3d modellers, so it was important for me to create one.

The other website i have been used more is LinkedIn. I created it in second year but never used it so this year i updated it and started using it a lot more to find professionals and find out more about their work and also its a really great platform for getting noticed.

Branding

For my branding i wanted to use an image of one of my 3d models as the icon. I picked the one with the most interesting silhouette because i think this is the most primary thing people will see.

Contacting people

1 At MAF i spoke to tom box from blue zoo and he said he would put me through to a modelling to have a look at my modelling work. Unfortunally i never got any feedback for my work but i'm sure this is because he is just very busy.

2 On my instagram account i saw blue zoo liked one of my modelling posts so i messaged them on instagram asking for advice.

3 On the annecy messaging system i contacted a director from pearl studies in Beijing asking for advice on my showreel. unfortunately i got no response.

4 I contacted Chris Coleman who is a animation journalist and he gave me some very useful advice. He told me about some companies and told me to concentrate on my showreel and getting that good first.

5 I contacted a designer called Oliver Smith who worked in a school in Beijing. I have a meeting with him soon

6 I sent a message to a modeller called Christopher Wright who i realy admire as a modeller but unfortunately i got no response.

7 I sent a message to Pedro Conti who is a modeler and texture artist who i really like but unfortunately i lso got no response.

I also messaged alot of other professionals but unfortunately none of them got back in touch with me.

为什么我开始学中文了 why i have started to learn Chinese

从我在大学开始最后的一年级我开始学习汉语，现在我的中文练习有一个真大部分在自己的生活中。为了学中文我每天早上学习两小时。但是有的时候我太忙的时候或者我太累了我只花一小时学中文。

最近我通过了我的中文考试。所以现在我可以把成绩放在我的CV了，因此现在我希望找工作在中国不太难的。

学中文让我用我的时间更聪明的，而且我觉得学一个语言是一个很好事情做。现在我找不到动画工作机会在中国但是我会继续找。我联系一个动画工作的人了。他现在住在北京， 我问他我应该做什么而我问他我应该用什么办法去中国。他的回答是我应该只学习很多，让我的 showreel 更好看，然后找动画工作在中国。

当然，现在我的中文不太好了所以我仍然需要继续努力。但是我开始学一个很有意思的语言的基础。

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From the beginning of my last year at university, I began to learn Chinese. Now I have a Chinese practice that has a big part in my life. In order to learn Chinese, I study for two hours every morning. But sometimes when I'm too busy or I'm too tired, I only spend an hour learning Chinese. I recently passed my Chinese exam. So now I can put my achievements in my CV, so now I hope to find a job in China is not too difficult. Learning Chinese allows me to use my time smarter, and I think learning a language is a good thing to do. At the moment I can't find an animation job in China but I will continue to look for it. I contacted an animator. He lives in Beijing now. I asked him what I should do and I asked him what method I should use to go to China. His answer is that I should firsty study a lot, focus on getting my showreel looking better, and then find animation work in China. Of course, my Chinese is not very good now so I still need to work hard. But I have started to learn the basics of a very interesting language.

Life Drawing

I have been developing my life drawing skills as well as my other skills such as modelling and rigging as i believe constructional drawing techniques are the basis for a lot of disciplines in animation. especially modelling.

I think drawing is the most important subject. Because drawing is the foundation of many disciplines. These are some of my drawings from this year:

Why i have decided to pursue hand drawn animation as well as 3d modeling/rigging

Internships

I have put a lot of effort this year into finding internships over the summer because I feel like second year is the best time to start looking for internships.

I emailed a lot of places for internships including Rockstar Leeds and other rigging places but I also wanted to find an internship relating to hand drawn animation because I have decided to specialise in both areas, 3d modelling/rigging and hand drawn animation.

For hand drawn animation, internships are harder to find I think because it’s such a specialised field but I immediately thought of Joanna Quinn’s studio, Beryl productions in Cardiff.

Joanna Quinn has been my favourite animator since I started practicing hand drawn animation and after emailing her studio and making a quick cv and hand drawn animation showreel, she offered me a week work experience doing drawing exercising and hopefully in-betweens on her new film. I am extremely grateful for this amazing opportunity and hopefully will gain lots of knowledge and insight whilst on this work experience.

Creative Report

Implementing zbrush into general workflow

I have started to learn zbrush as it's an import tool used heavily in the animation and film industry. I am trying to introduce zbrush to the pre production workflow. It really helps in pre production even if the project is ultimately 2d based because with zbrush you can quickly get a concept sculpt of characters and quickly get colours down on them.

For applied, after we had the characters designed, i added to the development of the designs by doing a very quick concept sculpt with dynamesh just to get a better idea for the forms and features of the character. I then used this as reference when animating.




This is a concept sculpt for another teams applied project, i wanted to sculpt this character as i thought it would be good practice as the pose is quite definitive.





I struggled for a while with getting the model with the colours into Maya but i finally managed it. However i need to learn more about the zbrush - Maya workflow because i think this will be very beneficial to me.

Development of my 3d rigging skills

My love for rigging has developed greatly over the past year. I began learning the discipline of rigging at the end of first year with the e4 ident project. I find rigging very logical and simple, when i say simple i do not mean easy. I mean that if there is a mistake it is because i have done something to break the logical structure of the rig.

This is one of the main things i love about rigging (among many). Any rig is possible essentially, its just the problem solving ability to make it work practically. This is also why programming is important to learn as a rigger because having a knowledge of programming opens up Maya and lets you fine tune any aspect of the program to make rigging easier and do things which would otherwise be impossible.

One important thing i have come to learn when learning programming alongside Maya is that Maya is just code visualized. The tools inside Maya are just functions. Realizing this made me implement the script editor more when using Maya, especially when rigging.

I made quite a few rigs this year, ranging from quick simple rigs to very complex rigs. I have been told not to get too far ahead of myself, as i have a very ambitious nature but this is the best way of learning, just jumping in and figuring every problem out until the project is finished.

Rigging has illuminated an aspect of myself which i had previously not given much though to, my problem solving ability. This is going to sound very pretentious but i believe i have developed my problem solving skills through rigging and real life problems and the development of these two different aspects of problem solving are intertwined, indifferent. By improving my rigging work i have improved at handling life and visa versa. This implies that the skills used for rigging are quite foundational and cross-disciplinary.

Starting with my first exploration of rigging from the end of first year. This rig was very basic, with simple FK controls and very basic blendshapes. Despite the rig being very basic it planted my feet into the fundamentals of rigging and wanted to learn as much as i could about it from that point on.


At the start of second year, i created rigs for the character and narrative module. I started exploring some more intermediate rigging techniques, such as IK chains, combining blend shapes for a full facial rig, and starting to use set driven keys for custom movements.

 
After character and narrative i spent alot of time learning about new rigging techniques and new parts of maya which i'd never touched before, such as the node editor and the script editor (which are now a big part of my workflow). I began playing around with rigging techniques on cubes, just to experiment and explore.

My next rig was for COP. I wanted to make a stable but advanced facial rig and i would say i have achieved this. This rig exposed me to various problems and in turn solutions, which added a lot of snow to my rigging snowball of knowledge. I solved problems such as adding squash and stretch to my rig, constraining joints to a surface. The amount of problems i had on this rig was ridiculous, but I'm grateful because it means i have learnt a lot more.

   
I intend to improve my rigging skills constantly over the summer and over third year and build a massive snowman (really good rig) as evidence of my increasing snowball of rigging knowledge.

development of my 3d modelling skills

As well as rigging i am very interesting in 3d modelling. This area is highly linked to rigging with topology being the main area in which the two disciplines are reliant.

I have been practicing my 3d modelling over the past year and i have realized that with each model i make i can see improvements on the last one. This has encouraged me to keep modelling and get as much practice as i can.

What i love about 3d modelling is that it is like traditional sculpting but with the added complexity of topology, now this might sound like a limiting factor but i argue that it expands the art form of sculpture to a new level where deformation of the sculpture is the main goal. This gives the sculpture a greater and more sought for purpose.

This post is to show the development of my 3d modelling skills throughout the past year.

I'll start with the end of last year, i created a 3d model for the e4 ident brief and created a pretty poor model to rig and animate. The model was mainly poor due to its topology. The polygon density was all over the place, causing creases in unwanted areas and just being quite messy. Despite the crude model i learnt a lot because i devoted a lot of my time to studying maya.



My next models were for the first major project in second year, character and narrative, I modeled a shaman and a girl. The improvement from first year was drastic. I took on board a healthy workflow of researching (tutorials and articles) and practice. This helped me to rapidly build up my knowledge of 3d modelling. I also learnt more about topology, i realized it was very important and i payed it a lot more attention. Notice my model's structure now accurately depicts the structure of the human body, especially the face.

It was extremely exciting modelling Brenda's character, the girl, as her character was very stylized. I loved the challenge of converting something very stylized into 3d as I'm sure there are a million ways of doing it. I also impressed myself, because modelling the coat was a challenge with topology as a constraint but i managed to solve all the problems i was faced with and was left with a mesh that deformed fairly well.

As well as the characters i also modeled the props for our short animation, i found this as an exercise for really hammering in the fundamentals of 3d modelling.

 








This is a model from a character i quickly designed abit after character and narrative, relating to a story idea i jotted down. I wanted to try a more stylized character and here i got more experimental with my use of topology, trying different ways of wrapping the edge flow around the model and finding out new better ways of deforming areas. For example in this model i have quite noticeably exaggerated the topology around the eyes to form an expansive 'super-hero mask' around the eye area.








I started this next model some time after the previous one, just as a side project. This mesh is alot more organic than my other models. The polygon density is more relevant, there are a high amount of polygons in the areas of the face and hands. This is because these areas will be deforming the most and will be subject to more acute deformations, therefore an increased polygon density is required.
An area i spent along time on was the shoulders, i worked out how the shoulders move and studied more about the anatomy of the deltoids and surrounding muscles.


This next model was for my COP practical. I felt the topology was clean and deformed well but maybe the polygon density could have been more relevant. I also should have experimented with different ways of modelling the hair because although this way worked fairly well it's not the most reliable or believable way.






My love for 3d modelling has developed over the course of the past year and i believe it will continue, as will my knowledge for this area.