Trex Scene

To learn a bit of Arnold, I did a quick render of a Tyrannosaurus scene I demonstrate in my iAnimate Creature Workshop. I also added some sound effects from https://freesound.org/



This is a video of the class, edited down to some highlights but will hopefully still give you some insight into my approach and process for a scene like this.



Since the animation was pretty simple, I thought the shot would benefit from some extra creatures. I hoped these would add some interest and a greater sense of life to the final result. Here I've highlighted these animations - a flying pterosaur and some small scavenging dinosaurs based upon compsognathus.

Intro to Creature Animation Course

I created a quick series of videos for iAnimate and thought it might be helpful to post them in order here -

Episode 1 = Intro
Episode 2 = Principles
Episode 3 = Anatomy
Episode 4 = Walk
Episode 5 = Trot
Episode 6 = Gallop
Episode 7 = Canter
Episode 8 = Polish

Weight Theory

Creature Animation workshop 3 - Lecture: Scale from iAnimate on Vimeo.

Here is a little animation experiment I conducted as part of my iAnimate fantasy creature workshop to demonstrate how I think about adding scale and weight to characters and creatures.

iAnimate Podcast

I was asked to be a part of the iAnimate podcast series, the results of which can be found here

I'll be an instructor on their upcoming creature workshop on Flight and fantasy creatures. More information available here

Goose Animation from Bird Flight Demo

I recently did a bird flight demonstration at an animation conference called Move Summit in Scotland. It's always a fun, if a somewhat daunting challenge to animate in front of people - not least because anatomy expert Stuart Simida was in the audience!

In the demo I created a basic flight cycle using a goose character, here is the animation below with an added background and glide.




I've also added a donate button to this blog. Many people have contacted me to say that they have found my bird flight tutorial useful. That is great to hear and I am happy to give this and my other tutorials away for free but the website does cost me money to host and I don't really use it for anything else now. So if you have enjoyed my bird flight tutorial and you have a spare buck or two I would really appreciate the help and you would make sure the tutorial continues to be a resource for yourself and others to use. Many Thanks!

Article and Archaeopteryx Exhibit

For the last 8 month or so I'be been creating a museum exhibit featuring the bird-like dinosaur archaeopteryx as part of my current research, here's an article on the ideas and processes behind it.

https://theconversation.com/flight-of-the-living-dead-how-animation-brings-extinct-species-back-to-life-86737

And here are some pictures of the exhibit itself

The bones assembling into the animal

Flying

Standing

Walk Cycle Creation Time-lapse

This is a recording of my process for animating a walk cycle in Autodesk Maya. I created the video as a tutorial for the animation students of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee. At this point in the course the students have already created a walk cycle using 2D, drawn animation so I aim to show a process that follows on from their traditional training. However, I hope this video will also be helpful to other animation students or anyone that is interested in learning more about the computer animation process.



There are quite a lot of pauses, extra camera rotations and general mouse waving as I was talking as I was animating.