My Character Animation Reel - Crits welcome

Hi all,

I’ve recently put together a reel to showcase my character animation. Most of it was done this month (within the last few days, to be specific), however one of the shots goes back to June last year (the guy in the cart). All of the assets are mine except for the Norman rig in the first shot.

C&C welcome!

Nice. I like the way you intersperse the cuts of the dancing guy.

I kind of expected the pencil animation of the piano player to segue into a 3d character acting out the same bit, and was disappointed when it didn’t.

I’m not sure the orange and white diagonal border around the cart animation is a good idea. It works with the product demo animation, but I’d like to see the storytelling animation full frame.

The spider walk cycle would look better on a textured plane, so we could see the feet aren’t slipping. Unless, of course, they are slipping, in which case you might want to shorten the clip, so the idea that they might be slipping doesn’t occur to your audience.

Good choice of music, too.

It ends rather abruptlly, though. I guess it’s not finished?

Hi Orinoco, thanks so much for your feedback! Gosh, having the Pianist in 3D is a great idea. I may just focus on that today in between work. Indeed, it does end rather abruptly, I do need to create more content for it. I rendered it out as is in order to have something to show clients, however I’ll try to create more content today. (perhaps the Pianist :wink: )

I had also meant to add a textured ground plane to the spider animation. unfortunately, though, the files got corrupted at one point when I removed my external while Blender and AE were still open (long story), so I was just putting in the few bits of footage that I have. Do you think it would be better to remove them? After having read your comments I’m also seeing slipping on the feet everytime :smiley:

Oh, and the animation with the cart is 100% laziness. I should just render out the components in HD and put it in full size. maybe (hopefully) I’ll fit that in today as well. maybe even finish it at some point :wink:

Well I can report that I’ve begun work on a piano shot. I’m not sure how much of the piece I’ll end up animating, but it definitely won’t be the whole thing (around 20 minutes). I’d ideally like to get some cool movement, however, so definitely some of the more expressive parts. This is rendered from viewport in material mode with ambient occlusion. The character took 3 days to model, texture and rig, and I’ve spent about a day’s worth of work spread over 2 animating. Let me know what you think