Antoine Dugas-Viallis, Animation

THE LOOP BOT

Context :

The Loop Bot is a school project. Every student had to create a place with a window and two doors, showing a world, and animate the character walking through this place in 144 frames.

In this way the bot will loop between all the places, like a dimension traveler, as if the doors were portals.

DA & CONCEPT ART

My goal for this project was to match a cool 2D matte painting and 2D animation with the 3D render.

I chose to make the run-down shack of a tomato's grower, in a desert, inspired by the Andalusia. His home is near a giant and beautiful city. The grower doesn't have a lot, except his tomatoes he only has a big chest. But what's in it ?

The most important point of my environment is the chest so I do everything I can to highlight it. I work the framing in order to create some mystery with the chest, I want that the audience ask themselves : 

"Why is there a big chest in such a bleak place like this ?"

It's what I tried to figure it out in my concept art, with the staging of the shot, the light script and finally the color script.

PROPS DESIGN

Once I knew all objects I'll need for my shot, I started to design them. I focused mainly to keep the bleak and makeshift art direction.

CG ENVIRONMENT

Then, with the 3D, I do my best to match this atmosphere with the modeling, lighting and shading.

3D ANIMATION

Here comes my favorite part, for the school exercise we had to create a walk cycle of the bot, allowing him to pass through every student places.

I made two walk cycles, it gets me to know the rig well, but for the final animation of the shot I had another idea in mind...

In the final animation, I want the character to be suspicious as he walks towards the chest, I want him to move really carefully. Then, when he reaches the chest, he realizes the danger outside and sprint to the door to exit of the place.

All of this animated in a "cartoon" style.

Inbetweens

Breakdowns

keys

2D ANIMATION

The things the character he's afraid of is a Mega-Beast, which I animated in 2D with procreate dreams.

I designed a sort of humanoid T. rex with a long neck in order to work overlaps and the weight on his head. For the final shot, I decided to reduce the length of his arms because I was too close of the deadline and I didn't have the time to animate them.

It was the first time I really finish a 2D animation, and I really appreciated it. Thanks to it, I now know what I need to focus on, so I get better with my future hand-drawing animations.

Quick sketch : Mega-beast charadesign 

Tie down

Color

MATTE PAINTING

To match the matte painting with my concept, I drew the Andalusian desert with the tomato field and the immaculate city.

FINAL SHOT & COMPOSITING

For the exercise we had the constraint to render realistic shaders, so it was quite challenging to match my 2D style with the 3D render in compositing. I tried my best and here is the shot

compositing

beauty render

THE PURSUIT RUN

The goal here was to familiarize me with IK/FK switch and have fun with the acting of the waitress being pursued by something terrible...

FINAL SHOT/COMPOSITING

I just create ruins modelisation and add volume to lights to give some context to the shot

INBETWEENS

Here it's where I'm focusing on overlaps, add weight on the graph, checking my arcs, matching IK/FK and correct bugs.

BREAKDOWNS

At this step I make sure the timing/spacing works and try to push every pose looking at the outline of the character in order to have a great readability.

EXTREMES

I try to push all the poses to bring dynamism in my animation, I do that principally with force line in the character.

KEYS

With these poses, I can check if the narrative aspects of the shot and the framing work. 

PARKOUR

Here we go again, a new exercise to dive deeper in the IK/FK switch. I really enjoyed animating a shot with a lot of action like this.

FINAL SHOT/COMPOSITING

It was cool to add some smear, so the animation is more fluid.

INBETWEENS

I struggle really hard to polish these movements and I tried my best to add overlaps

BREAKDOWNS

Here I adjusted the timing/spacing, pushed all the poses and checked if the rotation of the body works in all jumps

EXTREMES

I worked hard to push poses and have nice shapes but keep the readability of the movement

KEYS

With these poses, I tried to set a whole coherent and understandable movement. It was a little difficult with all these quick actions.

And... That's all for my best animation works trough this school year, I learn a lot thanks to them and it was a real pleasure. Now I'll keep studying in order to produce better projects, I can't wait for the next year !!

Thank you for your reading, I hope that you found some interesting works in my entry.

Goodbye :)