Animation highlights reel, July 2011. Everything keyframed except for the judo motion capture section near the beginning.

Music: Kevin MacLeod.

A soldier running and jumping over orange boxes.

Wasn't really sure how to end it, so that's why he stands upright looking very pleased with himself.

A soldier running and jumping over orange boxes... work in progress.

Wasn't really sure how to end it, so that's why he stands upright looking very pleased with himself.

A run cycle animation.

Ball physics using key frames

I wish I could say I worked on this, but I just wanted to comment on how amazing it looks - I hope there's a lot of motion capture, otherwise my head may explode from the amount of awesomeness if I discover it's all key framed. Make sure you watch the 720p version and in full screen. ;)

The trailers for the previous games are also equally impressive, getting better with each year - here's the one for Brotherhood:



Assassin's Creed 2, and the original Assassin's Creed trailers. All brilliant! So easy to forget they're CG at times.

Highlights demo.

Music: Kevin MacLeod.

My entry into May's 11 Second Club competition.

An overly dramatic jump.

Thin air chasing a strange guy with a mask and forcing him to leap from a tall building. Luckily he has strong bones.

Facial expressions animation, with lip sync and menacing looks, just before he skins and eats you.

A demonstration of facial expressions and postures, as well as a total disregard of real-world physics for comedic effect. Character rig from 3dluvr.com.

An older version of this animation can be viewed here.

Character rig - Max (from 3dluvr.com).

The most up to date version can be viewed here.

A character animation of a guy climbing onto a step and becoming the saviour of his glasses. Presented in cartoonvision for no reason at all.

Dragon animation cycle.

A character animation demonstrating interaction between two robots. The large robot rig is not mine, everything else is my own work.

An animation of a model and rig from The Matrix. The model isn't mine - purely used to animate.

Robot run cycle - to be animated further. Model and rig from ilasolomon.com.

Character animation loops of various characters and skeleton rigs intended for use in game engines.

Links to individual cycles:

Dragon flying cycle
Robot running

A video containing animated characters. Some are key framed, some motion captured and others simulated.

An animation of my dragon model in flight. The animation could've done with some more work, especially on the neck, tail and front legs, but it'll do for now.

Composited in After Effects as a bunch of layers to edit in the environment, clouds, dragon model and other effects in separately, to control the motion blur and depth of field independently.

A compilation video created in After Effects showing some quick highlights of my work in animation and effects.

My car rig allows vehicle animations to be created quickly and have simulated physics applied automatically to it, just by setting a path and speed. Further options can be adjusted such as the suspension travel, acceleration/braking weight shift, lateral g forces and over/understeer. It can easily be applied to any four wheeled vehicle and adapted to suit vehicles with more or less wheels. More info

An example of a modelled, rigged, unwrapped and textured character. I didn't spend much time on the animation as it was just a test - that's to come later.

A video to demonstrate camera matching - to be expanded on at a later date.

A robotic transforming ball initially to be used for the home page of my website but possibly for more in future.

A special effects animation of a crashing helicopter.

Click here for some of the work in progress videos

Character animation loop

Monkey animation loop

This is a version of the BBC F1 intro I made in Lego-like bricks.

The actual TV version can be seen on YouTube. You'll notice I've focussed on the first section of it, despite the second part containing car motion, which I have done a lot of in the past. This is because, well... I've done a lot of this in the past. And the first part is more interesting and better made too.

I posted this video on YouTube as well (link) where it has so far been met with praise, and quickly spread across sections of the internet, mostly via Twitter, eventually arriving at the BBC F1 homepage where it was linked to!

It has received over 5,000 views in its first week, so now I guess I'd better make part 2, which I didn't really originally intend to do, but one day I'll return to it.

A quick video to show progress on the project I'm currently working on, along with a model of the real life car I created a while back for comparison.

This is a project that formed part of my postgraduate degree which I have continued to improve afterwards, and the videos in this post should demonstrate some of its functions. I'll also explain the methods used, although I won't go into too much detail, but feel free to ask me about any specifics in the comment section after the post.

The intention of the rig is so that you can quickly and easily animate a vehicle that has been modelled without having to worry about the physics, as the rig will handle that with scripts.



The project started off life as a reactor-based rig, which was fairly easy to set up, and can be seen in a tutorial I wrote on building it. This method works well for simple animations, particularly over bumps, but I found to be quite limiting for manipulating the steering or for swapping the vehicle for another one without having to change all the settings.

I soon decided that scripting was the way to go. I followed techniques similar to this tutorial. I didn't actually follow this tutorial, but it does contain many of the techniques I did learn how to do, and I wish I'd have found this while constructing my rig. The main difference is that that is designed for a tank with tracks, while mine needed to be to suit any four wheeled vehicle, which I later expanded to allow any (even) amount of wheels, but not tracks.

The first thing I needed to do was to allow the wheels to determine where the ground was, so they could travel up and down terrain. This allowed the vehicles to not be stuck in flat, boring car parks. To do this, as in the tutorial mentioned above, I used the Conform tool on a plane and attached the wheels to it. I then used a spline curve as the path and made the conformed plane controller move along the path.

I now had a path and height sorted, the next thing was for the wheel rotation. A scripted expression was needed for this and required knowing the radius of the wheels, the length of the path, and the percentage of the path that the vehicle is situated at any given moment on the timeline. After adding these as variables in an expression for the z-axis rotation of one of the rig's wheels, the following expression should then calculate the correct rotation at each frame:

where pathpercent is the current percentage along the path that the vehicle has travelled, distance is the total length, and rad is the radius of the wheel.



The rig was now at a point comparable to reactor, minus the bump physics, but allowing the vehicle to have direction without having to pause the simulation and create new settings. The problem with the direction change is that the wheels remained pointing forwards, rather than in the direction the car intends to travel - it needed steering. This was done in a similar way to the wheel rotation, in that it was done with expressions, although it required further objects to be placed in the scene. One such object was for a marker to follow along the spline curve path slightly ahead of the path that the main rig is about to travel. This meant there was a way of knowing which direction is coming up, and so the wheels could face this direction, taking care to ignore the axis controlling the wheel rotation.

The final major obstacle was getting the vehicle to bank realistically on corners or when traversing bumps. In the following image, you can see a couple of controller points to act as the main chassis, and these were used by adding position and orientation constraints in the motion wheel tab, then making the geometry that is following the spline curve bank on corners and using appropriate settings, and making one of the two objects in the rig mirror this position. The other object remains static. A third object is then placed and takes the average orientation of these two objects, and it is this that the main body of the model will be attached.



For acceleration and braking banking, the current speed was calculated using an expression, and set to a slider manipulator in the interface, and this speed controls two objects in the world space, one of which moves in the vertical axis depending on the speed. The difference between the two objects (one of which remains static) is then used to determine how much the car should rock forwards or backwards - ie, it calculates how much the speed has changed from one frame to the next. This is then multiplied by a multiplier variable set by the user using a slider manipulator to control how much the car should move - so how stiff the suspension should be. An F1 car for example would have stiffer suspension than a road car and thus be less visually active on weight shift.

The rig is controlled by the user using sliders (create > helpers > manipulators > sliders), which are tied to various elements of the rig. Things like the wheel size and heights of the front vs the rear wheels, ride heights and wheel base and widths can all be controlled, allowing easy addition of any wheel-based vehicle. Other elements such as the steering look-ahead, steering override (to allow for oversteer - see below), speed and weight shifts are also controlled in this section to cater for different vehicles - a truck will clearly behave differently to a Mini Cooper, but they can both be used on the same rig without needing to change any of the scripts.



The sequence below will demonstrate how to add a custom model to the rig, and give a further insight into how the rig is put together.

Start slideshow

And that's the basic story of the rig. I went on to add further controls such as oversteer and the ability to add a driver, and these can be seen in the Motorway F1 video. The oversteer, which is a slider attached to the y-rotation of the main rig, ties in with the steering override, and is to be done manually, as it is difficult to predict how much oversteer is required. Wheelspin is a further addition and behaves in a similar way, allowing the front and rear wheels to rotate independently and at varying speeds, or to behave normally - this is a choice left to the animator.

I hope this helps someone, and that I have the balance between detail and being boring right.

Links to other videos containing the car rig on my site:
Motorway F1
Bugatti Veyron vs Eurofighter Typhoon
Reactor Physics
Car Rig Tutorial - 3dsmax
Car Rig - WRC
Car Rig - F1

A compilation of some of the videos on the site.

An effects animation of the Earth in the process of being destroyed. It's based on layers, with each effect just being a new layer, so the thing could just go on being added to forever - but at some point I had to declare it finished, and although there are still plenty of things that can be added, I think it's a decent enough final piece.

Demonstration of my improved car rig, updated to include a driver, oversteer and wheelspin options. It includes a blend of reactor for when the car needs to bounce, and the rig. The transition could be more subtle, but it works well enough.

Also an expansion of mental ray rendering, with glow effects and lighting systems. I also developed some After Effects skills, adding lens and video effects and manipulating time, as well as creating some extra special effects to composite over the top of 3dsmax effects.

The motorway is also scripted, looping and independent from the main animation - it's just a shame that it isn't really used all that much in this section, but work in progress videos of the motorway construction can be found elsewhere on the site (search for 'motorway').

A quick character animation in which the challenge was to demonstrate the word 'careless' in 10 seconds. The character is actually stationary, with the environment moving to easily create the motion blur on the background while retaining camera movement in the opposite direction.

A quick video to show the monkey character model, and that it is low poly and scalable with some turbosmoothing. It also aims to show a grasp of face morph targets, and some quick ragdoll applied to the end of it to hopefully demonstrate the skinning and rigging of the mesh.

Here's one of the monkey animations I've been working on.

It's intended to go on the home page as an introduction, and hopefully demonstrates some character emotion and interaction, as well as some cinematic effects.

I really should give this animation a name so I can stop calling it work in progress...

Anyway, here's a draft render of the animation so far to check the lighting, textures and glass breakage effects.

The main thing left is the building explosion so the whole thing actually makes sense. And he needs a gun as well to shoot at the glass so the glass doesn't spontaneously explode as it does at the moment.

An update on what I'm working on (see previous related post here)

Still very much work in progress - textures, animation and obviously special effects still need working on, but you can see roughly how the animation should end up.

The idea is he's running from a bomb that he planted in order to kill something evil, although I've not yet decided what this evil thing is, or even if we'll see it. But in my head at the moment, it's something like a tank (not my upload) from Left 4 Dead... but I'm not sure if I'll go as far as doing a section prior to this, and may decide to just go onto learning Maya, which I've been putting off for a while.

A quick video to show the monkey character model, and that it is low poly and scalable with some turbosmoothing.

It also aims to show a grasp of face morph targets, and some quick ragdoll applied to the end of it to hopefully demonstrate the skinning and rigging of the mesh.

Here's what I'm working on at the moment, and it involves bringing this monkey back that I started to work on ages ago.

I'm experimenting with morph targets now to try and get some expression, and it's still very much work in progress...

Just because I wish this game would be made.

Part of a university assignment that took place in character animation, sound design and games design modules.