CAGD 493 - Christopher Coombs's Senior Portfolio

       Hello again! My name is Christopher Coombs, and welcome back to my blog! The end of the year is approaching, and my work is coming to a close. This current animation is more than likely my final one for the semester. In the previous week, I decided to work section by section, since this was one of my longer animations. My goal for that week was to finish the AT-ST's turnaround animation. Here was the result of that previous week's work:      Although it needs just a bit more refinement, it wasn't half bad, being that it was my first biped turnaround. For this week's goal, I was primarily focused on pushing all tangents into spline and retiming the entire animation. I also took the time to refine some areas and even weave a few new small animations into the scene. Here is what I have accomplished by the end of this week:     At first glance, the most noticable change between these animations is how I incorporated my camera angles. I dec...

 Hello, my name is Christopher Coombs, and welcome back to my weekly blog! In the previous week's iteration, I had a half-decent blockout of how I wanted my scene between Wall-E and the AT-ST to play out. This is what I had at that time:          Considering this was one of my longer and more story-centric animations, I decided it'd be best to break the work down into smaller sections, so that I'd have more time to focus on refining each part. This week's goal was to get the AT-ST turnaround completely splined out so that I could work on the refining process. I believe that I was successful in reaching this goal. Here is what I managed to create for this week:       This was my very first time animating a fully in-frame turnaround for a bipedal character. With how unique this bipedal character stands, it certainly wasn't an easy character to start with, but I got it done. Similar to my previous assignment, using the AT-ST provided me wit...

     Hello, and welcome back to my weekly blog! This is Christopher Coombs, and this week, now that I have finished my ATST's walk cycle, I've moved on to my next big project.  On Friday, I finally made a full recovery and am feeling a lot better regarding my health, and I managed to commit to a decent amount of work on it this week. Primarily, I was focused on getting my idea out there while it was still fresh, so I put together a rough blockout of how I wanted my story to play out with the new mystery character.  Here is what I accomplished by the end of this week:     As you can see, the mystery character that I've been talking about working with a few weeks back was Wall-E all along. This was a free Wall-E rig created by Steakosaurus back in 2012:  What makes this particular rig so cool is all the small moving components it has that are quite accurate to the movie, such as Wall-E's ability to open up its frame to store away junk, the telescopi...

     Hello, this is Christopher Coombs, and welcome again to my weekly blog! Quick life update: A few days ago, I caught a particularly nasty bug, and in roughly an hour, I'm going to check myself into a hospital. I haven't been able to stomach food or liquid in three days, and it's not getting better. However, even in this condition, I managed to get a lot of work done on the ATST animation over the last few days. I'm going to keep it short and to the point, via bullet points. There has never been a word limit for these assignments, so I hope this is acceptable.  Here was the work that I managed to accomplish: List of changes according to this week's feedback: Repositioned the legs so that the mech is high on its up pose and low on its down pose while keeping the same "U" shape head movement. This, along with retiming everything, took the most hours to complete. Reduced the side-to-side x-translation of the headpiece Reduced toe drag considerably during t...

       Hello, this is Christopher Coombs, and welcome back to the tenth iteration of my blog! On Wednesday of this week, I had the good fortune of presenting earlier than I usually do, all thanks to an open spot in the schedule. On that day, this is what I had to show for my work of the previous week:   Coming into that presentation, I was aware of issues such as one leg moving faster than the other, and that ludicrous drunken sway that the head of the mech does. I'd certainly hate to be in that cockpit. Even so, the class feedback, as always, exceeded my expectations. They helped me pinpoint a handful of new ways I could improve this animation. When I first animated this mech, I thought about human walk cycles, specifically how the passing and up poses were when the person stood at their tallest. However, Mark suggested that I should make the down poses, where the mech is furthest to the sides, the highest part of the mech's walk cycle. This advice contradicted...

    Hello, this is Christopher Coombs,  and welcome back to my weekly blog! This week, I've decided to deviate a bit from working on my routine quadruped animations. Poetically, my laptop was also tired of working with the leopard rig, and it actually broke down just one day after reanimating my last leopard animation. After finally getting the new laptop delivered and set up for my classes during the latter half of this week, I started looking for something new to animate. Not only did I want my next project to be a brief respite from the many weeks spent animating nothing but quadrupeds, but I also wanted to experiment with the concept of weight. Therefore, I was on the hunt for a character that looked heavy. Fortunately, it didn't take long to find something really cool:      My goal for this week was to get this heavy machine to do a walk cycle. Finding references from the original Star Wars trilogy was pretty difficult, as the AT-STs were either too cl...