Animation Portfolio
polycounter lvl 7
Hey everyone. My name is Jimm "jPEG" Pegan and this is my animation portfolio and website. I am looking for a career as a character animator for games because I want to contribute to my favorite art form and source of entertainment until it is as accepted and respected as film, music, or dance. I have a couple game-oriented animations on my website, with many more in the works and planned for the future. I am interested in working with character artists to bring their characters to life and improving our portfolios.
I know this community is mostly comprised of modelers, but animation is just as much a part of "game art" as the models.
So if you please, any critiques, comments, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I understand this is a pretty rough time to be looking for work as a new artist, so that is why I'm turning to you gentlemen peers and professionals for guidance.
I know this community is mostly comprised of modelers, but animation is just as much a part of "game art" as the models.
So if you please, any critiques, comments, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I understand this is a pretty rough time to be looking for work as a new artist, so that is why I'm turning to you gentlemen peers and professionals for guidance.
Replies
The animation looks nice though.
You're animations are really nice and fluid, I especially like your wind up animations
Maybe do a gallery with further animations like you have for your artwork. You might embed the reel into the site as well.
Good animating indeed. Also nice job transitioning between your name and title directly into the animation. The use of text when presenting the art credits for your characters and such is nice too (where you have the three models and the text matches the perspective).
nice job!
I think your lip syncing could use work though, seems like she's just moving her mouth open when she speaks without much regard to the facial structure (but i don't know how limited that character's rig is).
The trick is to exaggerate and keyframe specific sounds. Mouth the lines to yourself, and see where your mouth moves the most and make note of how that facial pose is unique. Pose that and really emphasise the unique facial features it takes to make that noise then just play with the transitions.
Here's the rig we use at school, has great facial features: http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:nu83zWULym4J:www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/character_rigs/MooM-By-Ramtin-5067.html+moom+ramtin&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
here´s what i´ve noticed from the quicktime:
0:12 when the creature reaches the ground with his left foot one frame the
foot roates when it shoud have a contact-pose
0:15 left foot sliding, would probably be nicer when the foot stand still
0:17-18 left foot slides a lot, better be pinned where it is
0:19 hands sliding while anticipation, should be pinned to the ground
0:34 the right hand goes to the bomb and leaves to soon, either the hand should
rest longer or that better be skipped imo
0:38 hand wobble´s with no reason
the insect is fine
I'd like to see tons more..
I like the animation, you say youre going for a career as an animator in games.
well, I dont think the animations in your reel fit into games - at all.
good animations by themselves, but way too cartoonish for games I'd say. especially the first monster guy, with the stretching and the timing. feels very much like its more aimed at a cg movie and not a game.
Im not saying Im mr.animation and that you should bow before my might,
but you may want to check out my 2006 reel on my youtube page..you might see a difference in animation style between my animations and yours.
I take lots of inspiration from games, and love making animations that would fit into a game.
whereas, your reel mostly looks like what I mentioned before, inspired and made for cg animation.
but again, great animations
I also took a look at those 3 separate animations you had,
the first two, the run and the idle. while super standard and not pushing anything, Id like to see more of that in your game animation reel!
the guy floating up from the grave... mmmmyeah, I could see that on a similar character, in say World of Warcraft, with a bit different timing, and have him drop down onto the ground or something and get into a nice idle/ready pose, for the next AI script.
Zotter: Thanks. I'm glad you like 'em.
Krypteia: I'd originally had the .demo reel navigation button there to avoid comments like "why don't you have a link directly to your demo reel?" but since the demo reel is the first page a visitor will see, giving the page it's own navigation button is--like you suggested--redundant. I've gone ahead and deleted the superfluous button and I think it'll work out just as well. I really appreciate your perspective on that topic, which had indeed occurred to me earlier.
Ruz: Me too. Don't worry--there will be more soon enough!
d00kie: Thanks for the comment.
crazyfingers: You're right about the lipsync. It's definitely my weakest asset so far. Unfortunately, I realized too late how limited Andy's facial rig is (or was at the time?) and didn't have enough time to switch rigs. Thanks for the advice. The next time I do a lipsync, there will be much more "performance" than in this.
DerDude: Thanks so much for the detailed analysis of my assets. That's the kind of critique stuff I was looking for.
flow3d: You're absolutely right about my demo reel. For the sake of not making excuses for my work, I didn't explain that my demo reel is, indeed, not game-oriented. It is a culmination of my final few months of student work. As a student, I wasn't allowed to create a reel of game animations/cycles. The animation program I was just about to finish, had just split into film-oriented and game-oriented classes. Unfortunately, I was too far along to go and design my reel around game art. However, I am now working with a mod team and doing some animations for them. Once I get some quality work done and get the okay to post it, I'll have a more varied library of animations to show off. But thank you for your honest opinion. I have looked at the animations on your YouTube channel and was really impressed. That is just the kind of collection of work I'd like to have to show soon.
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Thanks for the feedback, guys. I really appreciate your comments and suggestions. Keep them coming!
I really like the first two animations on your reel, but the lip-sync felt floaty and soft compared to the others. The girl's right hand especially, it just kind of waved around slowly.
Great anticipation and arced movements on all the animations though.
I wouldn't worry too much about having more cinematic than cycles at this point the cycles you have are solid. It seems more and more places are looking for people that can blend cinematics with real time. Really if people think about it even those cinematic scenes have animation that can by cycled. It's a cool way to show off that you can do cycles but you're not forcing the viewer to sit through more loops.
I'm sure the rigs you where using for those scenes where more robust than what is allowed in realtime but I'm confident that given what you've shown you'll be up to the task.
I also don't understand the comments against quicktime, its good you switched to a wider available format but really anyone reviewing animation portfolios is going to have quicktime installed and probably ask for formats that play in quicktime. It would be like asking for model submissions and complaining about getting things in .obj format. It's pretty widely accepted for animation review and critque.
It's a very good thing that people want to see more I guess, better chance to get contacts like Art-Machine said.
I'm a bit confused about this as well. Quicktime seems to be the standard when it comes to displaying work in animation portfolios because it allows you a lot of control on both ends. You can save at relatively high quality and viewers can frame-by-frame through it without having to worry about the program locking up. I've never seen a Flash viewer that would let you frame step and wouldn't puke all over itself when you tried to jump to random places on the timeline like you can with Quicktime. I've also never had Quicktime murder my browser as consistently as Flash video seems to, and that's on several different computers at home, work and school.
i don't know why this is even debatable or debated, or for that matter why one comment should discourage someone from using the quicktime format. Letting the viewer scrub back and forth is the single most important thing to presenting a showreel. Bloody well use quicktime.
Nice work the reel vimeo version felt short.