BB-8
This project was a fun exercise to explore creating a faux-3D animation effect. BB-8 is a fun character to animate, but creating a functional rolling ball was difficult.
I utilized After Effects CC Sphere effect to create a faux-3D ball based on a flat texture. The effect was useful because it provides the ability to rotate the ball on all 3 axes. For the head, I repeated the same idea, using CC Sphere, but I used a mask to render the bottom half transparent, then stacked it atop the ball via a null.
With the BB-8 rig built, I then created a quick scene from Tattooine to give him a place to live.
CEHE Characters
During my time at the Center for Excellence in Higher Education under Independence University, I was tasked with creating numerous introduction and scenario videos and animations for various courses. Many of these featured characters demonstrating or introducing a concept for students.
Creating characters from scratch quickly became prohibitively time-consuming, so to make the process more efficient, I developed a robust character builder through Illustrator and After Effects, which allowed me to rapidly create and rig characters for animation.
The majority of characters were designed with the ability to rotate to 3/4 view left and right, as well as straightforward. Each has a full set of phoneme mouth shapes, controllable facial features, and numerous hand shapes.
The rigs were created using DUIK which allowed for rapid and robust animation. Below are a selection of some of the characters created and used throughout.
