The Online Portfolio of Colin Levy

18 seconds; 1.5 mb

Here's the second installment of the animation work done in my Animation II class at SCAD.

The one thing I'll say about Maya, in comparison to Blender, is that there's no scarcity of nice free generic rigs out there for Maya. That's something I've struggled with in Blender, and I think it's mainly because it's got a smaller user base.

Anyway, this guy Moom is a nice free rig that we used in class.

46 seconds; 1.8 mb

Here's a compilation of the first four animation exercises done for my Animation II class at SCAD with Michael Gargiulo. I really enjoyed the class and I think I learned a lot. I'm getting kinda anxious to move onto more ambitious animation because it seems for the past three years all I've been doing are little exercises!

Nothing wrong with that, though. Thus far I have been working solely with Blender for my animation, and this marks my first work in Maya.

45 seconds; 2 mb

After nearly two years of frustrating foundations classes at SCAD, this class was a breath of fresh air. My professor Jon Webber, an ex-Disney animator, was absolutely awesome.

Generally the class was about the fundamentals of 2D animation, so we were really focused on technique, rather than performance or storytelling. We had to crank out a series of assignments in very little time. Here's a quick compilation of the exercises. No matter how many times I do a bouncing ball I seem to learn a lot!

7 seconds; 432 k

This is my first attempt at lipsync. And really one of my first humanoid performance animations. Gosh. This stuff is not easy! The guy was modeled, rigged, and animated in Blender. It's kinda hard to work with, and there are weird deformations that I can't really get rid of. (Check out the shoulders!)

But anyway, I think this was a fairly successful test. The sound clip is from Woody Allen's "Scoop".

4 seconds; 328 k

I've been working on this character off and on for a few months. It's been a very good exercise - and I've learned a whole lot. It's my first humanoid/bipedal character, and this is my attempt at his walkcycle. I want to do some real acting exercises with this guy.

13 seconds; 180 k

I've seen a bunch of Juice Box animations recently so I decided this was something I should try. The animations I've seen usually show some sort of change in emotion, so that's what I tried to do here. This was a very challenging exercise for me, and it took me at least 10 hours to finish. But I think it's one of my best animations so far.

14 seconds; 1 mb

So my brother and I used to operate under the name "Peerless Productions". One of the reasons we settled on that name was because of the alliteration possibilities in the progression of the pronouncement of "Peerless Productions Proudly Presents". I did a little brainstorming and came up with this short animation. It's not as cool as it could be, but I do like it. I used Blender's nodal system for the first time for this animation.

18 seconds; 2.7 mb

This is a little clip I made using Blender's particle system. This is more "motion graphics" than animation, I suppose, because there really isn't that much animation going on here-- the cool particle effects are all pretty much automatic, once you set it up. But anyway, I like motion graphics, and I want to experiment more with this type of stuff.

20 seconds; 1.8 mb

This is the final walkcycle for my Snurgle Baby model, which I made for my film Suburban Plight. I completely scrapped my old Snurgle model (which was just atrocious) and started over. I spent a good three months modeling, unwrapping, texturing, rigging, and animating this guy, and I was figuring things out and teaching myself the whole time.

So this represents quite a bit of work, and I'm really happy with how it came out.

4 seconds; 576 kb

This is one of my first-even 2D animations. I recently bought myself a lightbox, and did this animation on 4" cards. This 4-second animation took me about 5 hours to complete.

Let me tell you, this stuff is tedious! This particular animation ended up being 79 drawings. 79! Just for a little guy to jump up and bounce a couple times. I'm having second thoughts about pursuing animation as a career.

3 seconds; 28 kb

This is another squash/stretch animation done in Blender. This one was done specifically for a "weekend challenge" over at the Elysiun (now BlenderArtists) forums.

I really wanted this to look realistic - to have the ball bounce as a real ball might. I don't think I reached this goal but I think it looks pretty good.

11 seconds; 1.5 mb

This started out as a short clip to try out Blender's new softbody system. This simulation is not very complex, but I still think it's cool. It was fun playing around with the parameters-- the weight/mass of the curtain, the amount of air resistance, silkiness, etc..