A Chessy Love Story

As promised in a previous post, below is my final submission for the inanimate object assessment. In the end, I chose to develop the pawn idea, which I think turned out pretty good. We had roughly three weeks from start to finish in which to model, rig, light, texture and animate the piece. In the past I have never really enjoyed rigging or lighting, and always did a half-assed job but I have started to put in the extra effort and I feel I have learnt a great deal from the assessment. The rig I created is fairly simple and I found it quite easy to animate, particularly with the help of Eric Goldberg's "Character Animation Crash Course" (which focuses on 2D but still applies)

Overall, I am fairly pleased with the final outcome of the project although, typically for an artist, I still notice little things that can be improved which I will bear in mind for my next assessment.

Our next assessment has been handed out already, this time we are expected to do much of the same but using a bipedal character (basically a character with two feet.) The deadline for this submission is March 14 2013 and at this stage I have absolutely no idea what I want to do. Some of my initial ideas have included a Ninja (great opportunity for showing lots of stealth animation) or an alien.