AN01 - Final AN01 Week

Hey guys! So I would have posted this earlier but I was in the process of trying to figure out how to nicely render out all the poses I did throughout the class so I could include them in my final reel.  And as you'll see, they're not included in the reel yet because I have yet to figure it out and I've been busy with traveling to Pennsylvania for Christmas.  When I have more time I'll go back to tackling it.

Unfortunately my time in AN01 has come to an end.  I can't tell you how much I've learned over these past 12 weeks because it's just so much.  I feel like I now have a solid foundation of the basics of animation, which is something I felt I was lacking coming into the program 12 weeks ago.  My mentor, Anthony Wong, has been an amazing and extremely helpful teacher and I will miss being in his very entertaining Q&A's.  My classmates have also been amazingly helpful throughout the class.  It was so awesome to be with all of these people who are just as passionate about animation as I am and it was a real pleasure to be able to learn from so many of my Animation Mentor peers.  I can't wait to start the new semester in January with Steve Cady, but for now here's my current progress reel!

Also, Merry Christmas!  Thank you to everyone who has been following my blog posts throughout this past year!

AN01 - Ninth Assignment

Hello everyone!  Alright so this past week we had to put our personality walks into spline mode as well as create a Stu pose showing balance.

First off, the pose!  This week's balance pose was pretty fun to create, I couldn't really act out the poses myself for most of these because I'm not a gymnast, but that's where Google images comes in real handy!  Below are my sketches I created...

From these I selected a few to pose out in Maya...

I had a tough time selecting one to submit and after some great feedback within the Animation Mentor community I decided on sort of combining the 2nd and 3rd poses I had made and I'm really happy with the result!

Now for the animation!  Again, the knees were time consuming in the clean up phase of this animation, those darn knees!  It was fun in this assignment to really exaggerate some of the movement in the walk and I think I can still tweak it further but here's what I submitted...

and the side view...

I'll let you guys know when I tweak it some more so you can come back and watch it again only perfected!

AN01 - Eighth Assignment

Hey guys!  First off, go have a look at my previous post because if you scroll all the way down the page you will see my revised vanilla walk!  So yes, again, I'm a little late posting the assignment I did for last week, but at least I'm getting it up before the weekend!  So last week we had to revise our vanilla walk, come up with a personality walk, and create a pose showing exhaustion.

First off, the pose.  Here are my sketches that I came up with showing exhaustion...

I am pretty familiar with the feeling of exhaustion so it ended up being not so difficult to come up with poses.  I decided on the circled one because it appeared to be the most dynamic looking.  Below is the final render of the pose I turned in...

I just got the critique for this too and Anthony mentioned that I should lower the head a little more so it's resting more on the block, that I could make the hanging arm even straighter, and that I could tilt the left foot slightly towards the camera.  I'll be making these adjustments come winter break when I go back and tweak all my pose adjustments.

Now for the personality walk!  I wanted to make a walk that would be more interesting than just a swagger or catwalk, so I went with an uneven weight, or similar to a cripple, walk.  Here's the reference video of myself walking while holding a frozen turkey in one arm, try not to laugh...

And from that reference I planned out my walk though sketches and wrote out the timing...

And into Maya I went!  Turns out it was actually pretty enjoyable to make a walk that wasn't so ordinary.  Below are the side and 3/4 views of the walk...

My critique on this actually ended up being pretty good! Anthony suggested that I have the right heel continually going up when it's lifted so there won't be so much of a pop, that the low poses could vary more between the different strides, and a couple more comments.  And that's all for now folks!