AN02 - Second Assignment Wk. 2

Hey guys!  Alright so for this past week we had to convert our blocked out walk into the finalized splined version.  We also had to sketch out and create two poses, using Stella, that show movement.

First off, the poses.  This week I wanted to go for less dancing poses, since that's what most of my poses were for the first assignment when we had to create movement poses, so this week I looked for more athletic poses on my search through YouTube for reference videos.  Here's my sketches that I came up with for the assignment...

And here are the various different ones that I posed out in Maya...

I chose to submit the last two, as I thought the silhouettes of those two were more intriguing.

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And now for the final version of my walk!  Before I went into the process of smoothing everything out in the animation, I had to actually take out a few poses from my blocking based on my mentor's critique, which was actually quite worrisome for me.  I was used to going by sort of a "formula" for creating a walk where I need to have these 9 poses all set in order for the walk to work.  My mentor showed me that that's actually not always the case as he suggested I remove 2 - 4 of those poses I had set.  Doing this allowed my animation to be smoother as well as quicker to finish as I had less keys to go through.  I was thinking that removing these would leave out important information within the walk, when in reality I was still able to have everything I needed in the walk by adjusting the tangents in the graph editor as well as adding some breakdown keys for some of the curves when needed.  So without further ado, here's the final version of my walk that I submitted...

 

This next week we get to start our quadruped animation!  Who's excited!?  I know I am!

AN02 - Second Assignment Wk.1

Soo this is slightly late, but here's my next blog post!  This past week our assignment was to start the blocking pass of our full body walk animation with the Stella rig.  We were given the option of doing a vanilla walk or a character walk as well.  I didn't want to go too simple and just do a vanilla walk, so I decided to do a walk with a little character.  Here's the reference video I shot for my walk...

and here are the planning sketches I drew based on that reference...

After I studied all of my reference, I went on to pose out the main poses of my walk to create the blocking pass of the animation, as seen below...

The blocking pass isn't quite where I'd like it to be, I unfortunately got sick Thursday so it was a little more difficult than I originally thought it was going to be to work through the weekend, but we shall see what my mentor has to say about it!

P.S. I also wanted to mention that last week on the January 13th edition of this online newsletter, The Daily Art Part 4, my blog post was featured as one of the articles!  Thank you so much to the person/people who manage that website, I don't know who you are but I am honored that you chose to show my work on your site, thank you!

AN02 - First Assignment

Hey guys!  So this past week I started up my second semester at Animation Mentor.  I'm so pumped after my first Q&A with my new mentor, Steve Cady, for Animation Body Mechanic Basics (AN02)!  This semester, for the q&a's, AM started using Google hangouts for the classes and my what an improvement it is!  I was able to actually see everyone in my class and there were no glitches with the mentor's video as well, which was awesome!  I'm going to really enjoy this semester!

For our first assignment, we had to create two poses showing movement using the new Stella rig.  This rig, first off, is awesome.  It looks like a simple character, but the rig is slightly more complex than the other bipedal characters we used in AN01, and she has hair so that's always fun.  Alright, well here are the sketches that I drew up showing movement...

So as you may be able to tell, the left side was inspired by running, gymnastics, and karate.  After getting those sketches it dawned on me that dancing would be great to watch for inspiration, which is the entire right side.  And here are the 3 poses that I posed out in Maya to see which ones worked...

I liked all 3 of them but I had to choose two, so I ended up submitting the bottom two poses.  I don't know why, but it's enjoyable for me to pose out lanky characters like Stella.  This next week we get to create a walk with her too, so that should be exciting!