Walk Cycle and Idle

Hello!  So as promised I will show you my idle animation in this post.  I didn't post in in the previous one because I really didn't like how it was looking, the character was moving around just way too much, not good for an idle.  But here is what I currently have for it...

I know, it's extremely basic, also there's not a whole lot of character to it.  In our most recent review he suggested a few things to adjust to finish it off but that I don't really need to submit it again so I'll be focusing more on my walk cycle assignment for now.

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Now for the walk cycle!  Here is what I shot for my reference footage...

Out of all the different walks I tried out I ended up going with this one because it seemed to have more character.  Also as a side note, I used Quicktime Pro to edit the footage and oh my goodness, way easier/quicker for me to get it all put together than when I would previously use Premiere.  Premiere is awesome, don't get me wrong, we just don't always get along.  Anyway, from my reference footage I went into Maya and created a first pass of animation.  Now normally when I would do a first pass I would create it in stepped mode, however my teacher had us just use auto tangents, which is apparently how they do it in his studio so you can get an animation test out quicker for the game engine.  I actually like this approach because it also cuts down on the amount of keys that you end up putting in your animation.  So here is what I turned in for our review this weekend...

He mentioned in the review some great tips that could help my animation look a bit more believable in the body mechanics department.  So I've been working on all the things he mentioned to fix all day today!  Yes, I am going to make you wait to see it in the next post that I make...

Getting Back To It

*Sigh* Guys, I'm horrible at keeping up with things, like this blog for instance! I ended up not posting anything about CTNx and have not made a post since.  Well long story short, I loved CTNx, all the amazing people I had the pleasure of meeting, and California itself because it was beautiful there!

So now for what I've been doing since my last post!  I have to tell you guys I hit a point in these last few months where I was just mad at myself every day because I wasn't able to get a job doing something I don't hate and I wasn't animating.  I thought about what I want to end up doing with my career and honestly, I have come to the conclusion that I don't really care where specifically I end up as long as I'm animating.  I also realized that I need to work on my ability to motivate myself to work on something every day because I am not that great in that area at the moment.  Which brings me to my next topic!

I have started taking game animation classes at iAnimate.net!  I'm actually really enjoying it and my teacher is pretty great.  His name is Jason Shum and this is his work http://www.jasonshum.com/. Jason has been an awesome teacher so far and I'm really looking forward to the rest of the semester!

Our first class was two weeks ago and so far I've had to create idle animation poses and then an idle animation.  Here are the poses I created...

From these poses we had to choose on to turn into a basic idle animation or a combat animation, depending on the pose.  I'm not going to post my idle animation in this blog post however because I am not too happy with it at the moment.  You'll just have to anxiously await my next blog post!

So currently I still don't love where I work, but hey at least I'm animating again!

Also, I am going to attend CTNx again this year and have purchased my ticket! Woohoo!