AN02 - Fourth Assignment Wk. 1

Hey guys!  So this past week for our assignment we had to make the final touches to our quadruped walk as well as start getting the video reference and creating planning sketches for our next assignment.

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To start off, here's the final version of my quadruped assignment that I submitted...

There's still some back and forth motion on the head that I wasn't able to correct before submitting it that I'll have to go back to, but other than that I was pretty happy with how it turned out.

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Onto the new assignment!  This week we had many different options for what we could do for the assignment that were rated based on their difficulty.  My thought is go big or go home so I decided to do one of the highest rated ones, carrying/moving a chair, placing it, and sitting down.  Now I couldn't really find good reference of this on youtube so I ended up filming myself for the idea that I had for this animation.  Let me tell you, it's quite funny, you should watch at least the first few seconds of this reference video of mine (sorry the video quality is not the greatest, I had to upload the lower resolution one so it wouldn't take forever to  upload)...

  So ya that's my idea for the next assignment, let's hope I can pull it off!  Also, here are the sketches I created from viewing the reference video...

Have a great week everyone!

P.S. I just received the book Simplified Drawing for Planning Animation that I ordered in the mail, and so far it's awesome! http://www.anamie.com/book/simplified-drawing/

AN02 - Third Assignment Wk.3

Hey guys!  So yes, I know it's Tuesday and I should have posted this over the weekend, but things happen.  Also, all the stress was to be had this morning because I had to go through the insanity that is class registration for Animation Mentor, seriously, the struggle was real.  After two hours of insanity and much needed help from Julia Campbell, I am registered to have Steve Cunningham as my mentor for next semester, here's his imdb page, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2827812/ .  

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And now for my assignments from last week!  So this past week we had to have our quadruped animation splined out and finalized as well as have poses of Sloan looking playful.

First off, here are the sketches I drew showing animals being playful...

And here are the ones I chose to create in Maya...

I ended up submitting the top two ones mostly because I tend to like the poses where a prop isn't necessary to get the point across.

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Now for the animation!  Like I said, this week we had to smooth out our quad. animation, so here it is!  

I still have issues with the head/neck area, but I shall fix that this week, let me know what you guys think!

AN02 - Third Assignment Wk.2

Hey guys!  So this past week we had to continue on with our quadruped assignment by blocking out the contact poses and breakdowns as well as pose out Sloan in some motion poses.

To start off, here are the sketches I drew this week for the poses...

For the assignment it said that we could draw any animal we wanted, but I figured I'd stay with dog poses since the rig that I would be using to pose out these sketches was a dog rig.  Here are the three that I attempted in Maya...

I chose to submit the first and third poses for the assignment after getting feedback from my peers suggesting that those were the most interesting ones, and I agreed.

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Now for the quad. blocking!  Recalling what my mentor had mentioned to me about the blocking for my walk from the last assignment, I decided to go with a less is more approach for the blocking.  I think that, for the sake of blocking, I have all the needed information without filling up my timeline with keys that I may have later needed to delete during the splining phase.  So here's my blocking!

Hopefully my mentor will appreciate that I'm trying to apply his critiques to my animation!

  

P.S. Last week I forgot to post the reference video I used for studying a dog's walk, so here are the two Youtube videos I used the most for my reference...

AN02 - Third Assignment Wk. 1

Hola!  So last week we had to start the planning phase of our quadruped walk, ooooooooo exciting!  We also had to sketch out poses for Sloan showing movement and recreate them in Maya.  I learned so much this week in the way of quadruped walks, it's insane!

To start off, here are my sketches for my poses...

And here are the ones that I chose to create in Maya...

Just kidding about that last one there ;).  I attempted a few more as well but I didn't get very far into them before I started to hate them, so the top two here are what I submitted.

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Now for the quadruped walk!  This assignment is split up into three week where on this first week we had to plan out our walk.  Here are the planning sketches I created for the walk...

The timeline at the bottom of the page shows the walk and he's a stick figure because I didn't want to get bogged down on the fact that I can't draw a dog over and over, so I just drew what was necessary.  This coming week we will be blocking out our quadruped walks and at some point I'm going to go back and revise my walk that I "finished" for the last assignment, so stay tuned!

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!