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!
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!
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!
To start off, everyone go check my post about the fifth AM assignment, I updated it at the bottom and it looks 10x better, if you can't tell, I'm pretty proud of it. Also, I forgot to make a post last week so this one's going to be a little long.
So last week we were given the assignment to block out the main poses of a vanilla walk as well as pose out Stu in a strength pose. I'll start off with the pose sketches that I came up with for strength..
Out of all of these I figured pose 10 would give me the opportunity to use the stretch controls on Stu's arms, I also tried to pose out 7, 3, and 6 but those one's as you can see ended up looking more like Stu being lazy or like in the last one he looks sneaky or something...
And here's the one I ended up going with...
And in my critique Anthony suggested that I could push the shoulders more towards the camera and that if I wanted I could get away with having both feet on the wall. So when I go back and adjust all my poses I might try that out.
And now for the animation assignment from last week. I realized this week that there are more key poses to a walk cycle than I originally had thought, and it was great to be able to learn that! Here's my planning sketch for the walk...
And here's the blocking of my vanilla walk...
In my critique, Anthony suggested that in the extreme high pose I should bring the lifted foot slightly forward, make sure all the straight leg poses are actually straight, push the high pose body back slightly, push the low pose body slightly forward, and to fix the up and down rotation so it's more of a drag on the rotation. And so in the second week of this assignment I added all those suggestions.
On to this past week's assignment! Since we're already talking about the walk I'll go ahead and continue with that. So this week I had to add all the critique from last week and continue to work on the vanilla walk until it is finished in spline mode. I don't know if you've ever done a walk cycle but man oh man, those knees, not fun. I spent a while adjusting the stretch control on his legs to attempt to achieve a no knee popping walk, and it took some patience haha. So here's my final version of my vanilla walk for your viewing pleasure...
This week we also had to pose out Stu in a concerned pose, which was a little difficult to come up with more than like 5 poses. Video reference helped a lot for this one, and here are my sketches...
I ended up only posing out one final concerned Stu pose just because the other ones I tried were not coming out well. So here's my final concerned Stu...
Now I'll just have to wait and see what Anthony says about the pose as well as the walk. Stay tuned for updates!
*UPDATE*
Hey guys! I received a lot of good feedback on my walk from both Anthony and the substitute teacher that we had for a week, John Nguyen http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1315347/. A few things that were mentioned was that at the contact pose the body should be forward more like a controlled fall and that the back foot should look more like it's pushing the body off as oppose to the foot looking like it magically lifting. So without further ado, here's the final version...
Hey guys! So I actually really like these drawings that I'm about to show you. I don't know if it was because we finally got to draw a female model or I was just having a great drawing day, but I like how they turned out, especially the last one...
The last one there is probably one of the few drawings that I have where I actually included the face, also the foreshortening of the legs was an enjoyable challenge.
Hello all! Yesterday I submitted my assignment for this past week, so here I am to share it with you guys! The assignment was to animate tailor, a ball with a tail, with an anticipation to motivate the first bounce and then have a minimum of three bounces, showcasing the overlapping action of the tail. We have two weeks to work on this animation and then the third week we have for revision. I found this animation to be pretty interesting, basically because I've never animated a character with a tail, and turned out to be a bit more challenging than I first thought. So here's my planning for my animation...
And here's the animation that I have submitted for the first week of the assignment...
On a side note, I signed up for my second class at Animation Mentor which will start the 8th of January and chose my mentor, Steve Cady. I'm so excited to learn from him, his e-critiques, that I've seen, are amazing and he provides his students with so much information. He is currently a senior animator at Hybride and has worked as an animator on such films as The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Pacific Rim, Avatar, Watchmen, The Amazing Spiderman, and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1513513/
*UPDATE*
Alright guys here's the final version of my tailor assignment. I received a lot of great feedback on the assignment such as he should anticipate more when he goes to jump off the pillar, try to show tailor squashing on the pillar from a side angle, have him jump slightly forward at the end due to all the momentum that he has from the previous jump, always favor the squash pose, and a few more notes. Below is my final version of the assignment...
Hey guys! So I forgot to make a life drawing post on Friday, so I'm just going to do it today. These ones are more current since they are from around the beginning of this school year.
I think these ones are okay, not my best. Definitely good for me considering this was after not drawing for a few months due to summer break happening!
