Seriously? Weeks 6 - 11!?

If you were expecting me to keep up with this blog you were way off my friend.

So this is the work from the second half of the term. The assignments in this reel include:

★ Animating a pendulum to portray overlapping action
★ Using the Tailor rig (a ball with a tail) to continue to demonstrate overlapping action.
★ Animate a plain walk, aka a "Vanilla Walk", cycle with no character to it.
★ Animate a character walk cycle. For this assignment I chose a side stepping sneaky walk.



I shot video footage of myself doing a bunch of different walks with character and I included the one I chose in this reel. Shooting footage of yourself doing the actual movement is crucial! Reference footage shows all of the subtleties of the movement, things that you wouldn't think of. I also find myself continually getting up and acting out the movement over and over again to make sure I'm getting it right. Once you have that down it's time to start exaggerating. After all this isn't rotoscoping!

I'm constantly video chatting with my classmates throughout the week. They're awesome dudes, and I put up some links to their blogs. We tend to drink together. How can you not love a school where pants are optional and you can drink during lectures?



I realized I never introduced you to my mentor for this term, Sean Ermey. Check out his IMDB page here. He's a freelance animator from Texas and has worked on Jimmy Neutron, TMNT, and Ice Age 3. Really cool guy and I learned a lot from him.



Since this is our final week in Basic Foundations, our assignment is to revise our work and upload our class one reel. I'll post that next week on here. I promise.

Weeks 3 - 5

I've been slacking on updating, so this post will encompass three weeks worth of classes. I'll start where we left off. Week three's assignment was to animate a bouncing ball with the weight of a soccer ball or a basketball bouncing across the screen. I need to go in and revise this, because it has a ton of problems and I've learned a lot since then.



Next up we have not one, but two balls! One has the weight of a beach ball and the other of a bowling ball. Again, I need to do a revision of this assignment and I'll post any revisions in subsequent posts.



That brings us to the latest and greatest (which isn't saying much). This past assignment was to take a ball and move it through an obstacle course while incorporating squash and stretch. This one was by far the most difficult, and thankfully was my best work so far. I learned a lot while working on this, and I started video conferencing with some fellow students and participating in study groups which really made a difference for me. This also needs to be tweaked and slowed down, but I'll get to that soon enough.



Finally, these are the three poses we had to first sketch and then recreate using our 3D model, Stu. The first one is the random pose, the second had to clearly show excitement and the third had to show devastation. After the first pose I decided to stop creating elaborate backdrops and using props. I want to make sure I'm not using that as a crutch, but rather have a strong pose that says what it needs to without relying on those things. With that being said I don't think my excitement pose clearly shows excitement, because without a facial expression it could be confused with curiosity.



Now It's time to begin learning overlapping action and apply it to a pendulum. Wish me luck.

Basic Foundations

Lots of goings on in my world as of late. Animation Mentor has gone hardcore and I'm currently in week three of the first class. Our first week was spent getting acquainted with the online campus and getting everything set up and ready, or at least that's what we thought. Week two's assignment was to observe and sketch real people doing their thing out in the real world. I hung out in Rittenhouse Square and sketched some random people there, and my drawings totally blew!



We then had to choose a drawing and recreate that image using the 3D character Stu. I ended up going with the one circled in red on the bottom. I then jumped on the computer and decided to create an environment for Stu, mainly to see if I still remembered what I learned in the Springboard workshop, i.e. basic lighting and modeling. Here is what I turned in. Overall I'm happy with it, but some fellow classmates pointed out some stuff I'll remember to do/not do next time.



Well, I just finished the lecture for this week. We have to plan out and animate a bouncing ball from the side view, and then I have to observe and sketch people who show "excitement", and avoid the pitfalls of cliché poses. Wish me luck!

One Leg

This is One Leg. Our assignment was to make him jump, so I decided to give him a reason to.



Tomorrow's our last class of the workshop, and I hope my first class of the program will be as fun as this one. Everyone in the workshop was awesome and my instructor, Jeff, was a really cool guy. He taught me a ton of stuff. The first time I opened Maya back in April I didn't know how to make a sphere. Now I can animate a ball with a leg! Soon I hope to move onto animating balls with two legs. Whoa! Better not get ahead of myself here. Anyway, Class 1, aka Basic Foundations, begins at the end of June sometime, so you better get ready!

Animation Mentor on Forbes.com

I just saw this video after it was posted by a fellow animation student of mine. It's only a few minutes long and gives a great back story on my school.



Awesome, right?

Crane Assignment

Over the past week I've been working on my latest assignment, which was to animate a crane picking up a cylinder and placing it on a block. Let me start out by saying that the way to approach a shot is to first block out the key poses, that is, the main storytelling poses, and then refine the shot with in-between poses. This is called blocking. Since this was my first attempt at blocking I didn't actually cover all of the poses and go as in depth as I should have, so when I went to finish the animation in the second half of the week I had a lot more work to do then I would have if I had properly blocked out the shot. So from now on I'll try to do a better job at the blocking phase.



After the blocking I went ahead and constrained the can to the claw. This way the crane actually picks up the can and takes it over to the block. I took my time and tried to make the animation smooth and hopefully interesting. This is what I turned in.



I'm happy with the way it came out, but I'm not finished with it yet. My instructor gave me some tips to clean up the animation and make things a bit more realistic and smooth. However, that's going to have to wait until after my next assignment where I'll animate a ball with one leg! I'll have that up when I'm finished.

Workshop Assignments

I'm sorry for not updating sooner, but I've been pretty busy with moving and the Maya Springboard Workshop. I'm really happy I decided to take this course. I started with absolutely no knowledge of how to use Maya, but now I'm getting pretty comfortable with it. I've learned so much in the past month and a half!

One of our first assignments was to create a very simple character and develop parent/child relationships between the different body parts. My maya trainer, Jeff, was pretty adamant about keeping it simple and just replicating the example image we were provided with, so my character isn't anything special. I am, however, really happy with the way the environment came out. I decided to model my living room and the front exterior of my apartment, with my character eating some cereal on the couch. Next we learned how to use shaders, which allowed me to add color to my project. Finally we learned some basic lighting techniques and moved on to animation. These are some rendered images of my lighting assignment.









We just started our animation assignments. This was my latest attempt at animating two bouncing balls. Believe it or not but it was surprisingly time consuming.



For our next assignment we'll be working with a crane. We'll start by blocking out our key poses and then in subsequent sessions we'll finish it up. I'll post the blocking when I finish it next week. I'll make sure to update this more often from now on!