Animation Mentor - Week 7 / 8 / 9

Hi guys,

Sorry it's taken a while since my last post, but I didn't really had much time to update this bad boy.
But now I do ! So here is a little recap of my previous weeks at AM !

WEEK 7

In this week we got a pretty in-depth lecture by Victor Navone about the graph editor and how you can use it to your advantage, how to keep your curves clean and what you should tackle first when you're going from blocking to spline.

In terms of assignments it was a pretty relaxing week for me because we only had to do our revision for the Tailor assignment, and since my mentor didn't really give me that much stuff to change, I didn't really had that much to do...so I only tweaked a little bit on my animation, but only on things that I still wanted to change myself. So without further ado here's the revision of my Tailor assignment (that probably looks kinda the same ^^)

WEEK 8

Oh man, this week it was all about WALKS, and to be more specific, about the VANILLA WALK.
What's that you say, vanilla ? Why not chocolate or strawberry ? Uh uh yeah offcourse, whatever floats your boat dude ! But with vanilla they mean just a plain old simple 'generic' walkcycle.

So we had to do a first blocking pass for our generic walkcycle, and this is what I turned in.

Then we also had to do a pose that would encapture 'physical strength'.

 WEEK 9

So here we continued the lesson on walks, and we took a more detailed look at the hips !
Basically, hips are very important, and everything derives from them, so make sure you have a good performance on the hips, and then the rest is easy peasy (actually it's still pretty hard, but it get's you half the way ^^)

For our assignment we had to continue to work on the walkcycle, this time going to spline and really try to nail it down !

Since I had a lot of trouble with the AM site not recognizing my previous assignments etc I couldn't get a critique on my blocking, so I just went with what I had the week before and just kept on animating. I'm not superhappy with it, there seems to be something off but I can't really tell what, so if you have some comments please do give them !

And again there was a pose to be done, this time it was 'concerned'.

Thanks for reading and cheerios !
I'll try to update more often from now ;)

Animation Mentor - Week 5 & 6

Hi y'alllll ! 

Since I didn't have that much time last week I decided to combine week 5 and 6 into one post.

So, for WEEK 5 we had a lecture on OVERLAPPING ACTION and what the different ways are to approach it and to incorporate this kind of action into your work.

In order to grasp this concept we had to go and animate a pendulum, with several 'apendages'.
I decided to put in a bouncing ball in there as well to get a more entertaining performance.

When I see it again, there's a lot of stuff that still has to be tweaked and can be better, but since the assignments are getting bigger and bigger I don't really have a lot of time now to go back to these shots. But I will do so eventually...so without further ado, the pendulum (already revisioned)!

 

Also we had to do a Stu pose for 'devastation' , and make sketches beforehand.

 

Then onwards to WEEK 6 !!!

Here we had a lecture about ANTICIPATION & SQUASH UND STRETCH

We learned why it's so important to set up (anticipate) your animation the right way so that your audience understands and follows what's happening on screen.

And to make sure we understand all the principles we've been learning about these past few weeks, we had to animate TAILOR. This is basically a bouncing ball with a tail that resembles a squirrely kinda creature...

I decided to go with some kind of 'obstacle course' where Tailor had to move through. I had a lot of fun on this assignment because I could try out something more fluid and it was just an awesome character to animate. 

And needless to say, there are still a lot of areas which can be improved, but I will wait for my critique before going back into this shot and applying them.

Cheers !!!
Feedback is highly appreciated ;)