Class 2 - Week 7

Hello Everyone, this week I'll keep it short. The week is really busy for me. I finally found a part time job were I will be doing some furniture modeling. Its not animation related but still 3D :)  I have to get used to work with 3D Max again but I think in a few weeks I have will have refresh my memory with this software. So to get my blocking for this week done I have to get a lot of work done in the next days. 

Here is my nearly final version of my drunken stumble animation, hope you like it

Class 2 - Week 6

Some people might call it week 6, I will call it the week of re-re-re-re-re-blocking.

The first days of the week I was mostly busy re-blocking my shot and trying different ideas. this included changing the beginning, the end and some things in the middle. After having some different ideas blocked out I couldn't decide with which one I should go. 

I finally decided to go with the one I felt I could finish in the next week with the luxury of getting some sleep  :)

On Friday I changed again the beginning and re-blocked it. So I had 2 days to go into splining. Even if the result is not the best, I learned a lot and hope I can incorporate that into the next assignment.

Today I feel film some reference and if everything works out and my idea will not change, the last thing I can say is howdy ;)

Class 2 - Week 5

This week is all about drunken guys. I can say that I never watched so many drunken people in my life then in this week. 

I chose the drunken stumble assignment and had to get some reference for that. 

First I tried to act drunk and record it. After nearly 2 hours of "acting" I ended with nothing. All takes had more of an acting drunk than this being drunk feeling. I started to watch a lot of youtube videos and found some good references. I tried to work with them but I couldn't get the animation the way I wanted it to be. 

The solution for me was, to start from scratch and build my animation pose after pose. 

This went surprisingly well and with a lot of feedback the story was becoming better.

The only part were I was not sure about was the ending. I had one ending were the character slips on a wet spot and than would fall down. The other one was that he would fall over his own feet. Asking a few people about their opinion I got a mix of answers back. I also asked in three Q&A's about the ending and got always different answers. So I decided to go with the shorter ending which for me has a better rhythm for the animation. I hope my mentor will see it the same way :)

So here is the blocking, have fun 

Class 2 - Week 4

Last week I was polishing my Captain Ballie shot and added some notes from my mentor. It was really the first time for me that I really tracked every body part to check the arcs and refine every curve in the animation. I think the shot turned out nice and I hope you still like it :)

This week we began a new assignment. First I chose the assignment "Walk in a heavy windstorm". I planned my shot out, got my 3D set ready and made a basic blocking to see if everything is fitting in the time limit.

So on Monday I started with the blocking and worked the whole day on it. Well, at the end of an long day animating it turned out that there was to much happening in my shot. The character would have been moving around way to much to really see everything happening. At least for the short amount of time I had.

After deciding to choose another assignment I picked the drunken stumble. I have to say that searching for reference of drunken people is kind of funny. I watched a lot of reference and than come up with an idea. I tried to film some reference of my own but it didn’t looked right. It was more of an controlled loosing balance than a stumble. 

Anyway, right now I am working on my blocking and I hope you will check it out later this week or beginning next week.

Cheers :)