Class 1 - Week 11

So this is the last animation assignment in class 1. Its the polished version of my personality walk and the balance Stu-pose.

This week started kind of strange. I got my critique and tweaked my animation a little bit and than, I was nearly done for this week. The last assignment is to put all animations into one reel.
I render a few animation and the poses I made during the last weekend. So for now, I'm considering to put some music in my reel. I read a lot that this is not such a great idea because you can't pic music witch everyone will like. Now I'm gonna with a kind of drum-solo, maybe I'll find something else.

Earlier this day I talked with a classmate of mine and we both agree that its kind of strange starting a week without planning an animation or give it some thoughts. Next week AM will be closed and than a 2 week break benign. I'm planning to read some animation related books during the break and work more on my drawing and planning skills. In addition to that I'll try to animate one or two walks too. But as it is witch planning things for breaks, we only have two weeks and they will pass so quickly.

Later this week I will upload my progress reel for class one and hope you stay tuned for my class 2 animation. I'm so looking forward to get myself in more animation assignments and hope I can learn tons of things next class.

That’s it for now, and here is my work

Class 1 - Week 10

Time is flying by so fast, week 11 is almost over. Right now I'm working on my last big assignment for class 1. Bringing the personality walk into spline mode and getting the last Stu pose done. This week the Stu pose was about balance. I must say that I am quite happy  that this is the last pose for this class. It was not always so easy to came up with something that hadn't been done before, if this is possible at all.

So next week we have to put everything we made over the last 3 month into one quick time file and our first progress reel is done :)

For this I try to tweak all my animations again and add a few frames here and there to get everything nice and smooth.

For last week We had to come up with a Stu pose witch communicates exhaustion.

Also we had to get the blocking done for our personality walk.

Hopefully you have fun with this and stay tuned for the progress reel :)

 

Class 1 - Week 9

The last few days were very busy. I moved on Sunday so had a lot of packing to do and of course unpacking.
The assignment was to convert the blocking of the vanilla walk into spline mode. Besides that we had to do a new pose witch communicates "concerned". It wasn't so easy to come up with something that isn't so cliche. Without any facial expressions its tough to tell that one.
Hopefully you like the work. This week we have to animate a personality walk witch is awesome. Its really cool to see what people come up with and even if like ten people make a sneak walk its ten times a total different walk. I decided to make a kind of double bounce walk with a bit of jumping in it. So stay tuned for next week, than you guys gonna see the blocking stage.

Class 1 - Week 8

The last week was all about vanilla walks. The assignment was to animate Ballie in stepped mode. We had to animate a walk cycle without any personality.

In addition to that we had to come up with a physical strength pose with our Stu-character.

Luckily I hadn't have to change much on the pose and the blocking so I went straight over to the new assignment. This week we have to finish our walk cycle and do a concerned pose with Stu.

Ok than, here are the last week assignments and the revision of the tailor assignment

Class 1 - Week 7

Lat week we had to animate Tailor. Its a ball with a tail like a squirrel. I knew that this assignment was gonna be tough but I didn't thought it would become so difficult. I started animating the body of Tailor and worked on the timing. After the animation of the body was done I tried to animate the tail. 

My first attempt was to animate it the way like I did on the pendulum. It was a horrible result. I tried a few different method’s like the pose to pose were I animated the whole tail in once. Than I tried to animate joint after joint. Nothing seemed to worked. For three days I started over and over again. 

On the forth day something happened :) The overlapping of the tail seemed to work and Tailor had a fluent motion of the tail. I worked on the tail tip and added more small overlaps. The result can be seen below, I hope you like it.

Class 1 - Week 5

Boy, this weekly assignments getting tougher and tougher :)

This week we have to do some overlapping action with the pendulum. Its really hard to get the timing right for the overlaps, so I’m still tweaking it.

To let the continuity of the blog doesn’t suffer from my work I'll upload my work from last week. I haven't changed the work to the comments my mentor gave me. I think I'll do that on the weekend.

Anyway. Here is the animation and the pose from last week.

And while I'm typing this blog post, here is an work progress of the pendulum assignment from this week.
I really have a hard time figuring out the amount and speed of overlapping of each chain joint. Hope you like it.

Progress on Week 5

It's unbelievable how much fun it is to animate a bouncing ball. This week its get even better, a bouncing ball and an obstacle course. 

I started my planning on this assignment by making a screen shot from all 3 obstacle courses and opened them in Photoshop. I drew some bouncing possibilities right onto the image and tried to think about the timing of each bounce. After I had the path I added the balls or circles into the image and thought about the spacing. As this week is all about squash and stretch, I also added some drawings for that into my planning. 

After a while I came up with this on.

 

I knew already that it was going to be tough to get this animation into 120 frames.

I blocked the key poses in Maya and added some breakdowns. 

I worked on the timing and spacing and after tweaking here and there I was quite happy with the result. I started to add the rotation to the ball so its always line up with the path its traveling. 

Now came the fun part :)

I added some squashes and stretches over the animation and it was such a gigantic different.

The animation is still work in progress, but here is what I've got so far.