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 :)

Class 2 Week 3 - Progress

This week is going to be about moving from blocked into linear or spline mode. We had to get our shot from last week into blocking plus. So this means no stepped mode and setting up the timing, spacing, overlaps and so on.

After I was quite sure that I've set all breakdowns and In-betweens I needed I selected all helpers in my scene and switched into linear. After making the first playblast I was kind of shocked about the result but who isn't? ;)

So I started to clean every curve very roughly to get the basic feeling of the animation as it was shown in the blocking. After this step the fun part began. Breaking up the movements so they wont hit every key pose on the same frame. Also getting rid of the even spacing in the movements. The next step was to concentrate on the arcs of every body part. I tried to make sure that everything wasn’t moving in a straight line. After a lot of hours tweaking the curves and going back and forth on some parts I started to tweak the knee pops and adjusted the stretch on the legs as needed. 

An with a lot of feedback and great comments of my AM fellers the animation looks now like this

I hope to get some more comments during the weekend to change the last things here and there for now. So I hope you like the animation. Thanks for reading and see you soon :)

New Class, New Mentor, New assignments

So quite a long time I haven't posted anything because there was noting to post.
The new Class started last week and had our first Q&A with our new Mentor Anthea Kerou.
She worked on some great movies like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Planet 51, Bolt and is working right now on Transformers 3. Here you can check her awesome demo reel

The first assignment for the new class was to get some reference video for the shot we want to animate.
I chose to do the big step with Ballie. To make things a bit more challenging I let Ballie step from a boat onto a pier. I planed out everything for a frame limit of about 120-140 frames.
After my Mentor saw my planning, she told me to add some kind of ending to the animation. For her it seemed more like an assignment ending ;)
So with the help of some classmates we figured out some possible endings for the shot. The next day I started to block out an ending with was kind of an combination of some of our ideas.
This is my current work progress.

*Update* - This is my latest progress and I call it final for this week

After today's Q&A I will know if there is going on to much or not, so stay tuned for next week when it goes into blocking plus.

Class 1 - Week 12 - My Progress Reel

The last assignment is done. I uploaded my progress reel and on Friday the class 1 term will be officially over.

I'm looking forward to see the reels of my classmates and of the other AM students. I think this will be great source of inspiration :)

If you want to see my reel as a quicktime file just click here.