Week 12

Dang! It's already the final week of class 1. I'm very sad, yet excited to leave this class and proceed onto the next class. As a last sorta 'assignment' we were to compile all of our work through the term into a sorta progress/demo reel ordeal for them to archive. I want to thank my fantastic, local mentor Anthony Wong for all his guidance, enthusiasm, and inspiration! Also, my awesome classmates, past, present, and future for their pointers and advice! With that, for your viewing pleasure, my progress reel thus far. (And now, a certain someone is San Diego bound for 'Spring Break'!)

Class 2: Body Mechanics here I come!

Week 11

Only one more week to go after this one! Well, at least for class 1. This is the final push of the quarter and for our final assignment, you guessed it, was to refine our character walk and make it all pretty and nice. So we basically change the curves from stepped (for blocking) to flat tangents and from there, smooth out the curves accordingly as the great Victor Navone showed us in lecture. "Clean splines beget clean animation" as he states and it holds very true. Some very simple problems can be solved by just fixing the curves and making sure that they don't run all over the place. Having smooth curves gives you smooth animation, in a nut shell. So with that, I proceeded to smooth out my lurch.

Also, for our last posing assignment, we were to pose out STU in a way that communicated "balance". As usual, we sketched out poses and brought the most pleasing one into Maya to be posed out with STU.

After some good pointers from my eCritique, the walk and pose have been cleaned up and revised.

Week 10

Wow week 10, 2 more weeks left of class one! This week we were to take what we learned from the bland vanilla walk and spice it up with some character. This could be practically anything, the imagination was the limit. But, like the prior week, this week we were to just block out the animation and get the essence of the walk captured in it. Of course, the best way to do this is to first film reference and then study it extensively. So in comes handy-dandy webcam. Following my love for the undead, I went with a sorta dead leg, lurching kinda walk.

On top of that, we had to pose Stu out again, this time it had to communicate "exhaustion".

On my eCritique, I put up my revised pose of "concerned", yet my mentor took it as both of them being "exhausted"....(good?)

Week 9

Week 9, Week 9! So, continuing from last week, we were supposed to take our blocked out walk and smooth it out and make it look more presentable (NOTE: My original blocking was a little wonky, as odd as that sounds, so I revised it, so the two walks are a bit different). Smoothing out all the curves in the Graph Editor is rather troublesome, and after receiving my critique, I definitely have to go back and revise it.

On top of that, we were to pose out STU communicating "concern". As arbitrary as that sounds, it was a nice challenge trying to figure out how to show it with just body language. I will most likely also be revising this pose since I have received my critique on it.

Original:

Final:

Week 8

Wow time certainly is flying, week 8! Now, we're jumping into the world of walks. This is arguably the most difficult aspect to animate, it dictates so much about a character, age, weight, mood, and overall personality. Yet, we are not going into character walks quite yet. First, we must master the "vanilla walk". The aim of this is to just get the mechanics of a walk down, without trying to add any sort of personality, just a ho hum bland ordinary walk. So, for this week, we are just supposed to block out the shot, basically just putting in the major poses so that the essence of the walk is there. Next week we smooth it out and make it all pretty.

Also, we were to pose out a position that communicates "physical strength". I went through a number of poses, I thought I had it nailed from the beginning, but soon found and learned that the first idea is not always the best. So with that, I changed around the original pose some but in the end, ended up scraping it entirely and starting over, I'm rather pleased with the end result, and even did a little fun one afterwards.

Final:


Fun!: