Class 2 Shot 1

Hey what's up minimal readership?

I'm finally done with my first animation for my second class. But first, I'll rewind a bit. My new mentor for this class is Martin Hopkins. He is trained in classical animation from Sheridan College and has transitioned into 3D, with his entire professional career pretty much at Dreamworks Animation for the last 13 or so years. He is currently working on Shrek 4, which he claims isn't as bad as you would think and is better than Shrek 3; which I haven't seen.

So far he has been pretty great. He sometimes gets out of his chair and acts out something on the camera for you to see instead of just relying on drawing over our frames. His inputs have gotten me from my initial blocking pass up to the polish of the final (although he hasn't seen that yet). Anyways, here is my progress from blocking to final:

You might also find this pretty interesting. After we set some keyframes, this is what we use to refine and polish our animations. It's called the 'graph editor' and all those curves represent all the different animation controls on the rig. Good times ;)

Close:

Fit:

My next shot should be pretty fun to do. I'm doing between 120-200 frames of parkour. This time we will be upgrading to a full body rig with no arms. So it's got all the controls of the Ballie rig, plus some spine joints, neck, head, eye blinks, and shoulders. Still got nothin on the thousands of controls the pros have to use :P