New Practice Test

We had a week off of AM, so I took this opportunity to do a simple practice shot. Just a jump, purely mechanical. I wanted to accomplish a few goals with this:

1. See how quickly I can work a shot through polish

2. Try new methods for animation controls.

a. IK spine

b. Follow enabled on both head and shoulders

c. Block in plateaued splines instead of stepped

3. Achieve a better subtle settle

4. Keep the body loose

The settling and having a stiff body was probably my weakness last session. I went in and tried to apply as much of the advice I'd gotten from my mentors. For the stiffness, the IK spine really helps me with that, as well as using some nice squashing and stretching on the body. Before now, I hadn't touched the translate controls on the IK spine, shoulders, or head; but this time I decided to try them out. I liked the results. Anyways, here is the shot. I worked on it for about 3 days.

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Sketchdump - 10.22.11

Had a pretty productive day today artwise. I decided to go out to the city today with my mom and sister for the weekend farmer's market at the Ferry Building. Originally I planned to just take BART back home after that while they went to the Cal football game at ATT Park, but since it was such a nice day and I had my sketchbook I decided to stick around and wander for a few hours while they were at the game. We grabbed some sandwiches at the farmer's market and went up to the 2nd floor of a pier were there were some free benches for us to sit on while we ate. I took the opportunity to do a couple of sketches. The first one was of the Ferry Building Clocktower from where we were sitting. I hadn't really gotten my hand warmed up yet so the top of the tower got kind of jacked up in perspective. Tried to fix it, but its still messed up. This one was a quick sketch of the terminal building from where we were sitting as well. I don't usually draw buildings or architectur...

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. ...

Jedi Stewie

Remember that pose I promised a while back? Just did it today, enjoy.

Frame by Frame

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