Frame by Frame

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.

So the last shot of class 2 has been finaled, which means I'm now pretty much done with Class 2. One more goodbye Q&A with my awesome mentor Martin Hopkins, and a progress reel and I'm done!......for 2 days until class 3. Anyways, it's been about 6 months since I've started AM and I've come a long way. I figured that I would sit down and give myself a self-assessment on my skills and what I think my current weaknesses and skills are. Overall, I think I'm doing pretty well. Not to sound braggy, but my work tends to feel better than most of my class. But maybe that's just me. I can achieve a pretty high level of polish with my shots pretty easily, although I'm not sure if thats not smoothness more than polish. But my arcs are pretty good, my spacing feels nice, and I have pretty good weight. I think I have a pretty good understanding of mechanics so far, but I took a look at next quarter's syllabus and it looks like we're going to learn a lot o...