Week 08 and 09 – Vanilla Walk
Phew, sorry I forgot to update over here! A lot has been happening the past few weeks, and I’m trying to keep on top of my game!
Our assignment was a two week long one, so I missed the update last week. I don’t want to do that again so from now on, I’ll be trying to at least update every week. The animation assignment was to do a plain, or vanilla, walk. We weren’t supposed to put any character into the walk, just work out the mechanics of how walks work. The thing is, there really *isn’t* a generic walk. Everyone puts there own little flairs and personality into their walks in real life, and the same is true when you animate one. That being said, I tried to keep it natural and as normal as possible. Even though I’ve done walk cycles before, I really learned a lot from this assignment. The arcs on the feet and the knees, balancing weight shifts properly (even though this was from a side view only, I tried to work it out so it looks good in perspective). I also tried a new method to me of splining the curves in the graph editor, by going to linear first and manually splining the curves. This actually seemed to work pretty well for me, it was more hands on, and I felt like I had more control of what I was doing. I’m sure it may not be the way to go every time, but I’ll give it another try for sure!
Here is the first blocking for the shot with the key poses:
And here is the final version, with splined and smoothed out curves:
We also were to do poses each week with Stu. First was strength, and then concern. I really wasn’t on top of my game for the poses both week, so my sketches came out pretty rough, even though the end result poses were alright. There still quite a bit of tweaking to do on the concern pose, but I was pretty happy with strength. The problem with concern is, without context, it could be viewed as many different things. I tried to show the motion of getting out of a chair quickly to see what was happening, but my mentor said to push it farther, because right now it looked more like an inbetween than a still image. I’ll be tweaking all my poses in two weeks when our assignment is to put together our progress reel. Anyway, have some sketches and Stu poses!
I realize I’ve been bad about not uploading any of my sketches. I’ll fix this from now on, because I want to track my drawing skills progress as well. Last week and this week I’ve tried sketching digitally in Photoshop. While last week I spent hardly no time on my sketches, this week so far I’ve really been focusing on improving here, since I felt like I’ve let myself down the past few weeks. I’ve spent a long time on each of my sketched poses, making sure that I put a good sense of weight, perspective, proportion, and clarity into each drawing. I really think it’s paying off, because I felt like I’ve improved dramatically. Can’t wait to show off those sketches here in a few days! I already feel faster on them too.
In other news, my laptop came today! It’s a Lenovo ideaPad y570. This is the first laptop I’ve ever had, so I’m especially giddy and bouncy with excitement. Still in the process of installing everything I need on it and setting it up to my tastes, but it’s got a lot of power to pack and I’ve very happy with it. Now I just need to get a bag…
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