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,...
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I'll keep this update short and sweet, since I'm juggling a lot of stuff at the moment. I had a lot of fun with the assignment for this week, since it was really the first time we've put together everything we've learned so far. That and I always have fun with "squirrelball".
All we had to do was animate Tailor bouncing at least 3 times, so I thought I'd spice it up a little without going too far. This is what I ended up with:
Tailor
Mentor really liked it, just a few small tweaks to make. I decided to make the big hop hang a lot less than what I normal think something like that...
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Seems I'm falling behind on updating this early in the week. I'll try to have that fixed next go around.
Last week was fun and a good challenge. The difficulty of the assignments is starting to ramp up now that we're introducing overlapping action into our shots. We were given a choice this week: either have the pendulum move from one position to the next in a straight line, having it settle on the end, or we could use whatever motion we wanted to for the block. I decided to give myself a little challenge, and went with the second option. I wanted to have a few direction changes and different...
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Phew, sorry this upload is late. Meant to get it done Sunday or Monday. This week has been kinda all over the place, so I'll keep this one short and sweet.
This week our assignment started to involve squash and stretch and a tiny bit of anticipation. We had to have a ball bounce through an obstacle course of our choosing. I was pretty pleased with mine, and my mentor seemed to be as well. Few things to tweak on it for revision, but there always is!
Obstacle Course
And then for our sketchbook this week, we were supposed to convey the emotion "devastation." I was having a rough time...
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Had a lot of fun on the assignment this week. To farther understand our understanding of the importance of timing and spacing, our shot was to animate two bouncing balls, one heavy and one light. Don said the only thing he wanted for us to specify was what type of ball we were using and what the surface they were bouncing on was. He said he didn't care if we wanted to add rotation on even had the balls interact with each other, so of course, I had to go and throw those two things in! Here's mine:
Bowling Ball and Tennis Ball on Concrete
Already got my critique from Don, and he seemed...
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Phew, this past week was kinda rough for me. I couldn't focus much in the beginning part of the week because I had an upcoming job interview on Wednesday. Tuesday, I went down to my brother's place in Raleigh, since my interview was in Sanford the following morning. It seemed to go pretty well, so we'll see. Animation Mentor ain't going to pay for itself and the money I have saved up is eventually going to run itself out. All I can say is thank goodness for unemployment insurance, otherwise there's no way I could be affording this. Guy said they had more people to interview later in the week...
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Phew, past few days have been all over the place, sorry didn't get to wrap up how week 1 ended over here! I got so much helpful feedback from the other students and mentors on my workspace this week, which has been absolutely amazing. So many things that you just don't think about they notice and point out. This is going to be a great ride.
So, here's the pose I went with for this week:
Went through a lot of different versions, tweaking things that people suggested. In the end when I got my critique from my mentor, I think it paid off. He seemed to think it was pretty strong. He went...
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Hey guys!
Animation mentor has been fabulous so far. Being able to see and comment on everyone's work is great, I just love how helpful everyone is to one another and I'm keeping in the spirit by doing what I can as well. Some of my classmates had been asking about lighting and rendering, so I ended up recording a tutorial for them on some simple techniques I've used to get a clean/simple render. Apparently, it's been very popular amongst other people as well, because I've gotten quite a large number of views on vimeo. The tutorial can be found here if you're interested: Character Pose Lighting/Rendering...
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AM started yesterday! Wow, this has been so crazy the past two days, and I haven't even started an assignment yet! Had my first Q&A with my mentor tonight which was pretty awesome. My mentor for this term is Don Kim. It was great getting to hear a little bit of his background and well as what he's expecting of us for the term. All my classmates and I got to get up on cam and introduce ourselves, tell about why we're here and how we found the school. So cool to get to hear everyone's stories from different walks of life. Really interesting to see why people love animation and where they're...
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Well, in slightly less than a week, I'll be starting class 1 of Animation Mentor! Can't believe it's almost here! The past few weeks have been crazy awesome and a whirlwind of emotions. I've met so many fantastic people that I'm going to be taking this journey with, and it already feels like I've known them forever. The facebook group "Eager Beavers" has been such an amazing place to meet people before being let into the full AM site, I'm so glad I found them when I did.
Orientation for AM started a few weeks ago, so I've been keeping myself busy trying to keep active on the site there,...
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