Not much really to say since last time. I finished up my uneven bars shot and at least shot reference and did some basic thumbnailing for my next shot. Still going to work out a few more things on it before jumping into animating, but I’m pretty excited to get started on it. It’s going to be a lot of fun, but you’ll just have to wait until blocking to see what it is (or you’re facebook friends with me and already know…)

Anyway, here’s the completed uneven bars shot, minus maybe a few tweaks here and there before I render it at the end of term: Uneven Bars Polished

Off to relax a little bit before heading back to work tomorrow and starting this cycle of madness all over again! Muahaha!

I finished up Class 2, had a wonderful holiday break, and am now halfway into Class 3. My mentor for this term is Pete Paquette, and he has been absolutely amazing. His critiques have been soooo very helpful and it’s great that he really doesn’t hold back. Being blunt with what isn’t working is very helpful indeed. I’ve finished 1 shot (which I will post below), and am starting to spline a new one, as well as starting to plan my 3rd and final shot for the term. Yikes, I’ve got a lot to do this weekend!

In other news, I started a new job in the middle of January. I’m now a contracted out 3D Artist at a company in Warrenton, VA. Technically, I’m considered a freelancer and not an employee of the company, but I’m still required to come in to the office. I ended up moving to the area and living with my cousin, who starts his job next month. My contract runs through the end of May. It’s been really hard trying to balance moving, work, and school, but I think I’m finally starting to get the hang of it. I just really do miss being a more active student and attending more Q&As at AM. Free time, what is that stuff?

Anyway, I’m just going to post up all the work I’ve done and call it a day. Sorry, no descriptions, it should be pretty self explanatory. More in depth post to follow on Sunday or Monday (I hope).

Bowling (Polishing)

Uneven Bars (Blocking Plus)

I finished up my diving shot last week. I felt pretty strange doing this shot, because overall, I really didn’t have a lot of trouble with it. It seemed to go really fast from what I’m used to. Maybe I’m getting more confident and comfortable in my animation abilities, or maybe the cards just fell right for this one. Either way, I’m extremely happy with how the shot turned out, it’s pretty much spot on how I envisioned it when I started. And that is the sign of accomplishing something, in my mind. Yay for getting faster and more efficient at animation!

High Dive

I still haven’t received my critique from Scott yet. He usually seems to do them on Tuesday night. I’m interested to see what he has to say. While I know it’s not perfect, my animation now (to me at least), is miles above anything I used to do. I’m so happy I decided to go to Animation Mentor, I’ve improved so much since starting here. Here’s to continuing to improve at this rate!

Also had to start planning out my next animation, which involves a full Stewie, complete with arms. Now we’re on to full body characters, wooo! I’ve always wanted to animate a dance, so that’s what I went with! I know it’s going to be super hard to pull off, but I’m ready to push myself. After all, we have a full four weeks to finish this up! I looked around and found something I liked and wanted it to be inspired by (ended up with LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem), grabbed a few other reference videos for how the feet are supposed to move for shuffling, and then even tried to learn and record myself doing it. The last part was really more just to try and understand the body movements better, since it’s easier if you can do the action yourself, for sure. Sketched out some of the basic poses, which you can see below:

This week, it’s time to block it out in Maya. There’s going to be so many poses, this is really going to take awhile, but I’m up for the challenge! Selling the weight, while trying to make the character look weightless is going to be the hardest aspect of this.

Oh, in other news: I’m going to CTN Expo in Burbank, CA this week! I’m going to be hanging out with fellow AMers and checking everything out. It’s going to be such a blast! If you’re going to be there, give me a shout out!

And now, off to get a few games of bowling in with my cousin before jumping into Maya!

This was my first Blizzcon, and it was quite the fun experience. I’m sure you’ve read all the stuff they announced by now, so no point in going over that. But it was definitely cool to geek out for awhile over the games (even if I don’t really play them anymore), check out all the cool artwork and sculptures, and just chill with a bunch of geeks. I mostly went to the art, making of, and information panels rather than watching the SC2 matches or lore panels. It was really cool to hear a little bit of the process that goes into creating their stories and ideas for games, as well as the production pipelines they have in place. I did get to play through the starting area for the new WoW Pandaren monks, and I really enjoyed that. Monk seems like it’ll be a blast to play, seeing as there’s no auto attack, mixed with the kind of energy/combo build up system. The animations they’ve put out for these guys is so far above any of the other character animations in WoW. Nice job stepping it up for in game animations, guys!

After Blizzcon, there was much adventures to be had with my friends. Arts and crafts, soda adventures at BevMo (from which we assembled the Rainbow of Soda), playing fetch with a certain awesome kitty, dressing up for Halloween parties, pumpkin carving (I didn’t get to finish mine…), and just overall being awesome. We also went up to spend some time at the Sequoias which was AMAZING. Those trees really are huge and awesome. Did I mention huge? We had to rent a car while Kymba’s was in the shop for that trip. We got an orange Dodge Charger, which we promptly named “Pumpkin”. Good times.

And now, back to animation!

Second shot for Class 2 was again a choice of a picklist to do with the Stewie character, except for this one, he has no arms. I ended up choosing a high dive for my shot. It’s getting pretty late here and I need some sleep, so I’ll just leave you with the videos of the various stages and brief captions.

Blocking – Here’s the first pass on my blocking. Still very rough at this stage.

Blocking Plus – Moving into blocking plus, where I adjusted the timing, added in a ton of breakdowns, and started working on the anticipation at the beginning.

Splining/Refining – Splined out the curves and started to smooth things out. Still playing around with the anticipation at the beginning trying to get something I liked.

Polishing – The shot as it currently stands now. I think I’m pretty much done with it. Nothing really is jumping out at me for being wrong, but I’ve been starting at it for quite a long time. Just waiting on some feedback, while I’ll start shooting reference and planning for my final Class 2 shot over the next few days. If you’ve got some comments, please leave em!

First Splining Pass

This week has been pretty much a whirlwind. In the beginning of the week, I did my best to take this shot as close to the end as possible, because I knew I was going to be busy the rest of the week. On Wednesday, I drove down to Charlotte to stay with my old high school buddy, because in the morning I was getting on a plane to CA. Why? Because I attended my first Blizzcon. I definitely had a blast there, but the stress of not being able to work on my animation was pretty high. Without much sleep between nights, I tried to work as hard as I could for a few hours before bed each night. But in the end, I think it was so worth it, and I came out with a shot that I’m really proud of. Now I’m still out here for another week visiting my friend, but I should have much more time to spend on AM stuff without Blizzcon taking up the whole day.

I played with the hangtime timing of a few of the jumps a lot, smoothed out the arcs on everything, and added some overlap to the toes. I also did my best to fix some spacing and silhouette issues on some of the inbetweens. I definitely learned a lot about good workflow and the importance of planning over the course of this shot. I’m ready for the next one, bring it on!

Hopscotch Final

I started the planning for my next shot last night, since that was also part of our assignment for this week. I did enough to meet the requirements for the week, but I really feel like I need to explore it some more before taking it into blocking. More on that to come later this week, for today, I take a break!

I just want to say, it’s definitely awesome to follow your mentor’s advice, because this got crazy better just by fixing those things he mentioned.

Right now, I’m still on stepped curves. There’s a few more breakdowns I can add in, but otherwise I think I’m pretty much ready to start splining. Waiting until tomorrow afternoon, once I’ve gathered some feedback and then it’s off to war in the graph editor!

Hopscotch Blocking Plus

hopScotch_blockingV3

Also, for sake of trying to see clarity, I did a silhouette only version. To me it looks like it still reads really well, but I’ve also been staring at this for a long time. What do you think?

hopScotch_blockingV3_silhouette

This having several weeks to work on a shot is so nice, gives me lots of time to study and draw.

First off, we have my video reference. Since our character is still Ballie for this time, I debated whether or not to hold my arms close to my body when filming this, since Ballie has none. But in the end, I felt like that interfered with how my hips were working naturally, so I just recorded myself without attempting it. I wanted to add a lot of variance and texture in the timing, and I think it came out pretty good. Originally I wanted to have both the forward and return hops, but to keep within the frame limit, I’m going to have to cut it down to on the forward advance. Oh well, I better get used to trying to keep things simple, and not being able to always cover all the ideas I’d like to try for a shot. Sometimes you just have to do what is needed without all the extra fluff.

Reference Video

Next, we have my two pages of sketches that I used to plan out my animation. Although I’ve since changed the frame numbers a lot, I went through and tried to figure out the rough timing while I was still on the paper stage. I really analyzed a lot of the video reference and tried to work out the best of what I had there, leaving lots of notes in the process. Oh, and there’s also a random hydralisk I sketched out in about 15 minutes tonight, because he’s cool. I’ve been trying to keep myself drawing everyday, and I’ve been keeping it up for about a week now. I really feel like I’m improving, but I have a long way to go still.

And finally, here’s the state that my shot is in currently with blocking. There’ll be more updates later in the week as I continue to work on it.

First Pass of Blocking

I did a lot of thinking about where I am and where I want to go as an artist. I feel like I didn’t work as hard as I could have for my first term of AM. I still put out good work, I made lots of friends, and learned so much. But I still feel like there are some things I didn’t make the most of, or didn’t spend enough time on. Perhaps it was because I’ve done all these assignments before (although not nearly as well with worse workflows), perhaps the initial glow of AM wore off a bit. Whatever it was, it got me worried that I was just doing things to “slide by”. Over the break, I worked my brain around all this and put my foot down. I’m done with feeling bad about my ability to draw, so I’m forcing myself (and now I’m really enjoying it) to draw everyday, even if it’s a quick sketch. I realize this is probably one of the last chances for me to go where I want to with my animation, so I’m devoting a ton more time to studying it when I’m not working on my assignments. I’ve even decided that if I get my schoolwork done earlier, I’m going to work on traditional animation, which in turn will help both my drawing and my animation as a whole. I’m currently unemployed, there’s no reason I can’t spend more time on this. I got inspired again. I’m doing everything I can to improve myself as an animator, an artist, and as a person. Keep that enthusiasm guys, it’s definitely the fuel for achieving your dreams.

So, with my batteries fully recharged and my inspiration gauge at max, I’m diving into class 2 ready for whatever AM is going to throw at me. 12 weeks to do 3 shots? I’ve got the time for the polish, I’m grabbing my rag. Awwww, yeah!

Where’s the work for week 11 and the progress reel for the end of the term, you might ask? Well, I’ve got it for you right here!

First is my sketches for Stu in a balance pose and then the version done in Maya. I also included the planning for my personality shot which I forgot to last time.

I’ll just let you see the final version of that shot in my Class 1 progress reel. You can check that out here:

Reference Video

There’s quite a few suggestions I’ve gotten on how to improve this, which I’m going to start working on tomorrow. For now though, considering how crazy the end of last week got with family get togethers and my car being in the shop, I’m pretty happy where it is for the amount of time I’ve spent on it.

Runway Walk Blocking

Also, I mentioned last week that I spent a while really trying to improve my sketching of poses. This week was exhaustion, and I had a lot of fun coming up with and drawing these out. The final pose came out pretty well too, I think.

Onward to the splines!