Animation Mentor Class 1-week 8 and 9

Our assignment over these two weeks was to create a basic or 'vanilla' walk for the Ballie character.  The first week was just blocking the walk out and the second week we worked on polishing it up and finishing it.

Here's my plan for the blocking of the walk, with just the keys/contact positions, breakdowns/passing positions and the up and down extremes.

And here's my blocking pass in stepped mode.

We also had to pose Stu in a way that showed physical strength, so I did a lot of research on sports, martial arts and just general exercising.  

I tried posing Stu in some of the martial arts poses, but his extremely large head made a lot of them look strange.  I eventually settled on one of the shot-put poses.

I also learned how to render the Stu poses so that they look prettier and have little drop shadows! 

In week 9 we had to take our blocked vanilla walks out of stepped mode and put them in spline mode, adding inbetweens and such.  After a lot of tweaking mine looked like this.

I think that I might have worked on it for too long because watching the walk cycle seemed to put me in a sort of trance, and when it started walking in time to the music that I was listening to I found it way more amusing than I probably should have....

We also had to do a Stu pose portraying Concern for this week.  This was another pose that was hard to avoid cliches with.

I chose #8, and I kind of really like how this one turned out.