Animation Mentor Class 1-week 3

This is the week where we were first able to dive into the world of animation!  With the ever exciting bouncing ball assignment.

 First we had to sketch out some thumbnails to show our thought process.

Then we had to make it bounce in Maya.  We weren't supposed to use any squash and stretch as that was going to be covered in a future lecture.

We also had to sketch out various poses that expressed 'excitement' and then pose the Stu character into one of them.

Here are my thumbnail sketches

And here is my Stu pose.  

After I got my e-critique back from my mentor Scott, I went back into the assignments and made some revisions.

Here's my Stu revision.  Scott wanted me to straighten out the one leg more to help with the line of action and to push the feet farther apart to give it more of a sense of dimension. I also tried to make the curve of the spine a little stronger and offset the angle of the shoulders from the hips a little more. 

And here's my bouncing ball revision (it also has the Stu pose revision at the end)

I gave the ball a ground plane so that it didn't look like it was bouncing off of an invisible force field (which it totally was in the first version by the way!) And I worked on making the arcs better and more arc-ier.

Animation Mentor Class 1- Week 2

So it's been a while since I last posted something so I decided to let y'all know what I've been up to at my wonderful school Animation Mentor!  I started Class 1 at the beginning of January and got my first mentor Scott Lemmer!  Scott is an awesome guy who has worked for a bunch of studios like DNA Productions, Pixar, Disney and Blue Sky!  He's also originally from Canada which is pretty cool!  I also have a bunch of awesome and talented people in my class from all over the world!

Anyways, our first assignment was to go out into the world and sketch people.  We then had to pick one pose out of our sketches and pose the Stu character with it in mind.  These are my sketches.

The pose that I picked was originally of a guy waiting at the counter of a bank.  The Stu pose ended up looking more like a guy waiting for a drink at the counter of a bar.  He also ended up looking a lot swankier than I originally intended...