Animation Mentor Class 1-week 10 and 11

So after the Vanilla walk we got a chance to put a little bit of character into Ballie with a personality walk.  We were allowed to choose from pretty much any type of personality walk, happy, sad, old, young, etc.  I chose to to a sneaky walk.  This is my planning for my contact poses/breakdowns and extreme up and down positions.  

This walk turned out to be a little tricky because there is so much back and forth to it.  I had a lot of help from Richard Williams Animators Survival Kit though!

And this is how my initial blocking pass turned out.

We also had to do a Stu pose conveying exhaustion.

Here's how my final pose turned out.

I got some good feedback from my mentor as well as some awesome words of encouragement from Dreamworks animator and former AM student Ron Pucherelli!

In week 11 we had to take our blocking and throw it into spline, as well as putting into a 3/4 

view.  It was the first time we were asked to actually animate our assignments in a 3D view

 instead of just a side view which was a little scary...

  

Once I put my blocking into spline a lot of craziness happened as well and I spent a lot of time fixing and tweaking it.  I even pulled my first AM all-nighter and stayed up until 6am working on it.  Even with all of that time spent on it I still forgot to look at it in a front view to make sure that the weight was shifting properly from leg to leg with each step...I guess I'll have to do that in my revisions.  Anyway, this is how it turned out.

Because I was up so late working on it and because my brain goes a little crazy with no sleep I decided to make a background for Ballie to sneak past.  And because I fail at modeling I drew a picture of it.  And with that I give you 'Sleepy Bears'

I managed to get the BG into Maya, but I forgot how to playblast the file with textures and such, so I had to leave it without the bears.  This is what it would have looked like though.

Our final Stu pose of the term had to convey balance.  Here are my early sketches.

I decided to go with one inspired by the Karate Kid.

And once again my tired brain decided to give my assignments a background...

And that was my last assignment of Class 1! I had a great term a learned a ton!  Even having taken traditional animation classes before it was really good to refresh the basics/foundations of animation and I'm super excited to start Class 2!  Psychology of Body Mechanics here I come!