Animation Mentor Class 2-week 2-4

Ok, so blogger finally decided that it wanted to let me upload video files again, so I can finally post what I`ve been doing for the past few weeks.  For week 2 we had to take our video reference and thumbnail poses and translate them into Maya to begin actually blocking out our assignment.  For the basic blocking we just had to get the basic timing, key poses and breakdowns in there.  Here`s what my first pass at it looks like. 

In week 3 we had to take our blocking pass and start a `blocking plus`pass.  We had to incorporate our mentors notes and start to move it out of stepped mode and into splined.  In Pete`s feedback he said that the wind up for the kick needed to have more of a bounce to it and more of a squash and stretch into the jump and kick.  I re-blocked it out incorporating those notes.

 

I started moving into the dreaded spline mode and this is how it turned out.

The timing turned out being really even and the kick was way too slow... I had a LOT of trouble trying to get Maya to do what I wanted this week and it was really frustrating.

In week 4 we had to take our mentors notes and start to refine our animation.  My biggest problem was timing, so I worked on it a lot.  Pete also suggested a slightly different approach to the fake out and wind up to the kick, so I took a shot at that.  I was still having trouble with Maya and it turned out looking a little choppy.  The speed of the kick worked out better though.

   

When I get time I might revisit it and try to make it smoother, but for now I`m just going to move on to my next assignment.  The drunken stumble! 

So I haven't posted a lot up here for a while, mostly because I have had a CRAZY busy couple of months, but I have a ton of stuff to post up here over the next while.  The first thing that I wanted to post about is that I started Class 2 (Psychology of Body Mechanics) at Animation Mentor!!!  My new mentor for this term is Pete Paquette, who like my last mentor works at Blusky Studios.  Some of the Q&A's that we've had with Pete so far have been the most entertaining that I've had since joining AM.  He doesn't sugarcoat things and he swears like a sailor, and I kind of love it.  He has also been doing walkthroughs in Maya during the Q&A's which have been really helpful.

For our first assignment we were given a pick list to choose from including things like walking down stairs, a sidestep, river dance, back flip, and other stuff like that.  I chose to do a roundhouse kick, because I was hoping that it wouldn't be too terribly difficult so that I could focus on making the weight of my character believable.  It turned out to be a lot more difficult than I had originally thought it would be...  For the first part of the assignment we either had to create our own video reference or go and find some on the internet.  Seeing as how the assignment was not to create an animation of someone failing a roundhouse or falling over I knew that filming my own reference would probably not be the most helpful route.  Luckily I found a couple of great roundhouse reference videos on youtube and this one especially was great in describing what was going on during the kick and showing it in slow motion as well.  I don't think that I have ever watched so many people being kicked in the head...There were many videos of people being on the wrong side of a roundhouse, and not just adults, little kids too....

The next step was to take the video reference and make thumbnails of the major poses to plan out our animation.

Sketch Blog-Imaginary

"Unicorns are not imaginary.  They just made up that rumor after people found out that they tasted like bacon."

So I left this week's sketch blog until the VERY last minute because I had a crazy busy week full of homework and a watercolor workshop and I did it while very over-tired and sleep deprived.....Can you tell?  I was pretty excited to draw a unicorn, although a unicorn standing on it's hind legs in a supermarket looks a little strange.  I did the background really quickly because I was tired and didn't really want to work on it any more.  I do like that the unicorn shops at a store that stocks liquid food, moonshine AND value pack tacos though.