Week 10 - 11 Animation Mentor - Basic Foundation

Hello Fellow Bloggers!

I apologise for the late post :(, I was in a hurry to get things done for week 10 -11, and normal work has been busy as ever, so I forgot to make posts, noooooo! But I will keep it up and try to post weekly.

So Week 10-11 was our last animation assignment where we had to create a personality walk, the first thing our mentor told us, was "Decide on what kind of character or feeling you want in the walk, before animating", so basically we should come up with a personality before even finding references. I wanted to do a walk that involves heavy feet that showed different timming in the extreme downs and ups, so me and my co-worker who is also doing animation mentor went to the parking lot and shot some references of ourselves :), which was a lot of fun!

I thought this last assignment was a really good exercise in bringing all that we have learnt all together, from the planning to blocking and to finally polishing our shots. I felt I have already learnt so much in this first term, and I feel a little bit more confident in doing animation work if I was to be given any, I just have a better strategy and a understanding of where to start off now then before.

We also had to do some STU poses that involves exhaustion and balance, I really wanted to try something different with the exhausted pose, and boy it very hard to try and move away from the cliche poses. Hope you like the personality walk and will be posting again for the last week of "Class 1" of Animation Mentor.

Cheers,
Meng

Week 8 - 9 Animation Mentor - Basic Foundation

Hello Fellow Animators and Bloggers!

OK so with this post I thought I would combine the two weeks together, as the first week we just blocked out our walk cycle, and then on the second week we polished it up. The biggest lesson I took from this exercise was the importance of blocking and getting that right, before doing anything else. I learnt that if you have your blocking solid, and perfect (as much as you can), the polishing is pretty much straight forward, and all the inbetweens are just things you play around with and clean up around the blocked key poses, I have definitely found in some poses I could improve on it, but realised that's its too late at the refining stage of the animation.

The second thing I learnt, was the use of tangent curves, this was some that wasn't really taught to me when I did my 3D generalist Diploma, and I think its a must! What I was taught was to animation with splines all the time and to block animations, was to key things into place. Now I know that's not the best approach, as you end up with keys in places you don't know, and result in confusion.

So moral of the story is Block! Block! Block! Get the blocking to near perfect and then the rest of the ride is smooth. So our next exercise is personality walks! I think this one is going to be interesting.