Trimester #02 - Week #03: "Walk to Stop, completed"

Class:
Body Mechanics

Title: 

Walk To Stop

Stage: 

Spline+

Critique Points:

•  Last hand movement should have the hand take the weight from the arm coming down and settling for it to look a bit more natural.
• Hip translation forward and sideways near the end should be smoothed out to make it look less pose-to-pose and to curve the movement a little bit.
• As a result of me being careless when fixing knee-related problems I ended up with a messy translation-Y (Up and down movement) and it shows (I didn't track the head before turning it in, that's where it shows the most). Besides being a little messy it's a little sharp too, so the movement curve should be smoothed out
• Last right arm movement has too much of a settle movement and overlap. It should have less swings (2 instead of 4) so that it makes the whole clip more consistant (It could work but the character's not that loose throughout the shot)

Personal Notes:
Alright this was the final critique session for this shot. I feel this was really important to understand general body mechanic details, such as contrapposto, spine movement, counter-rotations and feet planting. I'm super ready for next assignment (Run to Jump) and I'll risk it with some acting too, so that should be a ton of work.

 

Even though this was the final critique session I'll still tailor this one shot a bit more if I have time this week. I might do a bonus entry for that one extra correction.

Up until next week!

Trimester #02 - Week #02: "Walk to Stop, progress"

Class:
Body Mechanics

Title: 

Walk To Stop

Stage: 

Splining

Critique points:

•  On the final pose the arm motion looks overall too isolated from the body. The arm motion should be tapped backwards to around 80% of the weight shift to give that feeling that the hand "pushes out" the hip the last 20% of the motion, to make everything more integrated.
• There's issues with bent knees; there are a lot of reasons behind this but the main ones are:
  1. Up positions being too low and down positions being too high. 
  2. On the up-down movement (Y-axis) there's a lack of ease-in/out, which could be causing that as well.
  3. The feet are not slamming the ground quick enough, so they're causing some passing positions to have bent knees (or rather adding to the 'bentness')
  4. Overall this issue will go away with further polishing. 
  5. At some points the body's forward movement does not match properly some of the poses. There's a couple of down positions on which the body is either too far backwards or too far forward, so that's adding to the bent-knee situation as well.

Personal Notes:
From this week forward all my videos will be viewable on the Quicktime webplayer, which features a handy frame-by-frame button, so there's that. 
Also I'd like to comment on the brutal difference between last week's blocking and today's splining; This shot really came to life and hopefully I'll be able to fix it and push it forward.

Up until next week!

Trimester #02 - Week #01: "Walk to Stop, blocking"

Class:
Body Mechanics

Title: 

Walk To Stop

Stage: 

Blocking

Critique points:

• Down positions are too low due to overdone gating of the feet (Feet far apart so it messed everything up a bit)

• Arms lack overlapping (I was gonna input that in blocking+ but I shouldn't have been lazy like that)

• Endpose is looking too stiff, it really calls for a weightshift and more spacing between the feet. It needs to overall liven up.

Personal Notes/Comments:

This week was a bit weird coming back from the 2 week break and all (we get 2 weeks off at the end of each trimester). I'm definetly going to keep animating during next break, I feel like I got sloppy and I overlooked important things like the gating of the feet. That shouldn't have happened at all.

Aside from that good week, looking forward to bringing this guy to blocking+ / splining. Animating full bipeds is a ton of fun.

See you all next week!

Introduction.

Hi everyone! This project was originally intended to be a deviantArt journal but they don't allow video uploading, so I ended up deciding for an actual blog. This blog will serve as a progression reel and journal for Animschool and I will ONLY upload assignments after I hand them over for critiqu (those are weekly revisions, so one video/blog entry per week)

The uploads will have the following format:

____________________________________
Title:
Stage: [Blocking / Splining / Polish / Final etc.]
Critique:
Personal Notes: [What I learned, what was hard, my emotional state, etc.)
____________________________________

Little about myself:
I've tried to persue a carreer in 3D animation in two local universities only to find that most professors have no idea what they're talking about and that the university fills you up with non-sensical additional classes which only burn your time up and stop you from improving at the area you should be improving. With this realization I decided to quit university alltogether and found out about online schools and people getting trained by actual working professionals over at Animation Mentor, iAnimate and AnimSchool. I ended up picking AnimSchool (From here on mentioned as 'AS') and this is now my one and only educational activity (aside from teaching myself programming, but that's boring and I won't include it in blog posts)

I've been at the school for only 3 months and one week and I feel my animation has improved to be probably five to ten times as good as it used to be a merely two months ago. I cannot wait to share with you all the next months (actually years) that I have ahead of me over at AS.

I'm currently at trimester #02, which is titled "Body Mechanics", so the stuff you'll see here will all be related to that area.

I hope this comes in handy to aspiring animators and we all learn something from my experience. 

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As a way of further introducing myself I'll post everything done last trimester (No description text or critiques, though. They're all at final stage)

Bouncing Basketball

 

Varying Weight Bouncing Balls

 

Ball with Character

 

Simple Chain

 

Flying Ship with Chain Attached

 

Standard Walkcycle (NOT FULL BIPED)

180 Degree Turn (NOT FULL BIPED)