AM week 112 - Final Week of Class 1

Hey guys!

Here we are in the final week of the first term. I can't believe how quickly this has gone by.
I had an amazing time and wanted to mention my awesome classmates, who were always there to help and give critique, which is so important. Thanks to all of you and the best of luck! Although I don't mention names because of privacy, you guys know who you are ;)

Of course I want to say "Thaaaaanks" to my Mentor Mario Pochat as well, I think he did a great job and was super-motivated. The Q&A's were always fun and the critiques extensive and very helpful. So the students who get to be in his class this semester can count themselves lucky :)
Keep on rockin' Mario!

By the way, Mario is also a founder of "Vancouver Animation", a website focused on the animation business around the city of Vancouver, Canada. It has forums, news, a job-board and information about companies in the area.


This week we didn't have to do an assignment, except for assembling all of our animations into a so-called "Progress Reel", which shows our progress throughout the term.

So here you go, enjoy and leave some comments!



That's all for Class 1, sorry again for posting all this stuff so late! I hope I can do better in Class 2, after all this is fun :)

Take care everybody!
See you around...

AM week 111

Week 111 was tough for me, because I worked on a freelance job doing previz for a live-action film, which took several full days. Moreover I started teaching at the macromedia FH in Munich, which I also had to prepare for...

In the end I could only work about 2 days on my AM assignments, which was not really enough to make the walk shine... I was happy that I brought the blocking pretty far the week before, with almost everything keyed on every second frame (on 2's for the animators out there, hehe). That saved my butt because I didn't have too much work cleaning up the motion, because most of it was pretty well defined.
The hip rotations and the legs still needed a lot of fine-tuning though.

So here's the final result of my "Personality Walk":



I also included Front- and Side-Views for clarity.

Sketches and pose for week 111 were about "Balance"


3D-Pose


Looking at it now I find the pose pretty boring, but again, I wanted to go for something more "standard" because I didn't have much time for experimentation...

AM Week 110 - Personality!

This was one of the assignments I was looking forward to a lot. The "Personality Walk"! Unfortunately I didn't have a lot of time to work on it because I had to prepare for two jobs that were starting the following week. While I generally try to keep commercial work to a minimum to maximize my time for AM, I have to work sometimes ;)

So here is the blocking for my "happy, double-bounce-leg-kick-walk".

I shot video-reference of myself from side and front views, then converted that to 24 frames/s and used it as a guide. In the actual animation I tried to exaggerate certain parts of the movement, like the up&down and the kick.

Tell me what you think!



The pose for week 10 was supposed to communicate "Exhaustion".

Sketches

3D-Pose

AM week 109 - Finishing the Walk

This week we were supposed to bring the walk from blocking to final, adding details and smoothing out the motion. One of the trickiest areas that took a lot of work was the "popping" of the knees, a result of IK-legs. I think the result works quite alright :)

The pose for week 109 was meant to show "Concern".



Sketches


3D-Pose


Revision of "Strength" Pose

AM week 108

Now we're getting serious. WALKING!

You hear many experienced animators say something like: "Walks are among the toughest movements to get right", because we see people walking all the time and are very aware if something is wrong or just doesn't feel right. So it's always a challenge.

We started with a basic standard walk, the so called "vanilla walk".

Blocking with Keys and Extremes only



The pose for that week should communicate "physical strength"

Sketches


3D-Pose


I tried to do a pose, that was not as cliché as many of may sketches, but I wasn't very happy with the result...

AM week 107

Alright, now comes the fun part. "Tailor" was a character I was really looking forward to, and I wasn't dissapointed. He's really cute ;)

And my Mentor Mario liked the animation, too, which was cool!
The assignment focused on the application of overlapping action and arcs.

Again no poses for that week.



This version is already the revised animation after I had gotten Mario's e-critique.
Throw in some comments if you like!

AM week 106

Yeah, on to week 6!

More physical animation, now focusing on overlapping action. The "pendulum" assignment was a lot of fun, I combined it with the bouncing ball principles :)

No poses this week.



It might be a little hard to see in this small resolution, actually I'll try to update the posts using the quicktime plugin for the videos...

AM week 105

Now it's time for some fun! The "obstacle course" should basically show some use of squash&stretch and anticipation, but the movement through the course was supposed to be realistic.

Here we go!
The pose for that week was meant to show "Devastation".



Sketches


Revision of the 3D-Pose


For this animation assignment I obviously couldn't shoot reference, so it was mostly just imagination, which is fun!

AM Week 104

Hey fellas!

so now that Class 1 is over I'll still quickly post my assignments and the progress reel in the end, so that I can hopefully go on blogging about Class 2 on a more regular basis.

Here comes the second animation assignment, the heavy and light bouncing ball excercise...
I also include the revision for the "Excitement" pose from week 103 .

Animation



Revision of the 3D-Pose


P.S.: I shot video-reference of a squash ball and a ping-pong ball, and used that for the timing and the height of the bounces.

Update and AM week 103

First of all I have to say this is not the way it was supposed to be. I'm really sorry for not posting in such a long time...
I've been working besides AM and the last couple of weeks have been pretty busy, so the blog suffered. Now the first term is almost over and I've posted no animations yet, not good :)

So here is the first animation assignment of the bouncing ball and the scribbles and pose we had to do for week 103!

Emotion: "excited"

Sketches3D-Pose


Animation of standard "Bouncing Ball"




More stuff is on the way... :)