Session 10: Personality Walk (2nd & 3rd pass)

AM's server was down last week, giving us an extra week for the same assignment. Nevertheless I kept pushing as if nothing happened with the server issues.

This walk cycle assignment is fun, but it has had its dark moments!! So many tweaks its unbelievable! I'll submit it this way to AM and wait for Bret Parker's comments, of course... If you have any please let me know!!

Session 10: Personality Walk (1st pass)

Here are the first two steps, I want to get these two right with the attitude and timing before proceeding. It's really hard but I'm enjoying it!

Session 10: Personality Walk (planning)

I'll go for a happy walk, kicking out just before the contact pose (stride).
I have two poses down for the weight and two poses up for the kick and happy-light feeling. Hopefully this one turns out nicely!

Session 10: emotion pose: exhausted (pillow)

Here is a cartoon pose! I grabbed this reference from the "Animating the Looney Tunes way" book. The idea is he is sticking to the ground, no strength at all.

Session 10: emotion pose: exhausted (standing)

This is my first sketch for this emotion, mainly thinking about somebody that's doing sports, any sport. No props added, I hope it communicates with out them.

Session 9: Refining the walk

This week has been really hectic, I don't have the time to work on this assignments as much as I would like to. Walk cycles are hard (at least good ones) they require special attention and time to do that. Although; I did have the time to add the suggestions from Marcos Gonzalez (read comments on blocking pass), a great classical animation mentor I had during my student year at Vanarts, thanks for that Marcos!

Bret Parker Q&A was pretty cool and funny, she wanted us the students to sing for the other classmates, I guess she was in the mood.
During the session she showed us some drawing from a very good artist at Pixar and his quote for drawing is "Don't try to be perfect, try to be honest", "Don't ever draw something you don't feel or believe".

Session 9: emotion pose: concerned (weight)

What about this other reason? People from the financial industry might feel related to this one :)

Session 9: emotion pose: concerned (weight)

Another hard emotion to convey in one pose and without props. What really helps me is to find the reason why the character feels concerned.

Session 8: "Vanilla" Walk Cycle blocking

This assignment is all about blocking, having the Maya preferences set to Stepped Curves, no in-betweens yet. Only key poses, passing poses and extremes. This is a really good chance to get all this animation terms right from the start. Since there are so many animators (including myself) and studios that refer to each one of this terms differently.

Session 8: "Vanilla" Walk Cycle planning

Here I am doing some thumbnail drawings for a walk cycle, the reference is from 3 places:
1)Animation Mentor (of course)
2)Vanarts
3)Animators Survival Kit

The lecture for this assignment is more than amazing. They showed all this examples and for the first time, a Maya how to start; which is also very cool!!

Session 8: emotion pose: Strong (Standing)

I'm not really sure if the first one communicates that strong feeling, so I came up with a more evident pose for the assignment, just in case that the first one is not on the strong-range.

Session 8: emotion pose: Strong (Pole)

Here is my first pose for this emotion. I'm really trying to stay away from the typical "strong" poses, something like showing your muscles or destroying something. So I found this one from my life drawing sketches, I adapted Stu to the pose in the drawing first, (where it lose all the mass on the body and its tough to portray with just a stickman) but here it is.

Session 7: Animation Pass #3

This is the revision that includes the fixes on the comments from Mark Pullyblank and Fernanda Veloso. Again, a frame by frame revision (you should see the Maya timeline) This is what Bret Parker mentions on the electronic critiques.

One thing that is really hard is how to settle down the character, how to solve it in a way that feels right, without using too many up and downs.

Session 7: Animation pass #2

Here it is!!!
My second animation pass #2, I'm still getting use to the AM characters and their rigs, in particular the way the foot detaches if you pull his hips up; which makes it easier to play with the strectch on the legs nicely.