OK, I’ve been a bit slack with updates, so apologies for the rather terse nature of the next few posts! Let’s start off with the final polished version of my jumping turn animation. This is the revision based on my critique. Fortunately Shaun was pretty happy with it, so there was only one tweak that I really had to do. Here’s the finished animation:
I’m really happy with how it turned out, so I thought I’d pick something fairly challenging for the next assignment: Parkour! And we go to move onto using Stewie (with no arms), so there’s also the spine to contend with now. Here’s the video reference – I bet you can’t spot the seams ;)
The overlays were done in Kinovea, which I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned before, so I’ll link it again. It’s very useful! Using the overlays I put together my Flipbook planning. Annoyingly, I didn’t get time to do all the drawings properly, but hopefully it will give you an idea of what I was after.
And I think that’s about it for this week! Onto Week 5!
Here we go boys and girls! We’ve taken our blocking pass out of blocking and into a slightly more refined state: splined curves, more attention to overlapping and arcs and the like. I still need to track the knees and fix some of the stiffness in the first step along with whatever Shaun thinks I need to change (I’m awaiting my critique at the moment).
Week 4, along with polishing this animation based on our crit will involve planning our next 4-week assignment. I’ll be back a bit later with some video reference and thoughts on what exactly it is I’m going to do.
Right, I’m back up to schedule and it’s been a good week this week. Definitely feels less intensive than Class 1 so far – although I did have a very late night on Thursday. Not for any good reason, I just did :)
Anyway, I had loads off great feedback this week – after what I would consider to be a rather slow first week, people seem to be warming up to their new classes a little more and are getting into some in-depth critiquing. Which is really great! I had the art of critiquing drummed into me whilst I was at the NCCA so I know how important it is to leave constructive feedback. Enough with the jibba-jabba. Here’s my blocking:
One of my main criticisms from Shaun this week was that there was a bit too much detail for a blocking phase. This is quite a hard thing to judge, but I guess I will pick it up eventually. There were also a few poses that didn’t read as well as they could have and I have to look at taking some of the floatier movement out. The acceleration up and down needs accentuating whilst slightly extending the hang time of the main jump. I also need to add some body overlap to the small settle bounces at the end (how the hell did I miss that? The body rotation is completely flat!).
So, not a bad week but it would seem that I did miss the point a little. OH well, I will have a revised block up soon and then I’ll have to take it to ‘blocking plus’, which is perhaps even more vague! Somewhere between leaving stepped mode and doing final polish! Argh! I imagine there will be plenty of questions queued up at the Q&A tomorrow! :D
Ok new term, new classmates, same mentor, same stress! Thankfully this class, whilst more difficult in terms of the actual animation work we have to produce, isn’t quite as… intense as Class 1. Or at least I hope not. Last class we often had to do planning and the execution of an animation as well as pose sketching and recreating it on Stu! In Class 2, we get 4 weeks to produce a single piece of body mechanics animation, which tends to breakdown as follows:
Week 1 – Video reference and planning
Week 2 – Blocking out the animation
Week 3 – Move out of blocking
Week 4 – Final polish
So we won’t be producing nearly the same volume of work (but I suspect the amount of time we need to spend on it will be more if nothing else). There were quite a few different actions we could animate for this first exercise and I decided to do: ‘Jump up and turn 180 degrees in the air and land/settle’ but put my own ‘spin’ (sorry) on it, so that it wasn’t just happening on the spot. Here, check out the balletic action!
Very graceful I’m sure you’ll agree! Based off that, I decided to try my hand at using Flipbook to block out all my key poses and get a rough idea of the timing for the animation (naughty me, getting ahead of myself!). Now, bear in mind that this is pretty much the first time I’ve ever done 2D animation, combined with the fact that Flipbook can be a little temperamental when it wants to be:
Not too bad, right? Theoretically at least, I ought not to have started timing it out but it was a really useful exercise and it will certainly be of great help when it comes to doing the proper blocking in Maya next week!
These are the sketches I produced off the back of my Flipbook animation:
I annotated it with all the notes I made when studying my video reference – stuff to bear in mind as I’m animating in later weeks. And I also used the key psoes for the jump to get a rough guide of the arcs for the feet whilst in the air:
So, how was my eCritique? Wonderful! Got the all-clear from Shaun. He was very happy I’d decided to start looking at Flipbook for my planning and roughing out the timing for the animation and his main comments revolved around really taking a look at the key poses and really pushing them as far as possible to maximise contrast and visual interest. I also have to try and really make the most of the nice overlapping action I have in the legs during the jump itself.
