daniel-lim.co.uk » tap dance

Class 2 Week 11

Daniel Lim — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:22:07 +0000

Well, yet another week of crapping my pants trying to get my work finished. Next term I am absolutely not going to pick anything as complex as this again. If I try, please come over and beat me up. If I were not doing a full time job at the same time it’d be absolutely fine, but there really simply no time to properly polish and refine such a complex animation and be able to sleep now and again :)

So in theory, this is finished. I was genuinely concerned about the state it was in when I uploaded it to the website. It turns out that it was actually OK! I had a great critique from Shaun; he was generally very happy with it but since I had asked for some really specific pointers about how to make it better, he went through and gave me a few key frame numbers to go through and polish some more. So that’s what I’ll be doing with the remainder of this week – only have ’til Friday to get my revision in though!

I guess it really is difficult to step back from your work and look at it objectively. Something to bear in mind next time, anyway!

Class 2 Week 10

Daniel Lim — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 12:02:58 +0000

This is the first polish stage for the tap dance assignment. I thought it was going OK, but I got the impression from my critique that the animation hadn’t really moved forward that much from last week’s work. And perhaps that’s true. Unfortunately I didn’t have a lot of time for my assignment this week.

I started with the feet, then the body and finally the arms. Haven’t looked at the head, hands or knees (or eyes) yet (and I also haven’t been able to accentuate the ending yet either). This is the penultimate week – need to make some proper time to polish it up nicely!

Class 2 Week 9 – Assignment

Daniel Lim — Sun, 31 May 2009 17:54:29 +0000

Aaaand here’s my assignment hand-in for this week! It’s a relatively quick spline pass. Obviously there’s plenty to do so I’m glad we’ve got an extra week of polish – I have a feeling I’m going to need it!

I really need to start working more efficiently or something. I’ve lost 1.5 days of glorious British sunshine to this thing! I’m off to enjoy what’s left of the day!

Class 2 Week 9 – Reblock

Daniel Lim — Sat, 30 May 2009 23:02:58 +0000

Hello! Finally caught up with all my updates so everything is now as it should be. I’m going to be making a concerted effort to keep it that way from now on! So, here is my near-complete assignment for this week. It’s meant to be my re-block from last week, but I’ve added so much flippin’ information (we’re talking mostly 2s here) that it’s almost linear anyway! ;)

So there you go! Hope you like it. I’m going to take a quick run at splining it before the hand-in tomorrow evening – what I’m hoping is that it isn’t going to be too tough because I’ve added all that detail! I’ll update you all tomorrow once I’ve done it and handed it in!

Class 2 Week 8

Daniel Lim — Sun, 24 May 2009 13:20:30 +0000

So I bet you’re interested to know how my blocking went, aren’t you? Well I did take some days off last week, just to make sure I managed to get through the huge bulk of poses needed to make this thing work. Turns out those days off were very helpful:

Shaun was really happy with my blocking (“probably the best blocking I’ve seen you do”, no less!) and didn’t have any major pose or time changes to suggest. The main thing was to really push the ups and downs of the hips to accentuate the moves, particularly things like the slide and the kick and try to extend some of the slower sections by a few frames/as much as possible.

The key pointers he had moving into the refinement stage next week were:

Add in loads more detail to the blocking to really keep the feeling of the blocking as much as possible and make it that much less painful when switching to splines.
Give more time to the ending (I’ve got plenty of frames to enable this).
Try and keep the texture of the movement i.e. the fasts and slows, contrast between upper and lower body movements and speed etc.

These are all things I’ll be looking at when reblocking next week. I’ll just take my block and add loads of additional inbetweens/breakdowns and really concentrate on nailing down the timing and feeling of the feet. Stay tuned!

Class 2 Week 7

Daniel Lim — Sun, 17 May 2009 12:40:32 +0000

A very tough week this one! Not only was there polishing up to do on the Parkour wallflip, but also planning out a new animation for the final task of the class! Argh!

Right, so here is my final wallflip animation:

It was well received by Shaun, the main thing to sort out being the slightly too extreme spacing on the body just before Stewie lands. Hopefully I’ll get time to fix that before I have to put my progress reel together at the end of the term.

So, new task!

Being an idiot, I thought I’d go “all out” for the final task of the term. I picked something quite challenging:

Yes, I know. I. am. an. idiot. Well, I’m guessing it will be fun and painful in equal measures! Like I said, I wanted to finish the term with a bang, so what better way to do that than by near killing myself with a near impossible animation!

Here’s the Flipbook planning – there are a ton of poses!

The blocking stage next week is going to take me a very long time!