Post Jump - Blocking Plus

Second round of blocking on this guy. Cleaned up some of the poses, added another hop at the beginning so that we don't start things out on a mid-action pose as before, and added a settle hop at the end to try and sell the idea of him losing balance due to momentum. Time for splines... which means time for breaking this thing and putting it back together.

Post Jump - Blocking

In my e-critique from Steve this past week, he suggested that I take out the kick and limit Stewie to only struggling on one of the posts. I re-shot my reference video and, with the help of an air mattress, came up with something I could get excited about animating. Here's the new reference and my first pass of blocking.

Post Jump - Planning

Moving right along, for our next assignment we were given a pick list of 4 different actions we could animate. I chose to animate the Stewie character (with no arms) jumping from one post to another. This assignment is going to be all about weight and balance... should be quite a challenge. The post jumping reminded me of the Karate Kid, so my video reference has a little crane technique action... we'll see if we have enough frames to include it in the animation.

Turnaround - Polishing

So here's a quick update on the turnaround. Still tweaking... trying to get more fluid movement in the hips. Steve had some great comments in my critique this past week, so hopefully I'll get the weight to really sell in this movement. Anyway... enjoy. Feedback welcome!

Turnaround - Blocking

So here's my blocking progress. I still need to add in some exaggeration and squash and stretch, but I'm feeling pretty good about the timing here. A couple of the poses are looking a little muddled during the turn... silhouettes are hard to read. That's kind of raised a question in my mind as to whether the passing poses have to be immediately readable as well as your keys. I'll definitely be posing that question to Steve on Thursday.

Turnaround - Planning

Class 2 here we go! My mentor for this term is Steve Gagnon-Cady. He has two imdb profiles for some reason (here and here). He just got back from Weta Digital in New Zealand where he worked on The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep and Avatar. Our first Q/A was good, introductions all around. Everyone in my class seems to be pretty nice and excited to get underway.

So to get class 2 kicked off, our first assignment is to animate a 180° turnaround using the Ballie character. Our first lecture was given by Rick O'Connor and was pretty awesome as he went through a complete shot from beginning to end, showing his process of taking video reference, thumbnailing his animation using the timing observed in the video reference, blocking out his keys and breakdowns using the thumbnails, and going for final after getting feedback from another animator. It was extremely helpful to see how to go about planning things out, as once you get into Maya things can get confusing pretty quickly. I'm finding more and more that being able to articulate your ideas on paper before thinking about touching the computer streamlines the process. So here are my thumbnails and video reference for this turnaround. Let do it!

Apex Laptop Intro

Michael Foit, my boss at Apex Energy Solutions, hired me to create a dynamic intro for our sales laptop presentations. He wanted it to be akin to that of a film studio promo at the beginning of a feature (i.e. Universal's rotating globe, Bruckheimer's lightning in the tree, etc.). The intent behind this was to distinguish ourselves in a way that says we are hip and innovative and catch people by surprise when they sit down to hear about our products. He was really great about conveying his vision for the piece through hand drawn storyboards, which made the preproduction phase much easier. I took the storyboards and created an animatic (shown above) in the early stages to get a sense of timing for the piece. Frank Tai partnered with me on the project and his contributions were invaluable. We logged over a hundred hours and this is what we came up with.