Things are starting to click..

Wow, it has been incredibly easy to forget about this blog. Sorry about that. :(

I'm at a point in animation where I feel like things are starting to click. I've applied most of the concepts we've learned so far into a single walk cycle - squash and stretch, line of action, arcs, drag and follow through. The result is one of the best bits of animation I've done so far. Yeah it's just a simple walk cycle, but I still think it shows a better understanding of animation concepts than any of my other animations.

Facial Expressions

I worked on my Morpheus face expressions today. It was pretty entertaining. I particularly enjoyed doing the stick-out-tongue one. ;)

I picked two expressions that were somewhat complicated, and then I did a simple smile for the last one. I figured that smiles are pretty important so I may as well do one. The funny thing is, the smile was the hardest one to make look natural. I was happy with the other two expressions from the get-go, but it took me a while to make the smile look less awkward. I guess there's a lot of subtle stuff that goes into making a convincing smile. I'm glad I picked that "simple" expression. ;)

Blocking

I knew I forgot something... my blog post for last week! I don't know if I made it in time, but this is supposed to be for the previous week (it's Sunday now).

Anyway, I thought I'd write a little bit about blocking. I've done a little bit of 3D animation on my own in the last couple years, but I never knew about blocking. It's a little hard to get used to, but it seems like it'll be very helpful in the long run. I can see that it allows for much finer control of frame-to-frame motion. When I would animate purely in spline, I would rely much more on letting the computer calculate the in-betweens. With blocking, I'm creating way more keyframes than I ever did before. That said, it'll definitely take some practice before I can time my animations more successfully while blocking.

That's all for now!

Uppercut!

For this week's Morpheus pose, I decided to go with a good old fashioned uppercut. I tried something new with this pose - I curved the arms and legs. It's subtle, but I think it really improves the pose and strengthens the line of action.

I kind of wanted to copy in another Morpheus character to be the one receiving the uppercut, but I decided against it. Better to focus on a single pose for now.

Dino!

I have to say, I'm a little relieved to be animating something that's not a ball. I understand the importance of perfecting the ball bounce (and I'm actually very grateful we're spending so much time on it), but it's nice to take a break and animate a real character! The Dino's rig is extremely simple as well, very fun to animate.

Here's my first mid-week blocking pass. I haven't blocked out the whole thing yet. I'm going to have him jump to the final platform, lose his balance, and fall down to the ground.

Catch up time...

I'm a little bit behind this week. I've been pretty busy the last few days and as such have missed a mid-week deadline and will miss tomorrow's first pass deadline for Assignment 3 (unless I get really lucky tomorrow morning and have time to work on it!). I'll be spending this weekend catching up.

I have, however, done this week's Morpheus pose. I at first posed him with both feet flat on the ground, but I thought that was a little bit boring. So then I realized that sometimes when you're lifting something, you'll use one of your legs to support it for a bit until you can get a better grip on it. I think that resulted in a much more dynamic pose.

Squash & Stretch

I have to admit, I like squash and stretch. So much so that I over-did it a little bit! I followed the critique and reduced the squash and stretch for the first week, but just for fun, I think I'll post the original one with over-the-top squash and stretch. I just think it has a pretty neat whimsical feel to it. Though, I did somehow miss the "zero stretch" frames at the peak of some of the jumps, so that part of it doesn't look too great.