I had an extra week to work on my final project and it is now done. I can start working on my animation again.
I had an interesting winter session at university. I had a senior animator as a teacher and I tried to gather as much information as I could. He was a good teacher, but this wasn’t an animation course… Oh well.
Tomorrow I’ll do a walk cycle, just to get back into it.
Things are on hold until I finish my winter session at university. I also started working at a local video game business. I have some adjustments to make to my schedule, a very important project to finish and 2 exams in two weeks.
There will be some changes here also. Since I don’t think this was beneficial at all, I reduced the animations to around 90, top. They’re going to be complete animations based on the different principles found into the Animator’s Survival Kit. No more quick and pointless animations divided into “phases”. They looked painfully ugly anyway.
Here’s how it’s mainly going to be: a planning stage (which will include the key poses), a blocking stage (maybe more than one) and a refinement stage (again, maybe more than one).
I’ll see you on April 22nd.
I think I got an idea where I’ll be heading with this Animator’s Survival Kit experiment. The way it’s going right now isn’t leading to anything even remotely interesting, so I’ll have to change my approach.
More later…
For now, a bouncing soccer ball.
http://www.jsnicaise.com/flv/ask/march/20100307ball.f4vtime: around 3 hours
I did another take, a real quick one with a new Biped rigged character. I did not model it: I simply skinned it. His name: Flatface.
It looks bad, but I had an interesting critique today from a senior animator and I’m happy about that. Although I feel like I’m not getting anywhere with my animation sometimes, I know what I have to put more effort in.
One thing I’ve noticed is not to stick to the Animator’s Survival Kit’s timings too much… They’re often not exactly applicable to 3d animation, or need more refining altogether. I’ve also noticed Richard Williams is not using the exact same timings in his book and in his Animated DVDs.
here’s what I did today…
http://www.jsnicaise.com/flv/ask/march/20100306take.f4vtime: around 2 hours
I did this in class, took me about 15 minutes.
http://www.jsnicaise.com/flv/ask/march/20100305ball.f4v