Animation Station!

So this week our very first animation of the year was due! As one of the lead animators on our team, I was really excited to get to work on this assignment. The point of this assignment was to test out our rigs. Right now we are using Proxy Rigs, which are basically super low poly rigs, without facial controls. We were allowed to do anything we wanted for the animation, the only requirement was that our character had to transverse across the plane in some form or another. I decided that I wanted to test out how our character, Gan, would create a planet. Since our character Gan is supposed to be slow and elegant, I decided to take some inspiration from Tai Chi.

Fun Fact: Tai Chi inspired water bending in Avatar the Last Airbender.

Despite a lot of the issues with the rig, I think I successfully achieved the look I was going for. I hope that this animation test can serve as a possible animation style later on in the film. Once we have the final rig, I plan on redoing this animation to fix some of the issues that I encountered.

Here's the animation! Click the link to see the full resolution video (Blogger compresses it way too much below)

Recently, my friends Chelsea and Nick started Animation Mentor. Their first assignment was to take different poses and then pose a character so that it was doing the same pose. As I hope to do Animation Mentor next year, I decided to get a head start and work on the assignment on my own. Thanks to Nick for the first two poses!

I'm really happy with how these turned out! I definitely could push a few of the poses further, but for a first attempt, I'm quite happy with it!

As always enjoy!

~Josh