Animation Mentor Assignment Three!

Last week I animated a bouncing ball, so this week we had to kick it up a notch and animate TWO bouncing balls! Ok maybe its not THAT exciting. This weeks assignment was the "light and heavy ball" assignment. I decided to use a beach ball and a softball for this assignment. Like last week the very first step was to plan out the animation and film some reference. Now I didn't own either type of ball so I found a clip online for the softball and asked Lindsey to film reference of her beach ball for me. You can check out her post about the assignment here if you're interested.

Now that I had my reference and planning done it was time to animate! This assignment was interesting because I've never really put much thought into how I would approach to similar objects of different weights. Unfortunately this past week I was sick, so I didn't get to spend as much time on it as I would've of liked, but overall I think I did a good job. But I'll let you be the judge!

I got some good feedback from my mentor. The big thing he told me to be aware of was my spacing. He said my timing was pretty good, but its my spacing I have to keep an eye out for. Check back here later for the updated assignment!

Thanks for stopping by and as always enjoy!

~Josh

Animation Mentor Assignment One!

HERE IT IS! MY FIRST REAL ANIMATION MENTOR POST! As you can tell I'm a TAD excited
So last week our very assignment was to go out and draw some people. After we finished doing our sketches, we were supposed to go back and pose out the character Stu in Maya. You may remember me talking about posing back in this blogpost. This was actually a tough assignment because I had no clue what my mentor was looking for in our assignments. I knew that they wanted us to use a pose that followed the 12 Principles of Animation, but other than that I was in the dark. Here are the sketches I did, as you can tell they're nothing fancy but rather simple gestures since I just wanted to capture the pose as quickly as possible.

The sketch I circled was the one that I ended up going with. The original sketch was a woman walking holding a water bottle in her hand. She looked like she had some place to get to fast. Now that I knew what pose I wanted, it was time to bring it into Maya. I began  to pose Stu so that it looked as close to my sketch as possible. After that I began to exaggerate the Line of Action, mess with the attitude of the pose (I made it more of a power walking type pose) and changed the silhouette so it would read better. After some great feedback from both Chelsea and Nick, I ended up with my final pose. Below is the progression of the pose from start to finish.

As you can see the pose really evolved from what I had originally. I was quite happy with my pose and was pleasantly surprise by my mentors critique on it! He gave me some great advice on making sure that my sketches are clear in regards to what is going on and talking about the attitude of each pose. He liked the one I did, especially the Line of Action, and gave me some great tips to improve it, The first was to move the extended leg slightly closer to the camera. That will make the leg a bit straighter while also making sure it isn't on the same visual plane as the other leg. His other major comment was in regards to the camera right arm. He said that right now it doesn't really flow with the camera left arm, so if I moved it closer to the body (ironically enough closer to how I started) it would flow better. He understood that I was going for a super clear silhouette but explained that you shouldn't force a silhouette just for the sake of a silhouette.

Now that I know what he expects, I can't wait to work on this weeks assignment. We have to do another pose and begin our first animation, a bouncing ball!

As always thanks for reading and enjoy!

~Josh

P.S. OH YEAH my fellow Animation Mentor classmate Lindsey Jones has a blog too, so go ahead and check it out here!

Animation Mentor!

If you've read any of my past posts, like this one or this one, you'll know that I've been preparing for Animation Mentor. Well I'm super excited to announce, that along with my friend and fellow Celestial Animation Lead, Lindsey Jones will be starting Animation Mentor in January! That means prepare yourself for a TON of blogposts covering my various animation assignments!

My mentor this semester is Ray Ross, a senior Animator at Blue Sky! If you click his name you can check out his IMDB and if you scroll below you can see his demo reel!

RayRossReel from Raymond Ross on Vimeo.

As you can tell I'm SUPER excited for classes to begin!

Enjoy!

~Josh