AM Q3 Progress Reel

Well I have reached the end of Quarter 3 and I can't wait until Quarter 4. Here is everything that I have done thus far at Animation Mentor (in reverse order).

Wow, I hadn't realized how much I grew this quarter until I saw this. I guess that is the point. I have to say that the first assignment is painful to watch, but is actually my favorite. It has lots of fun little segments and I like the change in attitude. . I think I will spend some time and make that work. Maybe I'll change the tree to a dummyI have a much better idea on how to do that now. I also want to improve that drunk scene.
On our last Q&A of the quarter Jalil gave me a special shout out for tanasity, because I guess I got extra hard critiques and I didn't let it phase me and he was happy with my progress. He was my favorite mentor, he pushed me hard and he taught me so much. I have regained my animators eye and now it is impossible to watch anything without critiquing the motion and studding it. It is a gift and a curse and I think it will only get worse, but the first step to becoming a better animator is learning to see motion and break it down. The more you can see the more you can see in your own animation and you will be able to improve it. I wonder which mentor I will get next quarter.
I though I would add the still for my title card this quarter with Spike and I as vikings yelling over ale. This was before I had to cut the sword out to fit in the text. Now for winter break, which will be filled with more work and animation.

AM Q3 ASN3 Refining03 "Final"

This week I was amazed to find that I was not ripped a new one, not that my shot was bad last week, just the last couple of weeks have been rough in the crits. Though I love it and it has helped me to grow so much, no hard feelings Jalil. So this week it was all clean up, tracking arcs, going frame by frame making sure all of my splines are nice, clean, and pretty. I don't feel that it is 100% there, but a good 95%. I took it as far as my eyes and skills could take me. I am really happy with the end and the beginning, however, when he takes the step up to the keg that whole section feels off, not wrong, just not quiet right.

I think next quarter I need to do simplistic shots and plan my time so I could pretty much restart the shot every week, I have learned a lot by starting over.

AM Q3 ASN3 Refining02

So I got a small crit last week, to change the angle my character is standing. I changed it and it lead to better silhouettes and poses. However, it also made it so some poses were wrecked and nothing was matching up at the barrel. I had to start over. I feel like I made some pretty good progress this week. I like having to start over, I usually get something better, faster, stronger.Though I need to film some more reference and fix some parts. I'm hoping that by the end I have something that looks finished to me.

AM Q3 ASN3 refining01

This week end I went to the mountains with Laura and her family and needed to turn in my assignment early. This is what I had gotten done by Friday before I left. I continued to work on it over the weekend cleaning up splines.

AM Q3 ASN3 Blocking01

I really love blocking. It is my favorite part of animation, probably because I haven't figured out how to clean up my animations very well yet. As always my reference was not honest enough, next time I have to make sure I have everything that I am going to use in my animation on hand before I start planning so it is as honest as possible.

What I did to make the animation more honest was duct tape a varnish spray can on to one of my cheaper hats (not going to ruin my nice bowler hat) and used that as a proxy for my drinking horn. I knew I couldn't really tape my horn on my head it is way too heavy to stand up properly and to be pulled off multiple times. I had a lot of fun re-shooting my reference and trying to do different and more interesting things to use in my animation. These were the best ones. Though I had a couple that had some better starts that I might want to look at again later.

This week I tried to find stuff to live in my scene and I had trouble finding it for free so I decided to just make it myself and that went pretty well. I had to remake the horns on the helmet so that they could be taken off of the helmet, and it ended up making bigger more intimidating horns so I was pretty happy with that. I'm looking forward to my critique and moving ahead with the animation.

AM Q3 ASN2 Final and ASN3 Video Reference and Planning sketches

The Critique I got this week was hard for me to watch, because it was so true and so easy to see the errors afterward. Pretty much watch Jalil told me to do was to look at my reference and copy it as best as I could. So I started over I re-blocked the shot watching the reference and started getting my key frames from the reference.

I don't think I broke a lot of my keys down enough before I moved into splines, wich has lead to some linear looking movements at time, lesson learned. This shot is not done, and it needs more refinement, but it is well on it's way. The first 100 frames are the most refines and I spent a lot of time making sure that the sword arcs are really smooth in that section. The only down side is that it make the elbow do weird things and now it has a jittery quality to it that I'm not 100% on how to fix, because I tracked the arc on the elbow and it makes a smooth arc, but looks jittery.

For the next assignment I wanted to do something easier with less big broad movements and more subtle and direct movements. No more swords! So I decided to go with drinking.

The thing taped to the counter is supposed to represent a keg. I tired to tape little paper horns to my hat, I don't think they were good substitute for real horns, though luckily Laura has given me a a big drinking horn from Scotland so I had that. Next Halloween I need to buy a viking hat, for reference. Based off of the reference I came up with this planning.
Here is the lay out with the key frames. I'm going to have to make some barrels or hope I can find some free models on line.
I'm looking forward to refining assignment number 2 and for working on my next assignment.

AM Q3 ASN2 Refining 01, More Blocking, More Sketches, More Reference More Everything

OK so it seems like I'm going all out every week, it is tiring but I am still figuring out what I want my scene to be. Before I wanted it to be a super powered viking getting revenge against the tree that he failed against years before. I realized that it was too fantastic and I couldn't get something believable and honest with what I had going so I decided to change the end so I knew better what his motivator was. I changed it to him being just a better warrior training against a tree.

This one I made more honest I used a "real" sword and a real tree. Something that I could really swing at. Though I bent the sword, so maybe you wouldn't want to train against a tree seeing as people are softer then tree and you don't want to mess up your equipment while training if you don't have extras. I really enjoy playing with swords they are so much fun. I'm glad I have an excuse just go out there and swing sword around.
I drew some really rough sketches for this, not wanting to waist too much of my time on drawings instead of animation I didn't go into to much detail beyond a really rough thumb nails. I decided not to add them to the blog.

Here is my refining. I wanted to get it into splines because I get harder critiques from Jalil when it is splined out, which is hard because it makes watching the critique painful, (I already watched it) though I now know what I need to do and how I need to push it. I feel pretty confident that I can push it and make something really awesome for next week.
I also need to plan my next shot and I think I am going to do the Viking pouring Meade out of a barrel into his helmet and drinking it, this one should be fun.

AM Q3 ASN2 Video Reference, planning and Blocking

After my e-critique from Jalil, I decided to start over and redo my reference and my planning for this scene. He suggested that I use something that I can actually hit with all my might so that I can get better arcs in my body and more honest acting and poses. He said to make it simpler and to take out any walks that I had going on it it. So I spent a couple of hours shooting reference, it took me a while because there was a guy across the way working on some ones roof and I felt really self conscious. Though I shot it twice after the first time I found out what I really liked about the scene and I was trying to capture different subtle ways of doing it.

After shooting the reference I did my planning drawings. I found a lot more interesting actions to do this time including the sword rolling off the shoulder and moving into an attack stance. I feel that could look really slick.



I e-mailed my new reference and drawings to Jalil and he said that I need to hit the "tree" harder, I'm still holding back. But he said that some other guy from Weta saw my drawings and said they were really nice, so I got that going for me.

Though I didn't get that e-mail until after I had already finished my blocking because Weta is in New Zealand and is a day in the future and He doesn't answer our e-mails on weekends and I sent the e-mail on Friday.

I feel pretty good about my blocking. I think I need to do some more reference with the sword hits and to vary those two hits a little more. But this is a great start.

AM Q3 ASN1 Final and ASN2 Reference and Planning

The final animation was due this week and I didn't quite make it. This week felt like two steps forward and one step back the whole time. I actually made a lot of changes to my animation, however, after I got pass the brick wall I had when working on re-blocking most of the scene I was pretty much out of time. This week I am starting on Monday and going to get as much done as possible. Not going to let this happen again! I am also going to continue to work on this shot and take it as far as I can. I hope that my mentor Jalil will continue to give me critiques, if not I will have to start bugging my friends.

This is also the start of Assignment number 2, I wanted this one to be the counter point to the first one where the first one was chaotic and haphazard, I wanted this one to be more subdued and controlled. I don't know if it is reading the way I want or I am just tired and hate everything. I think most of it will be in the timing.

Note to self week 8 go out and film reference with a friend, last time it went so much better when I had the help of Rick to act it out and just do some different things and give me ideas. I feel like a lot of my reference is all the same. Maybe I will try and hang out with a friend this week and shoot some better reference, damn why does it have to be raining this week.
Yes I know this looks like a jumble, in all my other addignments this worked really well, I guess it is all too close to one another to work well visually. I was also surprised when I brought in a render from my scene from last week and that the spacing was really close to how I drew the planning for the last assignment. I didn't even know, it was kinda cool.
Here is the break down where it should make some more sense. The shot has pretty much 3 steps, he picks up the sword, he hacks at the tree and then he kicks the tree down. I'm hoping that I can get some subtle animation going on, where he is breathing heavy.
I am hoping that due to the fact that there are less keys that I should be able to add a lot more interesting texture in my timing and get more a sense of thought from the character.
On a side not I plan to give the viking character a beard, mustache and an eye patch, so no matter what it will be more epic

AM Q3 ASN1 Blocking Plus and Beyond!

This week I have been in an animation funk and had trouble getting started in the beginning of the week. Perhaps my inner procrastinator was rearing it's ugly head. But what my goal was, was to get get my animation as far as possible at the very least I wanted final timing and start doing the splining. Which is exactly what I accomplished.

One of my class mates Erik Lee pointed out that I had my viking stepping with the wrong leg when he took his sword swings. he was right and it was the perfect thing to help me fix some issues I was having with the shot. It opened the sword for all these really great big arcs and for more variety in the two swings. Thanks Erik.

After my blocking was done I took it into splines and for the first time it went really smoothly. there are some messy tangents and I need to clean the splines more but for the most part they looked just fine. I focused most of my attention to getting the throw transitions working and to getting the times where he swings the sword across his body to have a nice clean arc. I'm really happy that I was able to get it splined even if it isn't refined more.

I have also proven to myself that I am still capable of pulling an all nighter something my 23 year old self thought I was incapable of anymore.

AM Q3 ASN1 Blocking

I was very excited to get started on this project this week. What could be better then animating a character with a sword and shield. I also liked that for the first time I feel like my character has a real personality and not just doing an activity.
Though I had all kinds of problems with this project. First I updated to Maya 2010, which was free for students, thanks Autodesk! Though it appears to be a memory hog and at times runs really slow on my machine, there was no hope of playing with any good timing, Which lead to lots of playblasts.
I ended up animating this scene twice. The first time I animated it I had set up how the sword and shield leaves his hand in a weird way. The way that the extra items get attached to Stewie is simply by parenting the object group to the hands, this would not do me any good for what I want them to do. I will make sure in my survey this quarter to mention adding better option when it comes to parenting. I ended up parenting the object group to the hands, which made keying the sword and shield weird and hard to mess with in the time. After I did the first bit of blocking I didn't like what I had so I decided to start over and set up the items in a much better way.
After setting up the sword and shield with splines for controls and to hold the parent constraints I had a much more efficient and keyable and adjustable set up. I reanimated the scene and I changed some of the actions and it didn't turn out as nice. I ended up liking my first pass better. So I had to figure out how to copy and paste animation into my new set up. It took me a while to figure out, it turned out to be really simple, it was more about importing the animation the copy and pasting it. After that I cleaned up as much as I could of the old blocking and for some reason some of the controls didn't transfer, I reblocked those and got as far as I could. I just ran out of time jthere is still more that I want to do.

I think this week I might try and do a couple of run cycles from the Richard William's The Animator's Survival Kit, because I feel like there is something off with my run and I can't figure it out and the best way to learn something is by doing it.

AM Q3 ASN1 VIKING reference and planning

A new quarter, a new mentor and new exciting assignments. This quarter I got Jalil Sadool an animator at Weta, he has a reputation as a tuff love kind of kind of mentor, I'm looking forward to it (and dreading it) becuase I know it will be tough but it should help me to be a better animator which is the whole idea. This quarter I am doing the animation Jam, where we pick a theme and animate a series of exercised in the theme, when the week started I was overwhelmed with the possibilities and had no idea what to do. Then I looked at all the props that they gave us and found I could make him look like this!
It was now clear what I was going to do. VIKING WARRIOR! So seeing as I wanted to the animation jam the idea is to make 3 different excersizes that embody this theme and relate to one another with out be necessarily seamless. So my idea is that in the first assignment that he is a viking in training and he isn't very good. Then assignment number two he is still in training but he is awesome! Then in assignment number three he goes out to fight the mythic beast, played by our old friend Ballie.

So this week I was hanging out with my good friend Rick-O and I asked him to help me film my reference video. I didn't have a real specific plan, just to have the viking use his shield and sword and attacking a tree (pillar) with mixed success and then reacting by running away. Here is the best of what we came up with, we shot 36 shots and I picked the best ones that had similar things going on in them that I really like.

We filmed a couple of other ideas too but I liked this idea that he screamed and ran looking all crazy and bad ass and then when he hits the sword flies out of his hands and he freaks out throws his shield and runs away.
Page one
I drew out the whole scene with the staging on top of each other like a 2d animation along with arcs and general notes about how I plan to break up the scene.
Page two
Break down sketches of all the keys with notes on how to change between them. I needed more break downs for the run, but it would all just be a repeating cycle of the run and I felt it would be redundant. I feel the hardest part is going to be this swing over the head.
Page 3
Fleeing away very timidly breakdown sketches and notes, again here I didn't full draw out the keys because it is a simple bent knee run.

After shooting the reference I am really excited to start animating this! I can't wait to hear back from my mentor and get a feeling for his critique style.