Wk10 & 11 Final Assignment - Personality Walk

This has been a pretty challenging and confusing assignment for me, I do understand we need to show the personality within the walk we chose, such as a happy walk, angry walk, sad walk.....however, before I started this assignment I also did tons of research and reference online seeing many people do just about all kind of walk that may not necessary show the personality, such as dancing, sneaking, one feet got hurt....etc. So I decided to go for sneaky/stealth walk in the end and thought my mentor should be ok with it. At first I was trying out for cartoony style, however, the exaggeration in timing only enable me to have total of 2 side steps within 100 frames and i wasn't able to get another step in as my mentor wanted, so I completely scratched it and start from beginning by having it stealth in two different style in a more realistic way throughout 100 frames(the maximum frames allowed for this project). After the first critique session, my mentor suggested that I play with the timing and make it more interesting, he wanted to see this walk filled with personality, I was really glad he made this suggestion, I went for it and here's my final result, the first part is blocking, second part is the final rendering.

Sneaky Ballie

Here's my last Stu Pose for Class 1 "Balance"

Wk8 & 9 Assignment - Vanilla Walk Cycle

Vanilla walk cycle? chocolate walk cycle? what ever flavor it is, it's well known as one of animator's worst nightmare :)
One of the most important thing I learned about walk cycle is to make sure the knee will always travel forward, if there's any backward motion occur, the infamous knee popping issue will occur, and my eye almost pop out a few time fixing those problematic knee.

Vanilla Walk Cycle

Here are my Stu poses communicating Physical Strength and Concerned

Wk7 Assignment - Tailor's Agility Training

After getting good grasp on squash & stretch, overlapping, spacing and timing, it's time to COMBINE everything I learned so far together into this little AM creature "Tailor" AKA squirrel/raccoon/chipmunk/ball with a tail....etc.
One thing I wish I could have done was to give it a bit more personality....

Tailor's Agility Training

Wk6 Assignment - Pendulum Animation Showing Overlapping Motion

In this assignment we show our knowledge in overlapping motion by animating each joints on the pendulum. I also learned a useful trick where you can animate the base joint first, and then offset those same keyframe onto second, third and fourth joints, the result is quite effective. However, crap load of tweaking still required to get the curve to look nice and correct.
This is one of my favorite assignment even though I received my lowest grade on this one.

Pendulum Animation

Wk5 Assignment - Squash and Stretch

After getting good sense of weight and spacing, it's time to add in that squash and stretch to give it a bit more personality and exaggeration so it's more entertaining to watch and more readable to viewer

Squash and Stretch Animation

Here's my Stu Pose showing Devastation

Wk4 Assignment - Bouncing Ball Showing Different Weights

This week we are required to animate two bouncing ball showing differences in weight, one has to be heavy weight, the other one will have to be light weight, I decided to do all 3 because I think they all have unique weights and showing differences in timing.

Bouncing Ball with Different Weights Animation

Wk3 Assignment - Bouncing Ball

My class 1 bouncing ball assignment in AnimationMentor learning how to animate a simple sphere with proper timing and spacing using graphic editor. Back in school I used to hate using graphic editor and modifying keyframe spacing on timeline, but after learning more about GE in AM, I totally fell in love with GE and found myself using it all the time now :)

Bouncing Ball Animation

here's my Stu pose showing Excitement

Class 1 Wk2 Assignment - Stu Pose

This week we get to go out to public and do tons and tons of drawing on human figures and gestures. Honestly I'm really not a drawing type of person and certainly not very good at it, sometimes I will even pose my character on 3D and then draw on sketch book, but practice makes better, gotta learn it the proper way, thanks to my coworker here at work giving me lots of useful tips on how to draw human figures.

here's what I have

AnimationMentor

On March 29th, 2010 I've officially start my class in AnimationMentor, this will be a full time online school, should be interesting doing this while keeping up with my full time job, I hope I'll survive so good luck to me :) . My mentor for Class 1-Basic Foundation is Hyrum Osmond from Disney Animation Studio, he's the nephew of famous Donny and Marie Osmond, pretty cool, and he's totally awesome!