Week 2- Assignment #1

After an excruciatingly long week of having no assignments (I know, what a nerd, after finally getting a college degree after 10 years I choose to go back for more school and I'm too excited for our first assignment), we finally got one! We were supposed to go out and observe people and sketch interesting poses that we saw and then circle our favorite one. Then we had to go into Maya with the character Stu (supplied by the school) and recreate our drawn pose. I'll be honest with you, that week was a little hectic for me so I looked online for pictures of people in a park and got some ideas for that. I tried to find some interesting poses. Already having knowledge of animation helped because I already had an idea of what makes a pose interesting, however I was a little nervous not knowing what our mentor expected at that point. So here are my sketches...

I really liked 3 and 5, the soccer pose and selfie, so I tried posing them both in Maya. The soccer pose really wasn't translating in 3D the way I had hoped it would. I couldn't seem to create the silhouette I wanted, and for you non-animators, a strong silhouette is extremely important to a good pose in animation. I ended up going with the selfie pose, which is funny because it's the only one that I actually used myself for reference. I think watching girls trying to take the best selfie is kind of funny so I liked how current it made this pose. This is how my 3D pose came out...

The cool thing about our weekly mentor critiques is that they can actually draw right over our work and show us how we could make our poses stronger. This is Mike's

He brought up the issue of weight. Something all animators have to to keep in mind while posing their character is making sure weight is distributed evenly. He drew a line through the center of gravity on my pose and showed me how little of his mass was on the left side compared to the right side- nobody has ever really shown it to me like that and it was really helpful to understand the weight issue. He also pointed out that there could be a stronger line of action with the arms- notice there's more of a distinct line through the arms in his drawing? I also never thought about there being a separate line of action for the arms- I was always just thinking about the body's main line of action. I'm already learning so much just in the second week of class. After watching Mike's critique as well as reading the feedback from friends and other students (our work is public on the AM site to all students and anyone is free to comment), here is my revised Stu pose...

So that about concludes my very first Animation Mentor assignment. I can't wait to learn even more next week!