Week 2- Vanilla Walk blocking

It's already time to do a full body walk cycle with Stella! Before when we had to do a walk it was with Ballie, literally a ball with legs. Now it gets a little more interesting adding in a torso, a head, and arms as well. This week I felt that we didn't have a whole lot of direction going into this assignment like we did with the Ballie walk, so I really had to rely on my reference video and my book The Animator's Survival Kit, and then I was still unclear on some things. But this week was just our first pass at it- the simplistic blocking stage where we just set main key poses. Here's what I turned it...

I got my critique back and my mentor thought I did a good job and he said he could tell I really looked at my reference. He liked the arm animation and thought I had some nice rotations in the torso. He did give me some notes to fix for my revision next week, like some hip rotations happening too early, toning down the back to front rotations in the torso, and toning up the rotations side to side. I also need to have her feet planting one right in front of the other in a line because that is a sign of a really feminine walk. He gave me some other little tweaks to make so hopefully when I switch to spline mode for my revision I can get everything looking right!

Class 2!! Week 1

Well after a lovely week off I have started Class 2 of Animation Mentor which is Body Mechanics. My mentor for the next 3 months is Derek Friesenborg. He's been an animator on some huge films including Frozen, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Surf's up, Spiderman 2, the Matrix sequels, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and more! I was really excited to take his class because he has animated in so many different styles.

It feels good to jump back in again after a short break, but luckily for our first week we only had a pose assignment- to sketch out people showing "movement" and pick 2 to pose out in 3D. Here are my sketches...

For movement I really wanted to do poses that were sort of off balance- like if you just saw a person doing that they'd obviously fall over- because I feel that this really shows the character is in the middle of an action. I looked up reference of a bunch of different sports and some people swinging, and I chose the two that I felt showed the best line of action and silhouette  while also being clear and interesting. Here's what I turned in..

I was really excited that Derek seemed impressed with my poses. He agreed with the two that I chose and said that he knew exactly what he was looking at when he saw them. Awesome! He gave me some notes on how to make them better. For the swing, he suggested I could get a better line of action from her upper fist all the way down to her knee by just moving the arm and shoulder up and the leg back and to the side a little. He also gave me a couple more little tweaks. Then for the speed skater he suggested that I make it look a little bit more like my 2D sketch because there were some things about it he really liked. The main things he said was the get more of the line of action in the arms from the 2D sketch and bring her torso up and back so we can see more of it. If you notice in the silhouette there's kind of just a big mass in the middle and it looks like there's legs coming out of her head. Seeing more of the torso would fix that. Here's what his sketches looked like...

And now here are my revisions...