Week 3- Vanilla Walk Revision/Poses

Wow so I got so busy the rest of the term I did not keep up with my blog at all, so this is a little late. I'll refer back to my notes to remember what my mentor actually said about my assignments! This week was our last week to revise our vanilla walk with Stella. I really could have used another couple of weeks to get this right because I still felt like it wasn't as smooth as I wanted it to be. On top of that we also had to do 2 more motion poses with Stella. I'll start with those. I started off by sketching sports and dancing poses that I thought were interesting...

The first pose I chose was the hockey one, because I hadn't seen a lot of hockey poses from other students and I really liked the way the body twisted. This is how it turned out in Maya

My mentor, Derek, liked this pose and said it was really dynamic, he just wasn't sure about the placement of the front hand and if it would really twist like that. He also felt that there was a little disconnect in the spine and I should try curving it the other way like how it is in the 2D drawing.

I also chose of the dancing poses because I loved the silhouette and the elegance of the dancer's body.

This turned out to be a really good choice because Derek said he literally gasped out loud when he saw it and thought it was a very beautiful pose. He said he didn't have much to add but did offer a couple tweaks I could make. For example, he noted that the spine has a really nice curve to it but the neck and head don't really follow it, so to make them more in line with the line of action in the spine, I should straighten out the neck in that direction, bringing the head down a bit more. The other thing he suggested was to just try to bring up the lower shoulder a bit more in the direction of the arm. 

This is what they look like after the revision

And now here is the revised version of the vanilla walk I did this week.

I still was not happy with this walk when I turned it in. I could tell it wasn't smooth and she looked like she was getting stuck to the ground, which is also what Derek said. He said there was a lot of nice energy in it and the over-animatedness of it was working for me. The arms look pretty good from the side but theyr'e doing too much from the front. I also need to work on making them look not as sharp and add more of an ease to them. He agreed that the feet seem to be stuck in mud, which is what is causing the lack of fluidity to the walk. I also need to work on spacing this outs a little differently, like in certain frames everything seems to be moving at the same time which doesn't look natural. Even though this was technically the last week for us to turn this in for a grade, he said we could still revise it and he'd give us more notes on it so that is what I ended up doing.