Animation Mentor - Week 3 feedback

Fortunately I didn't need to adjust the pose much. The ghost image on the left is the overlay of what I'd originally submitted.

Feedback on the bouncing ball was for it to cover a greater distance, and to have a look at the reference videos taken regarding the rotation on the ball and how it acts during the bounces e.g does it change speed or remain constant. I took a screengrab of the rotation marked out. It seems pretty even.

Here's the adjusted video.

Spotter

Done for Australia Day.

Animation Mentor - Week 03

 I was ready to stab my eyes out with a fork after this.

Lifedrawing 21st January 2014

Another model workshop. I turned up late, so I was pretty flustered, and I didn't get a decent seat, so oftentimes the models were really close to me, and that makes drawing rather challenging! I'd also run out of tracing separators so my drawings got quite smudged.

Animation Mentor - Week 2 feedback

Got my first feedback session. Thought I'd go back over my submitted pose and incorporate the suggested improvements. This was my original:

This was the pass I did after the feedback:

 This is the two overlaid. A bit tricky to see.

Looking at it now, I don't like the position of the right hand, but I messed around with this pose so much that I managed to bust some of the controllers and their connections to everything getting increasingly difficult to move in the way it's meant to! Gotta draw a line under it and move on to this week's work.

L'Intermediaire

Animation Mentor - Week 02

Our assignment was to sketch some poses, select our favourite, and then model it in Maya using the Stu rig. I used some of my life drawings which I felt had decent silhouettes.
Everyone threw their work up on the Facebook page for critique and feedback, myself included, so I've also included the progressive passes on the three poses I had been working on.

Lifedrawing 14th January 2014

A batch of drawings from last night’s life drawing in 38C heat. This was a model workshop, so not a normal drawing class. The Life Model Society runs a workshop for prospective models and ask some artists to come along for feedback. Sometimes I’d only get 30 seconds to draw a pose, sometimes up to 10 minutes. I had 2 models in my group, Jeremy and Bianca, so I was usually drawing them both in the allotted timeframe. Sometimes I couldn’t see them because other models were standing in the way, but I made do!

Animation Mentor Term 1 Week 1

Although there was no official assignment for this week, I decided to get some video reference of three bouncing balls: a basketball, a tennis ball and a pingpong ball (thanks to Adam for doing most of that!).
I went through some very tedious number crunching (number of bounces, frames between bounce and apex etc) and came up with the following graphs (marking apex heights per bounce):

They were bounced on a tile floor, and all have pretty similar drop-off curves. These are the graphs overlaid:

The basketball and tennis ball are actually pretty similar in their apex heights, but it looks like the pingpong ball's apex heights are noticeably lower. I wonder if this is due to its lack of elasticity in structure, and consequently it drops energy faster than the other two. There were more bounces, but they didn't return to the same heights that the other two balls had.
Based on this information, I recreated the movements in Maya (vimeo link because the upload feature here just refuses to work!)

Gripping stuff. I did make some adjustments because I found that recreating it exactly looked... well, a bit shit and floaty, though that may have something to do with my lack of skill in using Maya!
Had I not gone through this process, I'm certain I wouldn't have bounced the pingpong ball as many times or with as much of an apex drop-off as research revealed. The tennis ball also deadened to a stop a bit more abruptly than I would've animated, and that might be due to its fuzzy surface, causing more friction.
So what did I learn? That there are more factors to consider when it comes to animation that either I am conscious of or would normally address. I probably could've busted out something believable in a fraction of the time that I spent doing all this. However, this is balls bouncing and there's surely going to be far more complex objects to deal with in the future that will require this sort of approach in order to recreate believably.

Looping Animation

This animation was supposed to be for Loop-de-loop’s November ‘Dance Party’ challenge but I never got it finished until now (sorry Neil). It was also a way for me to get used to using TV Paint, which isn’t especially intuitive compared to some other software I use. I also forgot how hand-bustingly tedious traditional animation is.

Face Practice 6th January 2014

Time: approx 2 hours
Taken from reference