Animation Training - Part 4

Hello all, hope you are enjoying the summer and making the most of it, when the sun is out, something that seems to be quite rare almost in my country at the moment. What can I say, British weather, you either love it or hate it. Anyway, I had done a few animations with the Ballie rig character from last week assignments, and now I have polished and refined what I had blocked out a few days ago.

The sneak walk is something that still bugs me, as I can't seem to get it right, even going into the graph editor over and over again to see where the fault is, it proved difficult to fix some of the small faults, that was present in the animation.

After trying to fix the problem, I knew that I would be doing more damage than good, just like the walk cycle assignment which I did a few weeks ago. The best plan of action for now was to leave it as it is, and try to do this personality walk once again, but with a different rig. Hopefully, I would see where I went wrong.

This video below was based on weight shifting for the character. I found this one to be much more technical and I feel that I enjoyed more animating this, as it felt that the principles that I had learnt and the tutorials which I noted down, really helped me  to push the poses out of the character, therefore you could feel the weight of balance for this character.

Technically I was told do another assignment, which I had not yet done, as I wanted to focus on the animation above more, rather than having lots of animation done, that didn't have enough time spent, to make it look good. It was meant to be a character walking and then change to another direction. I still feel that I need to do this, but I will do this another time. Right now, I think I have to try and work out this new task, that was given to me this week.

Right now this pose is not correct

This time, I have to animate the Morpheus rig, made by Josh Burton. It will be a simple walk cycle, lol, simple....it's always the simple animation that always proved the most trickiest in my opinion. But yeah, I'm going to be animating this character and so far, I have research and reviewed a few live references which I've recorded. I've done this and begun blocking out the poses, which seems to be quite difficult at the moment.

So I will continue blocking out this character, but only from the contact position to the other. Once i get the feel, balance, weight, and look of the character from these poses to their most appealing and strongest point, I will then block out the other poses, as it'll be symmetrical from what I will pose out. I'll see you guys next time.

Animation Training - Part 3

Hello again, so as usual I had my weekly review of my work from my tutor and just like every review, he gave me the good and bad of my work and tells me how to improve my work. Everytime this happens I do get quite annoyed with myself because I wish I had seen the faults before, but I guess that's part of the learning process.

I don't have anything to show at the moment, as I have not yet improved the personality walk cycles yet. Instead, I just wanted to express some of the things in my mind which has, really triggered me to think of the way I'm animating at the moment.

 It's fair to say that I'm happy with some of the work which I have produced so far, from these last coming weeks, as I have learnt a lot. However, when I compare myself to other people's finished work to mine, I feel as though they are on a much different level. It feels as though I have not given myself enough time to think about the work first and consider other factors to make the animation more appealing. Instead, it feels at the moment I'm just diving into the deep end, and rushing it; which animation is not about.

So as I find other student works like from "Animation Mentor" for example, and see their progression level, it does make me think, " can I get to that level, can I push the poses to the limit like these?" and so on. Plus, the competition to get into this industry is getting more fierce, as more people have access to tutorials.

So with this in mind, I will from now on, push forward and take each assignment as though I was working on a film, tv or game company, so I can show the full potential that I have, to become a better character animator.

Animation Training - Part 2

Hello once again, I'm glad to say that I had figured out, how to resolve my walk cycle problems from last week. As mentioned from the previous post, when I put my character into "Pre- Infinity" and etc, the whole poses would slowly collapse and some of the legs, feet or main body would lag behind. This was something my tutor could not figure out what the problem was. The main problem which I have later found out was that some of my poses were different from one another, even by a small cm on the grid, it can affect the overall animation.

The spacing from the right foot and the left foot

Even by a small margin could affect the whole walk cycle

So, this week assignment was similar to what I have done last week. It was to create a new walk cycle with personality. My tutor wanted me to however to focus on the animation being on stepped mode. By doing this throughout my work, I've noticed the smaller details and this will therefore make sure that, I won't have as much faults when I start working on spline, and re-fining the animation. 

In the meantime, I have completed two types of walk cycles. One of them is a heavy walk, as I wanted to show as much weight for this character as much as possible. 

I was a-bit worried to how my animation was turning, out, as I felt that some of the work looked incorrect. I did look over my filmed references of myself over and over again and tried to draw the key poses, that will be used in my animation. 

The videos below is the other type of walk cycle I have been working on, a tip -toe. I'm still not happy with the overall timing as it needs to be slower to build the anticipation more. 

I have previewed these two walk cycles on what they looked liked on spline and so far, they seem to be working well. Just have to work on the timings a bit more for the "Tip toe" cycle. Other than that, I will post later on to the progress of these walks.