Week 11...

What a week its been!

Were almost at the end of Term 1 and I cannot believe how fast it has gone, it seems like only yesterday I was surfing the campus and thinking to myself "wow, week 4... nearly half way through".

This weeks assignment was to take our personality walk from blocking to final and to sketch and pose Stu to show balance.

I started the week by getting my sketches done so it would leave me free the work the rest of the week in Maya and offer less of an opportunity to get sidetracked and end up taking a serious dose of procrastination.

I started by making the changes to my walk that my mentor suggested, this was a whole lot more time consuming than I thought as it involved adjusting the main body of Ballie which in turn screwed with the legs and feet. It wasn't much fun re-doing it all but I got there in the end, even though the end was 2am.

On my second night it was time to click the dreaded spline button which pretty much unleashed hell onto my screen, that night sucked and the whole nights work went down the pan along with a rather large chunk of my confidence.

The third night went alot better but it was Friday and the deadline was fast approaching, I started to feel the pressure as I had a whole load of work to do and I was surviving purely on Monster™ at this time.

Saturday came and by the time I had finished work I got a couple of hours done in Maya before the many late nights over the past few days caught up with me and I had no option but to sleep. I woke up pretty late, opened Maya and realised I was getting no where fast as it felt like I had no more animation left in me for the day. I took a quick playblast which I thought at the time wasn't too bad and decided to head into town for the night, which at the time also seemed like a good idea.

Sunday morning I was back on it, slightly fuzzy from the night before but I knew what I had to do to get it to an acceptable level. The only problem being that I only had a matter of hours to do it. I didnt quite realise what I was up against and as time went on more and more problems started to stand out.

To cut a long story short I ended up having to force myself to stop animating even though I wasn't finished because I only had 15 minutes to spare and still had my pose to do. I quickly knocked a pose out and my exact hand in time was 11:59:46 PST so thats 14 seconds before the deadline = 14 seconds before I would get a whole grade deducted from my assignment!!

Im not proud of this and I seriously dont recommend it to any of the upcoming AM students in the future but it comforts me knowing there were a whole bunch more who were in the same boat as me!

In short, that was my week, how was yours?...

Heres what I came up with, I know theres a whole load of things that need fixing on the walk and I am quite looking forward to sorting them out this week, Thanks everyone! - Adam

Week 10, This time it's personal...

Couldn't resist this weeks post title, I've held back on the puns lately and had to let one go, it is the first stage of our last assignment in Term 1 afterall!.

Anyway this weeks assignment was to block out a personality walk of our choice in 50 - 100 frames. We also had to sketch poses showing exhaustion and as always pose our favourite out in Maya with the Stu rig.

Carlos gave us a cool lecture that showed us the importance of studying reference footage and how to utilize it for the best results. He also went over a bunch of other awesome, invaluable stuff that I wont go into.

Again I persevered with the Wacom tablet for my sketches this week and quite enjoy using it now im getting the hang of it, I've also created a custom palette of brushes in Photoshop that has really helped speed up my workflow. My Wacoms just a little A6 size Volito2 version and I was wondering if its any easier to use a larger A4 size one?, I'm half tempted.

This week I got a taste of how it feels to be burnt out, I animated pretty much all Friday night straight after work until 2am, then all Saturday night after work until 1:30am and it didn't help I was just recovering from a mid week cold. It resulted in a hellatious headache this morning but it was worth it as I was pretty happy with what I had come up with.

It was also a pleasant surprise to wake up to a working internet connection this morning and not having to cope with the extra stress of finding somewhere to upload my assignment.

Heres what I came up with this week!, Thanks everyone - Adam

 

P.S. AM's student showcase gets unleashed on Wednesday! Im so excited. If my good AM friend Kevin Taylors work isn't on it I'll eat my hat! He is an awesome animator and has been a huge help to me since the day I contacted him when I was considering applying for AM.

Week 9...

So here we are, the end of week 9 and another busy week at AM.

This weeks assignment was to take last weeks blocking of the vanilla walk through to final. Sounds simple but couldn't be further from. I have probably spent more time on this weeks assignment than any other so far at AM, it seemed to be a never ending cycle of tweaking.

The main problem was keeping nice curves on all the body parts whilst preventing the knees from popping all over the place. Just when I thought it was all done I would recieve feedback and find that there was a problem in the foot rotation, this then meant I had to also alter the knees again, then I would find that the body needed a tiny bit more rotation which in turn would throw out the knees again, and so on....

The other part of our assignment was to sketch Stu to show concern and then pose our favourite out in Maya. This was probably the hardest so far for me as showing concern seems to be alot more subtle than previous assignments. I also took the advice from my mentor that I should bring my sketches 2 stages back and loosen them up making them less like illustrations.

I soon realised that for some reason I didnt allow myself to do this on paper so it was time to unleash the wacom tablet, I had no choice now to loosen things up because I had no experience and couldn't use one well enough to get the nice clean lines that I could on paper. Problem solved.

Apart from having no internet pretty much all day Sunday for the second time, everything went relatively well. The whole no internet Sunday is really annoying me now as it means I cant give any last minute feedback and I have to go well out of my way to upload my own work, my ISP needs to sort itself out!.

Thankfully despite my now usual Sunday internet drama and me being able put a stop to the tweaking I got there in the end, heres what I came up with this week, Thanks everyone! - Adam

 

Week 8...

The weeks are going so fast its crazy, I cannot believe we are 2 months in already!. Back in week 1 a student in class 6 told me the 18 months would fly by but I didn't quite understand how fast!.

For this weeks assignment we were issued with Ballie, a character who is basically a ball with legs. The idea behind it is to gradually introduce us into animating a basic character without having to worry about an upper torso/head/arms. The whole focus being on the legs/hips.

For the assignment itself we had to animate the blocking process of Ballie performing 2 cycles of a basic vanilla walk, no personality just your everyday walk. Along with this we had to do some sketches to convey strength and then pose out Stu in maya acting out our favourite pose. I really wanted to avoid cliche poses for my actual Stu pose but I sketched a few anyway for good measure :).

Thankfully the week went without any technical disasters and everything went well. As we only had to complete the blocking stage of our walk it gave me alot more time to cruise the campus and check out everyone elses work, leave comments and in turn recieve more comments, it really felt like I was making the most of the community for a change.

I think thats about all I have to say this week so heres what i came up with, Thanks everyone - Adam

Week 7 Tails off...

This weeks post title really is weak isn't it, just doesn't have the same effect as last weeks. I should really work on them, atleast now they can only get better.

If you hadn't guessed already, this weeks assignment was all about Tailor, the cutest of the AM bunch and the one that every AMer wants as a pet.

Ok, so it wasn't exactly all about an introduction for the little guy, it was slightly more focussed on overlapping action and spline editing. Victor Navones kick ass lecture really helped with this, Thanks Vic!

The week got off to a great start! We had a special guest Q&A on Monday with a couple of animators from Blue Sky Studios who worked on the recently released "Rio". I havnt seen the film yet myself so I can't pass comment but from what i've seen on the trailers the animation looks Amazing! I cannot wait to see it.

I pretty much got started on my assignment straight away as I had a clear idea in my mind of how the piece would play out. Before I knew it, Friday had come around and I had only animated Tailors body. Come Saturday when I actually started to animate the tail my time managemental mistake soon dawned on me.

Even though I spent all day Saturday animating I was still extremely pushed to get it finished on Sunday for the deadline. It really didn't help my nerves waking up Sunday morning to find that the whole internet/phone system was down in my area. To my relief it was fixed with 2 hours to spare.

Luckily I did get my assigment finished in time and heres what I came up with this week, Thanks everyone - Adam




P.S. Check out my friend Jeroths blog at http://jeroth.blogspot.com/, hes showing some awesome improvement.

Week 6 swings out...

See what i did there? swings out...... no?

Ok, this weeks assignment was focussed on overlapping action and the character we were issued was the mighty pendulum!. It was our first assignment with a pick list which meant we had two choices on what to do with our pendulum, they were basically keep it simple in 150 frames or get creative with 200 frames.

Now see what i did there?..... good.

Anyway I had some crazy ideas for this one, it was going to swoop, sweep and push around all sorts of obstacles, there was going to be brights lights, a fanfare, fireworks.... that was until I actually opened Maya and made a start anyway.

After roughly 10 hours animating spread over 2 days I realised my ideas were way out of reach from my actual animating skills and something was seriously seriously wrong. In all this time I hadn't even touched the pendulum part of the character, I had been fussing around with the base with disasterous results. I pretty much felt like I had failed and by Wednesday I was panicking and felt like the deadline was looming.

That night my savior came in the form of West Decker (http://blog.cleverpuppy.com/) he pretty much dragged me back to earth and reminded me of what I was actually at AM for, I came to learn and not kick ass like him from the start. He said I shouldn't be doing my animations to impress others, I should be doing them to learn animation!. I completely agreed with the guy and from that moment on I called shotgun on his wisdom.

I decided the best way to go from here was to keep it as simple as possible and then improve once I had the basics down. Things went pretty well from here on in, I decided to tackle the animation in a layered fashion. I started at the main base of the pendulum and then once that was done I moved onto the tail. To achieve the wave of the tail I used successive breaking of joints,  I could try to explain what this is but I wont as im not sure i've fully got my head around it myself yet.

Anyway heres what i came up with this week, thanks everyone - Adam

Week 5...

Ok I just realised my post titles are getting a little confusing, even im lost in the weeks and its my blog.

Seeing asthough I seem to be updating my blog every Sunday night just before the following AM week starts i'll start naming my posts by the previous week, so the past week has been week 5 at AM hense this posts title. Next week will be week 6.

This week was all about anticipation and squash and stretch! The lecture was headed up by ILM's Shawn Kelly who is known for working on a library of awesome films like "StarsWars", "Pirates of the Carribean", "War of the Worlds", the recently released "Rango" and upcoming blockbuster "Transformers: Dark of the moon" to name a few.

The assignment was to animate a ball travelling through an obstacle course using the principle of squash and stretch. We had a maximum of 120 frames at our disposal and were allowed to manipulate the obstacle course in any way we wished. Posing was also back on this week and we had to sketch and pose Stu to communicate devastation.

Luckily I didnt miss this weeks Q&A with Anthony and my graphics card turned up mid week so we're all back to normal!

We've been having a few bank holidays over here in the UK recently and an extra one on Friday for Prince William and Kate Middletons wedding so I took advantage and pretty much got the sketching and pose down by Tuesday as I knew this weeks animation portion of the assignment was going to be pretty tough!

Anyway heres what i came up with this week, Thanks guys - Adam