Monday, May 31, 2010

Walking before I crawl.

First attempt at a complete walk cycle. It's a lot tougher than it seems! Well known problem that sticks out in CG are the knee pops. It's weird that 2D drawings / stop motion doesn't really lend itself as much to the issue. I spent about as much time on the knees as I did the rest of the animation - and its still noticeable!



Although... the knees were quite jarring without tweaking it. I wonder if professional rigs just have a button to fix this :)

On another note I spent 11 hours yesterday putting hardwood floors in at my uncle's house and through doing it I have discovered a very important fact:

I am not made to do construction work of any kind.

It just made me want to pursue this animation stuff harder and faster. No more construction work! Ironically four people boarded my cousin's room and he didn't even bother to show up and help. And to Steven Tran I say: What the hell?

Lastly, if you're an animation geek and haven't listened in on any animation podcasts yet - you are missing out! Interviews range from layout artists to directors to animators to producers from all mediums.

Spline doctors, Animation Podcast, Speaking of animation... just to name a few. Time to start walk #2!

Saturday, May 22, 2010

A New Adventure

Welp, the past half year has been a doozy. It's funny to come back and see the last post I wrote - how excited I was about a newly purchased FZ50. And right after I got it, I ended up selling it. But past is past and now we're here.

Only 18 months ago I was just starting to mess around with film-making and animation. And only 2 months ago I decided I was going to pursue this thing! I just got accepted to Animation Mentor's Summer 2010 Term a few weeks ago and I'm truly excited about starting this crazed adventure. I know they use Maya at the school so I tried my hand at a test piece in order to familiarize myself with the program.

Here's a playblast of my very first CG piece - ever! (never got to the polish phase though)



* Edit: Gotta give credit to Shikkin and the choreographer "shota NOPPO".
Here is a link to the referenced video I used:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-LXclD6TFk *

Before this I never touched an "IK" control before. And my friend Gimbal Lock visited me every 20 frames. In retrospect this dance piece was extremely ambitious as a first test. All the twisting and rolling created a lot of problems, but I'm slowly starting to understand the workflow. I hope I don't get a lot of flak for switching to CG. Animation is animation after all... right?

Right guys? ...