Character Animation Bootcamp - Day 12 - Tween Run & Walk Cycle

Now with more migraines!

Character Animation Bootcamp - Day Nine - Run & Walk poses

The timing of the run seems off, but I think I will be able to see it better once tweening begins. This is an aspect of animating that is fuzzy & unclear in my head is proper timing.

I learned my lesson from the previous assignments and have decided to use FK on the arms from now on, unless a shot specifically requires something else.

I have screen captured the process and will be posting those soon!

Happy Back to the Future Day!

I do not understand how it is 2015.

Character Animation Bootcamp - Day Six - Tweening a Jump

Character tweened and fully animated.
The IK of the arms was a bit more difficult to work with than I had anticipated, but this is a decent jump in my opinion. :) I also documented the process and posted it to Youtubes!
Part One & Part Two

Character Animation Bootcamp - Day Four - Keying a Jump

My first week of Character Animation Bootcamp is complete. I feel very comfortable with the material, program, and rig so far and it's been fun to have some structured assignments again. The instruction is a bit more elementary than I was anticipating, but being able to go through everything at my own pace is really nice. Unfortunately, facebook is where the "communication" is supposed to happen and it is not a very good solution for communicating with virtual strangers and acquaintances. Especially since the group is so large.
It is interesting to see what my skill level is. I don't think it's as bad as I thought it was!

Character Animation Bootcamp - Day One - Strike a Pose

This first real assignment was very straightforward. Transpose the orange characters poses to the Blue character and then come up with a few of your own. I found the rig a little bit too rigid - especially on the main body as it lacks any spine deformations or bend controllers, so I slightly modified it to use the CC Bender effect to add a bit more flow to his torso.
It is very interesting how much the proportions affect the posing of each character. I never thought that the wideness of hips mattered - outside of fitting into a roller coaster or giving birth.

I have always tended to be a straight ahead animator as I never have a VO or temp track to base key poses from, but I am really looking forward to the future lessons exploring the importance of pose-to-pose and getting some more elaborate AE puppet animations under my belt.

Character Animation Bootcamp - Day Zero - Orientation Evaluation

The first assignment was an intro to one of their character rigs. The task was to move the character from out of the way of the falling squash. I decided to create a dodge roll for now - which of course ended up being much more complicated than originally expected because all the rotating controllers needed to add their value to the rotating body. Not a bad rig, but I would say it isn't quite as good as I had hoped to work with.

Character Animation Bootcamp - Day Zero - Orientation

I decided to sign up for School of Motions Character Animation Bootcamp to practice up on my animation skills. I have been doing motion graphics for years and haven't had the opportunity to work with any complex characters on projects so I figured this structured assignment style would be a great opportunity to polish some rusty skills.

I will do my best to post images & videos to chronicle my progress through the course. Looking forward to sharing what we create!

Dance Pickle, Dance!

I am alive, and do intend to post to my blog more often - however my apathy levels are at an all-time high. I've been playing with After Effects more - experimenting & purchasing plugins to make this one-man-studio work the best it can.

Below is Dancing Pickle Man created with some simple vectors & Rubber Hose from BattleAxe.com. A reasonably priced plugin that helps by facilitating simple IK - with some very useful options for the bending joint. This is excellently documented and wonderfully simple to use and I highly recommend it to beginners and advanced After Effects users.

Life Drawing - August 13, 2015

 The theme was 90's cartoon characters so all the models arrived in costume. This was interesting and proved to be a great challenge in rendering unnatural clothing. Most of the costumes were adult-sized onesies so they had little goofy booties that really stilted what the pose of the figure.

Compilation of the best drawings

More drawings below!

Another Day, Another Union Pacific Project

This project is an internal video explaining introducing Union Pacific employees to their website, as well as to serve as a primer to what features can be found there in. Everything was built from the ground up to emulate an Employee workstation experience as well as what would be found on the Union Pacific Railroad Employee Website.

I was also tasked with creating the video to be played without audio and narration in case the viewer did not have speakers or headphones. Instead of close captioning – this text box aesthetic was developed to portray the information covered in the audio.

There is a large amount of expressions and scripting to create some automated animation based on the animated mouse pointer/cursor positioning. It is not as evident as all the work that went into it, but you can see it at 00:09 seconds where it activates the opacity of the windows task items, and also at 00:19 where it is actively scaling each of the clickable icons. Really cool stuff, and I am working on creating a tutorial in my non-existent downtime.