Things about Animation

In October 2014 my last class at AM started, class 06 "Polish and Portfolio". I know I had written before that the class 05 dialogue would be my last assignment at AM but I stood corrected. I started a new dialogue shot in week 3 of class 06 which later replaced the longer dialogue from class 05 that I never really liked.

But apart from this new shot which I will write about at a later point I also went back and revised some of my older shots from class 03. Namely the body mechanics assignments with the Imp and the Popsicle and Stan running over the shelf.

My new mentor Greh Whittaker who I can only reommend with all my heart had a new and fresh eye for my old assignments and had some very cool notes on how to improve them. And since I had gotten some very good feedback before for both shots and I am planning to leave them in my reel for a while I went back and gave them some more love.

First I worked some more on the Stan assignment. Greg thought that the beginning could use some more punch and suggested to get some more contrast into the first few seconds. So now Stan only peeks out carefully at first before revealing himself fully.

Also the moment right before the jump up the book could use some more energy so I pushed his body more into the line of action. This is kinda hard with Stan's very bulky body but it works just well enough.

The differences are all very minor but when watched in realtime really do make a difference.

I also worked some more hours on my Imp assignment, which by the way made it into 2014's Student Showcase for Animation Mentor. I added some more stretch and follow through and pushed some poses.

Again quite subtle changes but I'm glad I went back in there and spent that extra time.

Both assignments are at a point where I think I'll leave them in my Reel for a while and focus on getting my acting straight in the future.

I also took them with me to CTN that year and got some really awesome reviews, but I'll write about that a little more at another time.

It is January 2015 right now, so it's been a while since my last update. My apologies to everyone who has been following this blog, but I have been very busy the past months.

I graduated in December and finished my last assignment, but I'll try to catch up with all my last assignments. So the last assignment thats missing from here is the one from class 05.

Class 05 consists of only one large assignment, the infamous 2-character-dialogue. Infamous because it is very much work and it's really hard to keep looking at and listening to the same 15 seconds of dialogue for three months.

Time management is essential! While previous classes at AM have been very neatly structured it is now on you to make sure you household with your time. You have 11 weeks in total. So you can plan for 2 weeks of planning, 3 weeks of blocking, 3 weeks of splining and 3 weeks of polish. This should work out fairly well, but you have to know your own strengths. Make sure you work well structured and always keep both characters on the same level. DONT polish one character while the others one's still in blocking. You WILL have to change things again later and you really don't want to go back and forth wasting your time in the process.

The criteria for choosing your dialogue are pretty much the same as before. Nothing too well known, make sure it's clear, little background noise and make sure it's not offensive to any group of people. Also make sure to make it not too long. I scraped pretty much on the top end of things with about 22 seconds and was barely able to finish it in time. Make it 15 seconds and spend some extra time on polish.

I chose a clip from "Longest Yard" with Adam Sandler and came up with a different story to animate. And as usual I started with a storyboard. Neat planning it essential for an assignment of this length.

And the same thing again with focus on poses:

The shot is pretty much timed out at this point. I acted it out many times making sure it would work out like this. After I was satisfied I sat down and created some video reference for it. Don't underestimate this step, it is very important for later use and the filming will take quite some time. This took me about 4 hours for the filming alone and then a couple more for the editing.

It is obvious now that we will have 4 different shots inside this one film. You will need to prepare for this and plan very carefully. There will be a cinematography class at AM to prepare you for this. There are certain rules of film that want to be followed, feel free to google for Cinematography, ask your mentor or get a book on this. It's a fascinating and complex topic and knowing about it will surely help you in the future.

Book tip: Mastershots 2: Shooting great Dialogue Scenes (Amazon.com)

To get your edit working in 3D it is a good idea to start with a layout animation. The simplest kind of blocking so to say. Do not animate any poses at this point, focus only on your timing and camera. Here's what that looks like:

From this point on it's pretty much straight forward. Blocking, Splining, Polish, Polish and... Polish.

Blocking:

Splining:

Rendering:

This is the final version of this assignment. It was enormously exhausting and nerve wrecking but I got it done. Honestly I never felt too proud of it though. I still feel like it needed much more polish but its main weaknesses are much deeper. After having spent 11 weeks on this I couldn't wait to get away from it. The more time went by the more I started liking it, especially because my mentor was totally in love with it.

In my current reel I ended up removing this shot again, because I felt like it hurt me more than it helped. Sometimes you have to let shots go. This was a great assignment, a chance to learn and grow, but it never made its way on my favourites list.

In class 06 I started a new assignment to replace this one on my reel which turned out much better. I'll write about that one soon so stay tuned.

It has been a while since my last update here so please take my sincere apologies for that. The second half of Class 04 was quite busy (as were all before that, I guess) and I needed some time to cool off.

The second assginment n Class 4, after the pantomime, was the dialogue shot. The concept is simple: You go and search through the internet and all your favourite movies for an interesting 10 second monologue (you'll only be animating ONE character), then you come up with an interesting setting and animate a character fittingly to create your very own fully synched movie shot.

Simple concept, hard task. This is by far the longest assignment so far. 6 weeks in total, which is a lot, but only means that a good time management is absolutely key. Animation Mentor will guide you through this, but you really have to give it all and stay on schedule, otherwise you'll find yourself not finishing.

I've seen many students fail this class and that's not because the workload is too heavy, but because they just couldn't keep their pace up over such a long period.

Anyway, here's how it works. The first thing you do is find at least 3 lines of dialogue. I would recommmend more like 5-8 and then slowly weed them out. Here's a quick checklist with some things you should consider when choosing:

Is the length of the shot inside your limit? Shorter is better.

Is there much background noise? Noise is bad.

Is it dynamic enough? Keep away from monotone lines.

Does the line make sense outside of its original context? sometimes ironic or sarcastic statements are just plain weird out of context.

Could it offend ANYONE who hears it? No insulting of races, geners, age, countires nothing like that. That's important since this probably go on your demo reel.

Is it appropriate for children? Even if you are aiming for an adult audience, keep away from topics such as Sex, Murder, Drugs, Cursing, etc.

Once you found enough you will be asked to upload 3 of your choice and your mentor will help you pick one that is best suited for your assignment. Here are some pages that provide some good audio files:

http://www.moviewavs.com/

http://www.moviesoundclips.net/

http://www.moviesounds.com/

There are many more on the internet, but I would personally recommend that you sit down and watch some of your faourite movies with your eyes closed and choose dialogue form there. With audio files downloaded from the internet you always run the risk of having lines that were animated before by someone else. There are hundreds of animation students each year and they all do this, so the best lines have ALL been animated. Be original!

From here on it's all pretty much straight forward. With your chosen line in mind you start creating thumbnails, shoot video reference, analyze and then go into blocking. Do yourself a favour and dont mind about the lip sync until it's time. It's really not that complicated and you'lll have plenty of time to do it when the time comes. Just focus on your acting and body mechanics for now.

This assignment will be very demanding for everybody, but it's the closest you can get to an actual production shot. So enjoy it and give it your best.

Here's what my result looks like:

This is after just about 120 hours of work. So yes, it's a lot of work, but there's no better way to learn.

Currently I'm in week 2 of class 05 and have just started on my two person dialogue, which will be much tougher than this one. Wish me the best of luck, this is my last assignment here at AM, after that it's polishing and fixing.

This is week 06 of Class 04 already, so I'm a little behind on my updates.

The first assignment in this class was the infamous pantomime shot. Meanig we were supposed to come up with a 10 second idea depicting some sort of emotional change in a character. For example from quizzical to angry, anticipation to disapointment, something like that.

The idea is to concentrate on story, behaviour and body language rather than pure physicality.

As always I juggled with many ideas at first, loving and then hating every single one of them. Anyway, I was able to agree on one with a simple enough story that would fit inside the limitations:

A girl finds a seemingly dead animal in the park and carefully wants to poke it with a stick, it shows no reaction so she relaxes and comes closer. The animal turns out to be very much alive, wants to play and bites her "poking device". She staggers, jumps away and then throws her stick away in disgust.

Sounds more complicated than it is. Here are my planning sketches:

And finally the finished and rendered animation:

I first created some video reference in the park, which helped em a lot with planning. In the end I modified it very much to fit my needs and get that exaggerated style and I basically only used it as a hint for timing and basic poses.

Class 03 at Animation Mentor is coming to an end. It's the middle of week 12 right now. All Assignments are done and all critiques and QAs are over. I'm almost getting a little sentimental, this class was really great, but there's no time for that. Class 04 starts on monday already and promises to be even more challenging.

My last assignment was similar to the other two. Just pick your choice of character and come up with a nice physical shot.

This time I chose one of th imps, just to try them out and have one more thing to cross off of my list. They are fun characters to look at and tell a story with, but I have to admit they are not as comfortable to work with as Steward and Stella. The short legs and big bellies make them much harder to pose, but more flexible as well.

As always I started with a Storyboard, here it is:

Pretty simple story. Rock is in candy land and dicovers a giant popsicle. And guess what? He loves popsicles. He sticks out his tongue, takes a big lick and gets stuck on the frozen surface. He tries to escape, but then slips away and smashes against the popsicle.

I created some video reference in the park to get a feeling for the weight and timing. It looks pretty rediculous, it was raining the whole time and it was cold. But again, it really helped me, so I guess it's worth it.

Based on this timing I started my blocking phase. After about 20 hours this is what I ended up with:

And based on this blocking I went into splining and finally polish. Those are the two phases that by far take the most time. All combined I spent about 40 hours splining this 8 second clip and to get it to production level quality it would still need a lot more work.

It's really satisfying to see how these past assignments have gotten less scary every time and how I'm starting to pick up speed while working. Some little things are already becoming second nature. No matter how many lectures I watch and how many books I read, some skills can only be earned by  simply doing it and doing it a lot.

My mentor was very happy with my work this class and so am I. I hope I can keep living up to my own expacations next class.

I found a little time to render my last assignment and wanna update you on my progress.

So this is the second of three assignments in class 03. Topic is still the same as it was for the last one. "Do what you like, just keep it under 200 frames and make it nice and physical."

I decided to work with Stan again, who is the massive big-guy character from Animation Mentor. I really like his weight proportions. He seems big and forceful, exactly what I wanted.

My inspirations were Toy Story, Small Soldiers and Indian in the Cupboard. Making the huge Stan into a Toy sized figure seemd like an interesting move. Originally I thought about making him an Action Figure, jumping down from his place in the bookshelf, but selling this idea would have been hard inside of the 200 frames limit, so I decided to simplify it.

As always I first created a storyboard and made planning sketches to get an overall idea. Again I realised how important that is for me, just for the sake of getting all my ideas in order.

Here's the storyboard:

After that I went ourside again to shoot some reference. The movement here is somewhat acrobatic, at least for my standards so I had to edit it. Here it is:

I was able to get it to look pretty close to my storyboard, so that's a win! I analysed the video afterwards, wrote down the timing for all the main poses and edited it to rozughly fit inside my frame limit.

Based on that I started blocking. Key poses first, then breakdowns and then polish, polish polish. After about 20 hours this is where I got:

As you can see, some of the animation differs pretty badly from the original reference, but that's what a reference is for, to guide you not to dictate the way. Some movements just work better in animation than in real live and vice versa.

The feedback I got was pretty good. I got some minor notes and my Mentor told me to move it into splining. So that's what I did.

Another 30 hours later and after adding some enviroment and rendering this is my final product:

I still got some minor notes for little things to fix, but I haven't had the time to get to that yet. I'll do it some day and just replace the video. Untill then, this is final. Hope you like it.

It has been a while since my last post here on the blog, but the last few weeks have been very busy. Currently it's already week 08 with week 09 starting tomorrow, but I'll write from the beginning.

This class we have 3 assignments, very similar to the last one from class 02. Each one running at 100-200 frames with completely open topics. We are free to either create 3 independent shots or have them be consecutive shots of the same story. Since I always have trouble with finding ideas anyway and would like to try out different settings, rigs, ideas, etc I decided to go for three independent shots, which I still feel is the right way to go.

For my first Assignment I came up with a little western story. The sheriff "Steward" (Animation Mentors new free Rig) walks down the street, when an arrow slams into the wall before him. He turns around looking for indians, hears another arrow, turns around again, then sees the whole lot of arrows flying towards him and with a scared jump leaps out of the frame.

With this idea I really wanted to push those quick turns, see how far I can go. I think I ended up at around 4 frames for a turn, which is about 5 times as fast as they were in my reference.

This is my planning and video analysis:

Most of its timing changed along the way, but that's how it always works. Though I have to say again that this would have been vastly more difficult if I hadn't done the all the reference shooting, planning and all.

Based on these drawings I created my blocking pass which took me right about 15 hours, spread over on week. Here's the result:

The blocking it quite rough of course, but already includes all of the key poses and most of the breakdowns. Stewards rig is pretty handy to work with, there's nothing I could really complain about. His anatomy is a little off making it sometimes hard to work closely with real reference, but that also makes it a good practice.

Going from here I started splining in week 03 of the assignment and polished that in week 04, making for another 25 hours spread over one and a half week. In production I don't think one would get more than a work week for a shot like this, meaning about 40 hours total, os there's still a lot of room for improvement.

Here's the rendering:

My Mentor "Scott Lemmer" (from Dreamworks) still had a couple of notes about this and would have liked to see some changes. I'll come back to these when there's time, but right now I am just too busy keeping up with the current assignments.

It's the middle of december right now, which means that Class 02 of Animaiton Mentor is over.

These past few weeks have been really tough, especially week 09 where I translated my blocking to spline, but I'm jumping ahead of myself.

Week 07. The final week for the dog walk and the first one for the "big assignment". The task was to come up with some idea for a heavily body mechanics based animation somewhere between 150 and 250 frames and create video references and planning sketches for it.

I decided to make Stan flee out of a castle. He runs around the corner into the corridor, up the stairs, to the gate. Pushes it open and runs away.

I wanted to challenge myself here and thought I knew how much work this was gonna be. Well, I was wrong. I was not prepared for the amount of labor that was awaiting me.

Here's me video reference:

And some sketches:

Week 08. Finally all other assignments are done and I can completely focus on creating this piece. While that is still a lot of work it feels good to focus on one thing alone.

Blocking actually went relatively fast. While this still means about 10 hours having the proper video reference makes a ton of difference. At many stages of the run I could actually copy the poses and timing and make all those subtle changes in blocking+ and splining.

Week 09. My nemesis. This was the week of transition from blocking to splining, and boy is it a lot of work. I spent almost 30 hours on this weeks work just to have my mentor tell me I actually took it too far. The task was to create a completely splined "temp animation" state, whereas I already took it halfway through polish.

One thing I disregarded this week was to create a proper linear pass before going to bezier curves, that made everything that much harder. Well, lesson learned.

The feedback I got at this point from my mentor was amazing. He was very pleased with my effort as am I.

Week 10 and 11. Those were the final weeks of the assignment. Both titled to be "polishing".

I got tons of great feedback form Ryan about the most useful things like "add some more bunce here", "reduce impact there", "watch out for knee popping the sticking", "make this step longer and that one shorter", and so on.

While this may sound tedious it's a great way to train your eye for those subtle things and be reminded of all the tiny details that make an animation. Working alone I tend to get stuck with "Well, I guess it's alright now, isn't it?"

It means a lot to get professional feedback and I'm quite happy with where it got me. Here's my final:

And this wraps up Class 02. Class 03 will begin in January. The main topic will still be "Body Mechanics" but mixed with a bit of personality.

It's week 10 right now at Animation Mentor so I've been animating  A LOT these past days. I'm gonna show the animation once it's done which should be by the end of next week.

Today I wanna share with you a pice of hardware that's been making my life SO much easier and might just be the second best thing that's ever been invented (no.1 being Mountain Dew).

It's the Shuttle Pro v2 by Contour Design which is actually supposed to be a tool for editing, but applies just as well to animation. Here's what it looks like:

I use this along with my Wacom, but you can keep using your mouse with it or whatever you like.

The beauty is that you are able to easily shuffle through your frames by using the jog wheel. The inner ring slowly steps frame by frame and the outer ring can be used to play the scene in variable speed, from slow motion to fast forward.

I have also set the other keys to custom commands for playback or keyframe stepping, but they can be set to virtually anything.

Here's my full key mapping:

As you can see there's still plenty of room for additional keys, but these are all I need for now. I would totally like to have a "play backwards" button, but haven't found a way to script that yet.

The whole thing is available as a basic or Pro version, you can check them both out, but I'd recommend the Pro. It can be bought all over the internet for under 100$. For example here at Amazon:

Amazon.com: Shuttle Pro

There's a little catch though. As you might have found out already the "one frame forward/backward" function in maya generates history events for some reason, meaning you can easily fill your undo queue with just shuffling through frames.

To prevent this you have to exclude this function from your history which can simply be done with a small script. I wrote a short article about this a while back, you can find it here: 

Mel: Skip through frames

Alright, week 07 is over and that means the Dog walk Assignment is finally done.

This was the longest assignment so far, 4 weeks in total from planning to polish. It started in week 04 with the planning. We were asked to go into the park and do some research, film dogs and analyze their walk patterns. Youtube was allowed too this time, because it just isn't as easy for everyone to find this kind of reference.

So this is the reference I was able to get my hands on. Part of it is borrowed from youtube, the other part is selfmade.

Going from this reference I analyzed the walk pattern, drew a breakdown of poses and made notes about important key features:

The Video lecture we got was incredible. There is so much going on in a walk and it is amazing how all those patterns occur in all kinds of animals all over the planet.

There are great pages about this in The Animators Survival Guide and lots of useful information on the internet. I can't stress it enough how important it is to do research, especially in a complex field such as this.

So I took my animation through a week of blocking and two more weeks of splining from there. Just as you would with a biped. Find your keyposes, find your breakdowns, Done. Simple as that.

The critique I got was really good. Ryan was able to find some minor things all the way to the end, but in general he was very happy with it.

The assignment was quite challenging, especially in the later stages of the walk. This is a great example of "easy to learn, hard to master". Even when I thought I was done, there was always something missing or could have been improved. To see all these subtle things can only come with experience.

For week 06, aside from animating our dog walk which I'll show you next week, we had to do more dog poses.

This time the topic was "animals at play". Well, it's more like "dog's at play" if you ask me, because it turns out to be really hard trying to find any other animals that actually play. I tried my best to come up with some clever stuff, here are my sketches:

Drawing more than 30 poses in 3 weeks can really strain your creativity. I'm not sure I could have come up with any more than these.

I chose two of them and recreated them with Sloan:

Ryan told me that he liked the first one better, though he had to mention that he didn't really feel the weight of the dog. The ball seems so stiff that the dog seems to have barely any impact on it.

The second pose is somewhat too complex and lacks a clear line of action. It's a tough pose to get right with all those legs whirling around.

Week 05 of Class 02 was the week we started our blocking for the dog walk, which I'll show you once the walk is  finished.

There was of course also a second assignment, more dog poses. This time with a focus on motion. Running, jumping, anything really but lying around.

Ryan asked me to do more different animals when drawing so here's what I came up with:

And these are the poses I rendered:

My mentor was much happier with these than the week before. He especially liked the dynamic line of action in pose 01. Pose 02 is a tough one, it's really hard to get the right angle on Sloan to show his motion, but it's pretty close.

The last weeks have been busy so here's a little late update on week 04.

After the Stella walk we started working with AM's new Dog Rig Sloan, which I have to say can be a real pain to work with, This is not actually AM's fault as far as I can see, quadruped Rigs are just tough to work with, especially when you try to do extreme poses.

Anyway, we were supposed to just make a couple of animal sketches, preferrably quadrupeds in motion and recreate them using the rig. Here are my drawings:

Drawing dogs was new to me, so this wasn't easy, but you get the hang of it,

My mentor, Ryan, didn't like that I only drew Dogs, he would have liked to see other animals as well. Noted.

And these are the rendered final poses:

Ryan wasn't too happy with my work on these. They are ok, but he mentioned that he would have liked to see a better line of action.

The first one wasn't dynamic enough and just caught in an awkward moment and the second one could have used more work on the hind legs. But since this is my first time working with a dog I won't take it too hard.

Week 02 and 03 had another shared assignment. The Full Body Walk.

We were asked to animate a walk with the new tribes character Stella. The walk coulder either be completely vanilla or have personality, our choice. I decided I wanted to go with an overly feminine posing walk. My Stelle is confident, open, feminine and in a good mood. She leisurely swings her arms and treads lightly.

We had an awesome lecture about human anatomy that I can sadly not post here. But I recomment everyone to watch some video on that or get some books, it makes everything much easier.

Interesting points of the walk are for example that the shoulders will always counter the movement of the hips to maintain balance, an effect called Contrapposto. Google it, you'll see what I mean.

There are much more things going on in a walk than you would think. You should make sure to rotate your hips in ALL axis, same goes for the chest. If there is a unanimated axis in there, you probably missed something. Also try to narrow down the stance of the feet, a girl will most likely walk on pretty much a straight line, that makes her look more feminine and watch out for the overlapping action hapening in the arms. There's a very clear successive breaking of joints from shoulder to arm to wrist.

Here are some of my planning sketches I created from reference:

Make sure to walk your walk, act it out. I think it's important to feel what you are animating or you wont see what's wrong with it. Get your own reference and make sure not to rely on someone elses groundwork.

Here's what I ended up with:

The critique I got was rather good. Ryan told me that the heel landed a little too softly and asked for some more impact, also he suggested to lift the heel a few frames earlier to increase the push.

It's week 03 at Animation Mentor and that means it's time for poses again.

The Assignment is pretty much the same as the one from week 01, that means drawing and posing the figure in motion without any specific topic.

While this gives you a lot of freedom it also gets increasingly harder. I started to run out of ideas about halfway through and had to do some research. Sports are a great area to look for references. You can fill a whole page with baseball poses alone as can be seen in this great page from my classmate Stephanie Tamoana from Australia:

http://stephanietomoana.com/

My drawings are far from being as good as hers but anyway, here they are:

My mentor mentioned that he would like to see more natural poses, these are already pretty exaggerated and Ryan would like to see the exaggeration to happen in the 3D pose, not the sketches.

This is the opposite of what Anthony Wong told me in class 01 so I guess it's really subjective.

Since I'm not very good at drawing a lot of this is hard for me. I feel that making the drawings work is even harder for me than representing them in 3D, not sure if that's the same for everyone.

I'll do my best to make drawings that communicate my idea, we'll see how realistic I can get while doing that.

Anyway, these are the 3D Versions of said poses, first the Slamdunk:

I gotta say I'm really pleased with how this came out. Ryan mentioned again that it was a little unrealistic and judging from the way her legs are dangling along she must have flown quite a long way "defying gravity".

While he didn't like that too much it's about what I had in mind. That super long Michael Jordan style "flying" jump. So I'm ok with it.

This is my Rock pose. I kinda like it because it reads very well I think, but the critique I got wasn't too great.

First of all Ryan thought it was a little too stereotypical, everyone has seen this pose before and not only once. He also said that there was no clear line of action and no direction of the jump. A different camera angle or more orientation towards the viewer might suggest a jump direction, right now it's just jumping up. And lastly the guitar is too parallel to the frame. A tilt up or down might help selling the action more.

Class 02 has finally started and week 01 is already over.

The assignment for this week was, of course, some new poses.

This time we were asked to find some that show some kind of motion. To look out for a strong line of action and pay extra attention to composition.

My new Mentor is Ryan Bradley known for The Incredible Hulk, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Pacific Rim and more.

We also got access to the new AM rigs this week, which are absolutely awesome! I've never had the chance to work with advanced rigs like this before and it is heaven! There's a control for everything. I'm lovin' it.

So here are my sketches for the week. They don't look as pretty this time. I tried a new drawing approach that would allow me to start with the line of action and then draw the character around it. The result is not as pretty, but more dynamic.

And here comes Stella.

The feedback I got was pretty good and I'm happy with it. My mentor pointed out that he could very well live without the backgrounds, but you know what? I like 'em. I spent about an hour on compositing so I guess that's ok.

In Week 11 we did our last animation assignment for class 01.

The personality walk. For me this was an assignment that turned out much harder than expected, but by now this is nothing new.

The idea I came up with was the one of an old copper. An old school policeman strolling though the streets of ancient london.

He is a bit of a big guy, he has nowhere to be, he's lazy and complacent, yet he has a millitary touch. That means, long slow strides, a lot of straight legs and a distinct up and down movement.

Actually the idea came form Terry Patchetts "Night Watch" one of my favourite novels. It's a great read!

For this one I needed to make some video reference, so I grabbed a camera and some video editing software and this is what I got.

From here I took the timing and sketched out my planning.

Next was the blocking phase, of which I don't have a video right now, but it's basically only drawings in 3D. I later noticed that the poses I created in blocking wheren't enough. Since the strides are so slow I would have needed some more inbetweens, at least on every 5 or so frames. The way I did it I ended up with a big gap of keyframes between passing and high which needed to be filled in splining.

After quite some hours of polishing I got a halfway decent personality walk. It's far from perfect, but I'm ok with it. It's a learning process.

My Mentor pointed out that the walk could be 5-10% faster which would cancel out the too even rotation in X. He also liked the idea of the moving hat, but said that the rotation was too much. But most of all he told me to look out for the two "high" positions I got here. One is when the body reaches its high in Y-translation and the second when the stretch kicks in. I'll have to watch out for this and make sure I track the actual tip of the geometry rather than just the body control.

After all I have to say that class 01 went well. Very well actually. I learned a lot and could see how my work in this rather new field of expertise accellerated. I hope I can keep up this speed in class 02.