#animationmentor

AN01 - Week 1 - Introduction to Animation

Happy New Year! (Okay, maybe a little belated...)

After a couple months' break, we're good and rested and ready to move onto the main event. For the next 12 weeks, I'll be taking the AN01 - Animation Basics course for AnimationMentor's Character Animation Program. We're already finished with week one, so here's what I've accomplished so far!

The first part of the assignment for week 1 was animating 3 cars demonstrating the animation principle of Fast In, Fast Out, Ease In, Ease Out -- basically a timing exercise. Alright, simple enough.

Neat.

After that, we worked on another character posing exercise like back in Week 4 of the Maya workshop. Part of this assignment was filling a sketchbook page with many different poses to choose from. Once again, @jookpubstock comes to the rescue! (Seriously, this site is SUCH a valuable tool. Fantastic, I love it!)

So here's what I came up with for sketches--

--and here's how the 3D pose turned out!

(I love this guy. Super fun rig to pose with.)

Seems like the next few weeks are going to have a lot of these posing assignments with different expression themes, so I'm really looking forward to that! That's it for last week's work. Onto the next project! ~

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The reference photograph I used for my pose is (once again) from the amazing @jookpubstock. Check out their huge gallery of reference photos here!

Maya Workshop - Week 4 - Intro to Character Animation

Last week's assignment was all about how to manipulate a more complicated (but still relatively straightforward) character using rig controls and how to pose it following a real photo reference. The "real photo" aspect being crucial so that as a student you avoid the bad habit of creating a "caricature of a caricature" if you try to create your pose using another animated or illustrated example for reference. Have a look at my pose and silhouette for "Stewart"!

The important thing to remember here is that a reference is your guide, not a rule! It's okay to break the reality if the end result is a more clear shot. For example, my goal here was to ensure a nice clean-to-read silhouette of the final pose. I didn't like how the left elbow was a bit hidden in the original reference, so I pushed it out some more to get a better read.

Here's some additional shots from other angles!

There was an optional part of last week's assignment which involved animating a head-turn for this character. I have a reference I'd love to use, but unfortunately I ran out of time to complete it. I'll be working on that in addition to my assignment for this week so I'm hoping to have it ready in time for my next update! Back to work then! 💁‍♀️

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