Facial Study Assignment Final

First dialog assignment in "finished" form. May come back to this next class a bit more, but it's been done a few weeks now. Just now getting it up here.

Still feels a bit busy in the mouth, and it's pretty low key acting wise, but I think it comes across ok. Trying to be a bit more active/reactive on the current follow up assignment, which is a two character dialog piece.


What's up with alpha layers on export looking entirely screwy in the video thumbnails? Weird pink stuff, not there at all during playback!

Weekly Animation Exercise #3

Took a bit more time than I had hoped to get something new up, but here is my latest result. Worked very quickly on this one, only three sittings of not too long each. Did quite a bit in stepped, even keys here, and was able to move right into splined animation quite smoothly. Some wonkyness on the arms and little things here and there I could go back into, but want to just keep moving for now and get #4 going instead. I put a bit more into the face and hands here, though I messed up by jumping into the face too early and then changing the body timing around, it never quite recovered fully, but it's better than an unmoving dead head. Save the extremities for last, I suppose.

11 Second Club June Entry

Well, managed to somewhat finish an entry for this months 11 Second Club competition. Don't expect to win any awards with this one, but it came about decently. Some really late changes to blocking, right down to the last day...and then I recalled that I hadn't done any lip syncing so I threw that in quick and dirty like. Ugh.

Some jerkyness and a few floaty bits, and the less said about the walk the better (not really, obvious issues, but I put most of my time into the guy on the left since he had more going on and I wanted to really sell his actions as much as I could). I think I was able to focus on trying to clarifying some ideas compared to my earlier passes, which had the seated character entirely spinning around at one point, as well as a bunch of messy little actions going on between poses. This accounted for many late changes but improved readability and just kept it a bit simpler. Learned a few things on how to set up a shot and work through it, as always. I'll report back here when the results are in from the voting. We'll see what sort of feedback it gets, hopefully more than "hey use the principles of animation more" or "this isn't great". July competition is a much more dramatic sound clip...should be interesting to work on, and really good acting practice.

I call it "Not That Kind of Jar". Includes sound.

Progress Reel, 1 to 4

AM Progress reel, from class 1 to 4 (in reverse order). I need to learn more about how spines work...I think I'm improving for sure, I just have to move beyond getting stuck in workflow bottlenecks, plan better...and animate more!

Weekly Animation Exercise #2

Got this up the other day, forgot to post it here. I need to stay on that sort of thing! Anyways, week 2, a little push-ups clip. More complex than last week for sure, took a little more time, but not perfect (and not really intended to be, quick and dirty and then on to the next thing). Some IK/FK pops and some other little polish needed. I think this week I'll have to try for something more neutral just to work on little idle details, feels so robotic in my default stances.

Weekly Animation Exercise #1

Here's the first in a series of weekly self-inflicted short animation challenges. The idea is to just take a really simple sub-10-second idea and take it as far as I can in a day or two. It's called "weekly" because I plan on doing one of these every week, indefinitely. I figure it'll help me sharpen my skills and figure out what works for me and just give me a wider variety of experiences and concepts to mess around with. They're not going to be perfect, but I sure hope they improve over time. Here's the first "exercise", some quick jumping jacks. Using the Max rig.



I'm also likely going to experiment with rendering techniques as I go, for fun. This uses some default simple motion blur set up, not sure if I'm crazy about it.

Acting Test, From Blocking to Final

This is my Animation Mentor Class 4 first assignment, an acting test showing a change in emotion. Here I'm trying to go from Frustration to Relief. I went with "bucket stuck on the head" for the concept...pretty straightforward. You can see how much the second half changes throughout the passes, as I got crit notes and changes things around to simplify. Left me with not as much time for refinement as I'd hoped, this goes to show that nailing down the planning pass early on is important.