Friday, October 15, 2010

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Basic Foundations Week 2



I almost forgot to mentioned that I started taking animation mentor classes. After graduating from Ai I just felt like I needed more direction in order for me to reach my goal of becoming a Character Animator.The program they had at Ai was good but they emphasized on too many things and not just one. I didn’t want to be a jack of all trades and a master of none.So here I am starting an 18 month long journey learning everything there is to know about character animation from some of the best animators in the world :)!!

We didn't have any assignments for week 1, we just had to set up our profile and introduce ourselves to our mentor and other students. For week 2 we had to use our sketchbook, go to a public place and do some quick sketches of what we see in our surroundings. Sketches could be rough even stick figures are allowed just as long as it communicates ideas of posture, attitude, weight, balance, etc. We then had to circle our favorite pose and recreate that pose using the Stu rig. This rig by the way is kinda weird, it's kind of limited because it doesn't have any shoulder controls which kinda sucks because it would have really helped me out when I started posing this guy out. So I kinda cheated and translated his head down to make it appear as if he is shrugging. Doesn't look like it did much but it looks a lot better than having his head pointing straight up. Also, he doesn't have fk/ik switch for his arms which I found strange. I later found out from our mentor that they purposely made him that way so we can adjust to using both ik and fk which makes sense since most of the new students at AM have never touched Maya before.