Professional Communication and Presentation (Showcase)

This class revolved around learning how to "sell yourself" to potential employers. While I have had several jobs and experience in professional environments in the past, such as with Apple and the United States Army,  it was a nice refresher course. Here is a slide show presentation I completed for the class that tells my story:  my skills, my faults, my journey, my passion. 

Click the "Read More" tab on the bottom left of this post to see the entire slideshow and learn a bit about my background.

Character Animation 1 (Basic Walk, Final Project)

For my final project in Character Animation, I attempted to implement everything I have learned this month (and over past months in classes such as 2D Animation) into a basic scene. I started off animating in "stepped" mode so I could manually control the animation, versus Maya just blindly filling in the gaps. I plotted the contact, passing, up, and down poses for my character while in stepped. I then proceeded to change the animation tangent to "auto" and corrected the foot roll, balancing issues, head bob, and tail swag. Here is the final product:

Character Animation 1 (Strong Poses, Part 2)

Last time, I shared the pre-pro work for this project. Now I'll share the final part of the project. I took my storyboard and adapted it to a scene in Maya. My goal here was to maximize the poses by exploring negative space in my silhouettes. Here is the final scene render:

Some issues that I need to address in the future include:

Arms do not show joints.
Lobster claws (no silhouette on the fingers).
Symmetrical Antennae.
Some poses lack line of action.
Insufficient use of negative space.
Disgusted pose doesn't read clearly.

Character Animation 1 (Strong Poses, Part 1)

This next project for Character Animation involved a lot of pre-pro work. The main goal of this overall project was to study strong poses in animations, primarily by working on silhouettes. To start off with, we did some concept work exploring different poses for several strong poses such as relaxed, fear, anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, and balanced. Below you can see the different poses I came up with for a set of exploratory thumbnails.

Next, I chose one of each of the strong poses that I thought would work the best and compiled them into a storyboard. I primarily focused on the silhouettes to try and pick poses that would best represent the desired pose.  

Next, I will be applying these poses to a corresponding model in Maya! 

Character Animation 1 (Leggy Walk, Part 3)

Here is my final playblast for the "Leggy Walk" project. I am pretty confident with the results, but would have liked to have more time to explore the foot roll in the future. That is definitely something I will explore more outside of class in the future.

Character Animation 1 (Leggy Walk, Part 2)

Next on the Leggy Walk project, I started working on the "up and down" poses. These poses are important because they add realism to the animation. When we walk, our hips rotate from side to side and move up and down. This part of the assignment helped me understand how these poses are important. 

via Full Sail University curriculum 

via Full Sail University curriculum

As you can see in me animation below, I took these techniques and applied them to my project. 

Next I will move on to finalizing the hip rotations along with applying a foot roll. The foot roll will ensure the character looks balanced and natural. 

Character Animation 1 (Leggy Walk, Part 1)

This is the first project assigned in Character Animation 1. It is a building block, a foundation, for what is to come. The project involves a simple leg walk. I started out by blocking out the animation in Maya using stepped tangent. Here is the playblast of the blocked out scene.

The blocked out scene contains the contact and passing poses on the animation. Next, I will move on to up and down poses, and eventually a foot roll.