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.

Character Rigging

Here are some screenshots at my first attempt at character rigging with split geometry. I have included several poses to show the mobility and flexibility of the rig, along with an image showing the actual rig set-up.

Fundamentals of Animation, Box Push

After completing the ball bounce, the next project involved animating a character pushing a box. Through this assignment I learned how to create a successful piece of animation that incorporates weight, appeal, staging, and good timing. All of this was accomplished by using the workflow tools taught such as MEL buttons and the graph editor.

Fundamentals of Animation, Ball Bounce and Roll

This month, in Fundamentals of Animation, we covered a lot of the key aspects to animating in a three dimensional environment. We started off learning how to animate a bouncing ball.

This video shows a project in which I animated a ball bouncing. During this project I learned how to use the Graph Editor in Maya to control the speed of the animation. Using the graph editor was vital to create appropriate timing and spacing, key elements in creating a believable ball bounce and roll. Being able to control the animation of an object such as a ball is an important first step to master before moving onto animating a character.