an animation workbook
In this pass I was trying to break the key poses a little bit more. I have animated everything by eye so if there are any glitches with the arcs, I can still tweak it in the next pass.
There are a few more areas that need more love and attention in terms of spacing, slow in’s and slow out’s and timing but overall it’s slowly coming together.
Once I sorted out my spacing and timed the performance in Flipbook, it was time to do the cross over to Maya. In order to make my life a little bit easier, I marked in red the golden poses I had in my 2D version so I can quickly go in and spend more time tweaking them and making them read well.
Here is the result of the first blocking pass only with the story telling poses. Next on the list is adding the breakdowns and inbetweens.
On that note, I must say that adapting to Jason’s work-flow is taking me a little bit of time but it’s great because I can slowly feel how I am getting rid of all the old habits I had (and trust me I had heaps) and slowly get into that traditional way of thinking mode. Once I will pick it up more I hope the speed in getting things done will come along for a walk in the park.
This time I revisited the flipbook of the extended side step test I started after watching Jason’s tutorial. The main problem I had with the shot was inconsistency, the timing, arcs, overlaps and drag weren’t working well together the entire shot.
To avoid confusion, what I did next was deleting all the breakdowns and inbetweens I had. I found it less distracting to work with the golden poses only.
Then I roughly timed each pose for 15 frames (more or less) and then started to add breakdowns by favoring the previous frame.
Reworking this shot after watching the weight shift tutorial Jason did really helped me to put a little bit more emphasis on where the weight is at all time during the test. I know that the character hops from one side to the other more than it actually shifts any weight, but it still helped me understand and implement that concept into my poses and my spacing.
This is the test I completed after watching Jason’s tutorial.
Hi there, sorry about not posting for the past few days, I was quite busy with finishing up at my job before I start the new one next week. Needless to say I am super excited and really looking forward to start this new adventure with the animation team at Torus. It will be a great opportunity to learn more about the games industry and how the production pipeline actually works.
After my last post about the pregnant walk cycle, I felt like even though the idea is different and holds a lot of challenges, I needed to concentrate on simple things. It’s very easy to get distracted and side tracked when you experiment and sometimes you need to be disciplined and pull yourself straight. After all the idea is to practice the basics and I started to feel like I was not in touch anymore with what I was doing. Finding good reference was pretty hard so in the meantime I decided put that test on hold until I would feel a little more confident with my work-flow.
So, after a lot of coffee and two long nights I managed to get started on the next Jason Ryan tutorial. This time I am tackling the side step. As you could see, I added two more steps in order to break the evenness of the cycle and to make it slightly different to the one Jason did.
I am also adding the reference footage I took to study the timing, I tried to vary the poses a little bit so it won’t look and feel too even. Oh and yes I know I look like a goof ball!
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