LOA Week 2

Alright...
Its hard to spend enough time animating when you don't have any deadlines arrrrrggggg!!!
I come back from work & just chill, so tempting specially with the summer activities all over.

I was planning to start my animation practice with the basic bouncing ball exercise, both in 2D & 3D, I want to have a rough 2d planning to my shots as part of my work flow just like Jason Ryan's tutorials (check out his website)...but I ended up with 2D for this week.

you might think redoing a bouncing ball exercise is a waist of time, for me It was so helpful, I only did this exercise at the beginning of AM & back then I was trying to understand Maya & the basic animation principles in a bouncing ball, with redoing this I understood things more, & practiced flipbook a bit...

here's a simple my 2D bouncing ball & at the end I added tail to the ball for some overlapping action



hopefully this wee will be more constructive

Away for the Summer

Alright... Alright !!!
I'm currently on Leave of Absence (LOA) from Animation Mentor,
I have decided to take a break for a bunch of reasons, mainly to go over what I've learned so far marking half way through this great journey, practicing animation polish more, enjoy the summer & charge my batteries for next term, which might be a retake of class 3, I'm not sure yet...


Anyways here's my progress real at the end of class 3

AM 311: Sincerity: A Conversation with Mark Henn

here's the last assignment for this term, there's still some parts that need to be polished
lots of pops, timing & spacing issues, arcs not that smooth, lack of overlap,ease ins & outs & counting!!! specially in the parts where I had gimbal, each time I want to slide move the keys to edit timing & things like that twists appear again,but it looks better than last week.

AM 310: Hands

This week I had my eCritique done early on sunday night, which gave me the chance to spend my only night off work that week on this assignment... one of the main issues I had was the hands were the gimbal happened looked weird plus some pops in the head & spine that I had to refine, so I refined the hands & showed the progress to my mentor on the q&a, turned out that spent too much time with refining the hands, while it should be the last, so I had to go back and start with the character root, then spline, neck, head, then if I had a chance shoulders,elbows & hands...
but not necessary for this week, so I kept bumping back & forth between the root,spine,neck & head until I reached what I got here, didnt touch the arms yet...
so here the pre final refining pass & the surprised hand poses

AM 309: An Introduction to Entertainment

Unfortunately I'm posting this update late on week 11 instead of 9... Its was a crazy super insane 2 weeks for me, going out of blocking into splines and for the first time ever to face the GIMBAL LOCK monster ;) if I may call it...

I just discovered how painful fixing gimbal issues specially when the euler filter fails you, & having to go frame by frame tweaking this crazy wrist twists that I had when I moved out to splines,
of course I've learned now how not to get in the gimbal trap again, two important tips :
rotate each axis by itself & check every once n a while with switching the curves from stepped mode to linear early in the blocking stage, that will save you from such a disaster.

here's my first look at the gimbal, then my final assignment submission plus the relaxed hand poses.


































you can notice the gimbal in the wrist crazy twists



final first refining pass