class 3 week 6 It's Bishop Time Baby!!!

HaHA!!! Yeah!!! Finally we get to start working on lip syncs with a full character (Bishop) here at AM. We will finish the pantomime and eye movements this quarter then next quarter we finish the lip sync and facial expressions. I can't wait to get started on this one! I have been tirelessly wading through hours and hours of movie dialog trying to find a really unique piece to do my lip sync to. There are two that I really, really want to do but they are too long for the frame limit in this assignment, so hopefully I will be able to do one of them next quarter. I'm already planning those out in my head and I haven't even started the first one yet. Anyway, you may be wondering what the dialog is for my shot. Well, you'll just have to wait and see ;) Hey gotta get that traffic to this blog somehow.

class 3 week 5 Fianlly done

Whew, Finally done! This one sure had it's fair share of headaches but I managed to not kill myself and worked through them. Anyhoo, not a lot to say this week so here it is in all of it's.....erm.....glory...?... ;)

Special thanks to Cesar Tafoya and everyone else that gave some much needed feedback last week.

class 3 week 4

Oh man, what a week. Work has been killin me, and along with all the work I have to put into my animation I think I'm about to go over the edge.

Still have not brought everything out of linear mode yet, working on my arcs before I worry to much about spacing.

I am working on some moving holds in the part where Stewie is looking around before jumping over the couch; but right now its just static holds. This has proved to be a difficult area for me because the moving holds look contrived. Not sure that I am really thrilled with the timing there either.

I am also having issues with the flip over the couch because the knees and elbows are flipping all over the place so I may end up doing that frame by frame. I'm to tired to figure it out in the graph editor right now. other then that most of my work this week has been in the first half of the animation. Looking forward to hearing what you have to say so on those areas so I can get moving on the rest this week.

I wish this was a little further along (still have done a lot) but I was struggling for hours with a broken rig after a particularly rough day at work and I just don't have it in me to do anymore tonight. I finally remembered that I had heard that you can transfer animations to a fresh rig, so after learning how to do that I transfered my animation but it was not a perfect transfer even though I am positive that I did it exactly right. I ended up having to tweak a lot of poses again. So I figure, get some sleep and hit it hard first thing Monday.

Anyway, all is not a loss. I changed up the middle a lot and got things reading much better there. I also added some better anticipation to the initial shocked reaction at the beginning. I have also added some more breakdowns throughout the animation so transitioning into my first polish pass next week shouldn't be a problem.

class 3 wk 2

Whooo! Been working on this all week. I was getting really frustrated with some of the transitions and the flip, but I finally worked through my headaches and started having fun with it again.

Here's a tip: if you make your character flip or turn 360 degrees then the foot twist and foot rock start acting crazy and not working properly when the values get cranked up to high. Having the values up to high on foot twist and foot rock also causes the foot roll to break. Make life easier on yourself and just use rotation to twist and rock the foot along with foot roll. If you do it this way foot roll wont break and you will have a lot less channels to deal with in your graph editor. HTH

Class 3 Week 1

Alright, Week1 of class 3 we begin planning our animation using Stewie. the objective is to do a pantomime animation that clearly conveys two different emotions. Anyway, my idea is to have Stewie lazily spread out on a couch flipping through the channels on the TV. He changes the channel and gets scared by the program, does a double take then looks around frantically before deciding to dive for cover behind the couch. He then pops his hand up from behind the couch and turns the TV off. After my initial stab at thumbnailing out my animation very close to my video ref, I decided that it was too close to the vid ref and not as entertaining as it could be. Per Don Kims suggestion I went in and studied the heck out of the ref and picked out the best beats in the ref and then went on to Thumb the poses out, paying close attention to exaggerating them to make the animation more entertaining. Now, it's time to get to work on the initial blocking pass.