Animation is about Possibilities and the Choices

We are all profoundly connected.

Thursday, May 26, 2005

But Did I learn Anything?

Frustration aside, I practiced drawing the key poses for Ballie a dozen times before I actually posed him in the computer itself. I repeated it until I could do it from memory. I can recite by rote where the keys, breakdowns and extremes are in a 24 frame cycle. Not that I want to become stiff and formulatic (is that a word?), but just like playing Jazz ...like Louis Armstrong said..."If you gotta ask, then you'll never know". I've definitly learned to cut down on the number of keys to use and I mark the hell out of my screen with a dry erase sharpie trying to get the curves right. But not just with the animation, but in the curve editor as well. I've found myself setting keys on my character to get the movement right, then going into the curve editor I then trace over the new curve with the dry erase. Then I delete the new key and tweak the curve until it matches the dry erase marks on the screen.

This weeks assignnment is to draw in our sketchbooks our approach to a 180 degree turn of The character, Ballie. I held the sketchbook and spun around 180 degrees while staring at my feet, tryig to feel what was happening, see what was happening and understand every nuance of weight shift. When I got dizzy I jotted a note, then repeated the dance. I drew out Fred Astaire footsteps for Ballie to Follow. Amazingly complicated proceedure for a simple 180 turn.

I was watching an iPod commercail directed by Mark Romanek and I was thinking that it would be fun to animate those extreme hip hop dancers with Stu. Talk about biting off more than I could chew. But that is the question. I nned to take small bites that I can digest, but I have to really push myself to grow. I'm so afraid of being mediocre. But here I am.

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Spinning My Wheels in the Dark

I just had all of my work for the last couple of weeks kicked back to me, so I redid everything from scratch and my mentor did not noticed. My mentor is so caught up in his own internet problems that he doesn't acknowledge anything in the sketchbook section ever and seems to address the revisions as an afterthought. He hasn't even done our QnA's for the last 2 weeks, relegating that to BBB which could be a good thing, except that last night, the make up session was a Global QnA which meant that instead of 20 of us in a room it was 300 and hence NO PERSONAL CRITIQUES. Every day I work towards something unknown and mysterious. I'm not suggesting that this is a good thing. I really don't know. I checked my grades and no matter how hard I try I come up with a B+, which ain't too shabby. But I need to compete for a job at the end of the day. The revisions are supposed to give us an opportunity to improve on the grade so I find this particularly frustrating. There is so much top shelf talent out there and I feel that only the 'A' students are the ones who will eventually end up with work. Not to mention the competition coming out of the gaming schools, art schools, and universities around the world.

Monday, May 16, 2005

I am posting links to the life drawing that I did in the first semester, which incidentally is drawing to a close. There is a new AM chat window which allows the students in a class to see whoever is asking the questions as well as the Mentor conducting the session. This is Luis answering administration questions for the weekly tech QnA.

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The one leg animation was a challenge but I learned an important lesson about the entire process. Most of the learning is done in the second week of an assignment. The first week I dio what I think or know to be right. Although there is dscovery along the way, this dosen't change the way I think. In the second week, the critiques from the mentors and fellow students come in and man, these guys are PUMPED! Every aspect of an animated shot is exmined, deconstructed, and challenged.

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Week 6 - I Struggled...

....with the character "Tailor". Maybe because I missed the video about using the T puppet. Perhaps it was that I waited too long before I elicited the help of Gilgamesh ( I waited my whole life to say that) . Could be the real
Miss Taylor Rae making my life crazy. (Those who know her know what I'm talking about) . But mostly, it's those wacky Maya shortcuts that I was unaware of. Such as holding down the shift key and successively selecting the controls in a hierarchy to enable an
animator to deform the curves simultaneously and view them all at once in the graph editor. You see...I have a confession to make. I am ...a 3dMax guy. That's the best excuse I have. Some people fall right into this stuff. I need to get to work. As Richard Williams said...Animation is Concentration. Anyway. Thanks G for the M tips and I'm off to massacre the next assignment.


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Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Spillover Inspiration from Animation Mentor

I found an article in 3D World Magazine about how to make realistic looking skin on characters. I'm particularly interested in the application of animated bump maps and their application in facial deformation of wrinkles. I'll need to do some tests. I have plenty of meshes from old jobs and it'll do me a world of good to retexture them from scratch and strive for realistic skin. Painting the maps, creating the sliders, subsurface scattering, it'll all come into play when doing characters for either myself or for a client.
Last week I completed a 3D model for the Ritz-Carlton that is actually being made into a piece of furniture to go into their suites. I'm especially proud of the project because the entire thing from design, to approval, to 3D construction took 2 days. The contracting company said that it was a "smash". My homework suffered due to the time it took...okay, going to Vegas didn't help.
I set up my Easel and I'm cleaning my oversized mahogany pallete to do a portrait of the late Uncle Nate. The kindest man to ever grace a Harley Hog.
It's a pleasure to do the weekly sketches in my sketchbook. There's so much to see at Venice Beach in the way of visually interesting characters. And they're doing things. Restaurant drawing is fine but very limited in the poses department.
So much more that I have to do, now that I'm inspired. I love it.