1000 pictures says what?

Well Its been a long few days with not a whole lot going on. The Mrs has turned 24 and its been mothers day and basically not a great deal of time has been spent sat at the screen, well not this one at least. Tomorrow I AM going to upload a quick 'playblast' of my blocking so far, should include most of the motions for the second character all fleshed out. I have found myself going over the same motion over and over again, which is no one else's fault and I'm not going to complain either. With each new version it improves or at the very least, because a lot cleaner, often with a lot less (messy) frames blocked out.
With there being 21 days left (ample time) with my sisters wedding thrown in the middle I am hoping to make decent head way with this in the next few days, allowing for a "rest" period in which  I can flex my animation muscle on some of my pet projects. First one that comes to mind is simply an exercise, it will be a short clip of one guy slugging the other in the face. Nothing spectacular, but its one thing they get wrong in a lot of films.

An action sequence looks terrible if you dont get a sense of genuine contact between fist and face.. or whatever your striking. It all looks too much like a sport points match of karate. In karate sparing, no one ever really sinks a move in, or hits to the persons mass, its just a surface blow, snapped back and forth. In real fighting its hit hard and hit deep, no pulling the punches. So i'm going to do my research, theres lots of different takes on this, i'll be looking at classics like Enter the Dragon, this style would help me practice exaggerating speed and keep me loose, rather than keeping it safe and animating everything on twos. There's a lot of snap in Bruces' moves and no one ever really moved quite like him. Another example film with intense action is The Bourne Ultimatum, mainly due to its use of unorthodox camera shots, the camera appears to give an apathetic jolt with each coming blow. This is another technique I will attempt to utilise in my "how to make a punch look good...mission, thingy" Well its a working title..

Before I go, getting to the point of todays blog title. I can't really draw very well, once upon a time I could draw well for my age. But this soon wore off with a lack of development, by the time I reach college I had met a number of people who already had a good understanding of drawing, I had just sat back in blissful ignorance. By the time Uni came around this had multiplied, my fellow peers who enjoyed drawing and dedicated so much time to it that they left uni with skills worthy of paid work.. Now I may be focussing on Animation, but I enjoy drawing and furthering my skills can only aid my chances of getting hired. Plus I would love to believe one day I could also be paid just for using a pencil and not having to write with it. So as mentioned before in a previous post i'm going to have a crack at my first 1000 drawings, today i'm uploading one of the first 10 and i'll keep you posted as I progress!



-Paul

Behave yourself! References are your friend!

I'll be first to admit I have bad animation habits. One the worst of which is steaming ahead setting poses without using my reference, at this stage I either haven't got any, its rubbish or I'm just not looking at it properly. Luckily I caught it early on this time and I've filmed some new footage and ive gone over my first poses again. I probably mention this flaw on a number of occasions previous to this, but its definitely something I need to work on.
I usually like to use a lot of different clips for different stages in the animation. My break down will usually include; General body motions, head motions, lip sync and facial expressions. Being only an amateur actor at best I cant get it all right in one take, ah well. One of the main reasons I can think of right now why references are key at this moment, is for things like weighting. If I hadn't been viewing my footage during my first blocking phase I would miss out simple things like putting weight down as a character leans. This is something that would be less fun to have to add in a later pass.
I'm still very much in the starting phase and I'm getting there slowly with Maya, I still find the flow of animation is less fluid as I would like, little things like selecting things and keying are coming to me now though. Next months entry will run much smoother I'm sure, this month will just have to be  the prototype.

Gotta run, apparently I've burnt my dinner whilst writing this... whoops.

New software = hardwork

So today has been a bit of a up hill start, every stage of development has been met with a hiccup of some sort. After getting past the ordeal of learning how to navigate Maya having spent years on XSI  I have spent today just learning some very basic stuff. Simple constraints of objects to characters shouldn't have felt such an epic task. But after giving up and finding a nifty little script I then dragged out the task of installing it... In the end I Youtubed it and found a quick demo of how its done.
The script was up and running, but wasn't working on my custom model *sigh. I proceeded to faff about with other failing methods before having another punt at using the script...which worked!
Anyhoo, I did manage a couple of hours of posing characters, I just need to iron out my warm up blunders such as forgetting to key, or keying the wrong frame. Always a pain when you spend ten minutes correcting a pose, to the flick through frames and realise 10 mins later your going in circles. Ah well, the ground work is down now I can drop In Some major poses, shame I have work tomorrow...

Day one: 11sec club March

Yes I know its technically day 4 or 5, but I've just started. Anyways, I remember one of my lecturers telling me that animations should be at least 70-80% planning. Which for me is true enough. Otherwise I would find myself sat with an open scene file in full on zombie mode. After a day of thought, a few sketches and a scene setup later , here is a screeny of my initial idea in scene.

As with my previous entry (attempt) I will be using the morpheus rig, not only because its awesome but because the author is constantly working to develop the rig, so any bugs or what have you have long since been ironed out (i hope). This rig offers a great 'customgeo' tool which allows quick alterations to the character, so my rig should at least look different from anyone else who is using the same one and there usual is.
Ideally i would have gone for the other set up for the scene. But since I spent half my setup time yesterday getting to grips with the new Mac setup and magic mouse, I'm going to put my simplistic scene layout down to my current lack of knowledge of the software. Later projects should yield a more interesting scene. Or at least more than four walls and a prop, yes I know I am focussing on my animation and putting any time into anything else would be a pointless deviation from my discipline but other entrants have put some great scenes together and some of these guys get the low ranks too. I've got all the time in the world to learn that stuff and anyway, its time to crack on!

Lets try this again...

Ok, new computer , check, lets have a crack at the 11 second club again. In all honesty I can't remember just how many times I have attempted to do an entry. Granted I've never spent more than a couple of 3-4 hour sessions on one for one excuse or another but its been at least three or four times over the last few years.
My goal isn't to win one, nope its to develop my 'pipeline' or workflow. Currently it kinda sucks, that is to say that theres a lot of pauses in my process where I sit and umm and arr as to what I should be doing next. So with any luck and a couple of entries I should be well on my way to developing a decent workflow and a faster pace. I do have my own projects on the shelf waiting to be dabbled with, but until I have a better method of approach and understanding of keeping a project moving I'm going to proceed to use the 11second club as my 'Client' whom I need to get a project done for without fail.

Anyhoo heres a quick sketch of the two ideas for this months scene. In it I have just dropped a few lines to indicate a bar of some sort for two people to sit and converse at. The other is a similar bar or cafe situation where a customer mumbles to the help.

I'll keep updating my progress day to day.





Paul out.