Yawn3, this is as far as I've gotten

Click to Play

Yes, I am aware that the nut and butt scratch go by way too fast. It will be corrected.

Yawn2

Click to Play

Yawn block

Click to Play

You've just viewed the all of my yawning Package Man to his latest polished state. Look at my progression. Mmm.

Pitch 3

Click to Play

Here's  a cleaner version of the pitch. It's not finished but it feels better than the last one.

Yawn

Click to Play

So here's package man again, from rigging101.com. This time he's actually showing a reason for his being in his underwear. In a good old fashioned yawn. The worst part of animating a yawn is not being able to stop myself from yawning while thinking about yawns. This is really rough blocking and the timing is waaaaay to fast. But the overlap is there; some of it at least.

The pitch, pt 2

Click to Play

So here's my baseball pitch thrown into the polishing stage. (I have many more great plays on words, sadly.) The timing is more refined in this one as well as many many reworkings of arcs and rotations. Most rotation issues were brazenly visible once Alfred was smoothed and were all in the throwing arm. Once again Alfred is a model/rig free from Rodri Torres.

The pitch

Click to Play

Continuing in the vein of Class 2 Body Mechanics assignments from Animation Mentor here is my blocking of a pitch. It's hard for me to understand why people who don't know how to pitch a baseball didn't look to the internets for good video reference. Also I didn't quite realize all of the rotations involved with throwing a baseball let alone pitching. The model here is a freebie from Rodri Torres and is a pleasure to animate.

Walk Cycle

Click to Play

Courtesy of Eric Westlund's amazing, and so far 2 part, tutorial on walk cycles I've started my decent back into the shiny depths of body mechanics. The model is from www,rigging101.com he is Package Man.

Jumping bloke

Click to Play

This is the rough keyframe blocking of a jump using the Bloke rig from Jason Baskin.

Jumping bloke, pt 2

Click to Play

This is the polishing stage, taken out of stepped with breakdowns and better timing. Bloke courtesy of Jason Baskin. Erik's tutorial seemed to have provided me with additional insight to animating. Hooray Erik! Hooray body mechanics!

Wow...so, um yeah...hi

I've clearly let this fall by the wayside and I've plenty more animations to show. This post is for new eyes to see what I'm currently doing and say something if anyone still pays attention to this.

Will talk about this more later...

This needs a revision. Soon to follow.

Weeks 2 and 1

So to start with here's the blocking of my Ballie animation. I chose to have ballie take a step to the side.

This is what I ended with for my grade.

This is what I started the week with.

That just goes to show the power of the Public Review. Between watching other students' work and having other students criticize mine I added breakdowns between my keyposes and really pushed Ballie's performance.

In the first week I was hit by the "Belzer Bus" pretty hard gradewise. (The Belzer Bus is the nickname given to Mike because of his brutally honest and hard critiques and grading.) I got hit because my thumbnails for this assignment while being good at hitting the keyposes were lacking in the development of breakdowns poses between those glorious golden poses. What kind of a grade does missing breakdowns in thumbnails earn one when faced with the Belzer Bus: C- (OUCH!)

Painfully soothing. By the way the opening blocking scene earned me an A- for week two. As the Belzer taketh, he giveth.

Having more time to actually do the work is really helping. I knew that I understood all of the fundamentals from Class 1. I just wasn't getting enough time to exercise my knowledge.

Oh yeah I suppose that I almost forgot to mention what Class 2 is about. Class 2 is focused on body mechanics which is why we start with Ballie. So far Class 2 rocks.

Space holder...

This post is just to hold you over until put up some of the goods that I know you all want to see. There has been a lot more activity on here than what I expected. So I'll let you part time lookers in on what I plan on adding. Look forward to: a picture of Mike, a progress reel from my last term, my video reference, and assignments from this term. All to come probably later today.

WOOHOO! It's back and so am I...

Of course being that it's on the internet this blog never really left. I certainly stopped writing on it that's for sure. In part because I took a leave of absence from Animation Mentor following, and not necessarily because of, a disappointing go at the first semester. Now I'm back in the saddle for class two. Time is to tell whether it was a wise decision to move on to the next class. I also wasn't aware that I could choose to redo the first class but I'm ready for the challenge.

My mentor is Mike Belzer and it seems that I'll get my money's worth this term. Get ready for more posting and some sweet animation love.