The first week is almost over with a class today at 12 noon (pacific) – 3pm Eastern. I had some homework to work on over the week. I finished them, uploaded and we go over the work we did with likely instruction for the coming week.
So far so good. Nothing I haven’t experienced before. My personal trials and tribulations getting a character to walk are legendary so getting professional instruction and feedback will be welcoming. It just feels good to be aware of the information. I totally have a clue about everything being taught. What’s happening now is a refining.
Next week, we should be talking about ‘splinning’. IT’s where you allow the computer to figure out the poses between the keys we set. That has always been a nightmare process. I’ve come up with my own tricks over the years. It basically boils down to NOT allowing the computer to do all the frames. I’m basically doing the traditional work of adding much more keyframes and splinning only here and there.
Some people just select all their keys between, say, 1 and 50 and go ‘spline’. lolol.
I like to do many poses between 1 and 50 and spline specific keys for a flow. To me this is better than cleaning up the mess of only two keys.
A lot of techno-babble for the non-animator. Suffice to say, I’m doing more work to accomplish less mess.
Below is my homework. Once I get correction from my instructor, I’ll upload new versions.
The sketches are to find the center of gravity, hips and where the largest amount of weight on a foot would be. Again, areas of animation I tend to have issues with. Very happy to learn where my problems are and fix them.
I’ve started using YouTube to host my practice animations. My experience with YouTube is pretty much just use them for unlisted or private work. They are selective on what they allow on their system and it’s often based on what videos are making them money. So fuck ’em. All finished work goes on Vimeo.
