Class 1 - Weeks 8 and 9
Animated on 24th March 2009
Images
Here's the planning and images associated with this week's exercise:
First of all, apologies for the delay in getting this stuff live. I wish I had a good excuse but I probably don't. Oh wait, I do! I've got no spare time. None. At all.
Well this assignment was a two-weeker; the first week you block out the shot, the second you refine, polish and finalise. Blocking a shot is where you lay out the key frames and the breakdown frames between them. Essentially you could think of it as a means of showing what's going on in the shot with the minimum of information. So there's no smooth animation, it's all pose-to-pose. Well since that's not as much fun for you I've bundled it with the second week where it's all cleaned up and tidy. I say that, but I didn't do such a great job of tidying. More on that in a second.
This particular assignment is called the Vanilla Walk Cycle. A walk cycle is where you have a character take a couple of steps, but you could loop the animation over and over and there'd be seamless animation of the character walking. Walk... Cycle... OK.
Vanilla in this case just means there's nothing there that implies character. No two walks are the same, for sure, so the term doesn't mean the walk isn't unique, but it does mean that there's nothing overtly personalised.
The blocking went well - I felt I got a pretty good handle on things. Then I started to tidy it up in week 9 and talk about a learning curve. It took me a very long time (up to 3am on a Saturday night at one stage if memory serves) and it still felt pretty ropey in the end. As it happened my mentor agreed, which only served to depress me further.
Also in these assignments were two poses with Stu: Strength (Week 8) and Concerned (Week 9). The strength pose was significantly better and, I suspect, benefited from the fact that I was doing it alongside the blocking rather than trying to do it with the clean-up. These two weeks gave me a lot to learn. Mainly I learnt about how the position and rotation of the hips and feet totally control the position of the knees and that sometimes you just have to delete the whole flaming thing and start again!