Who knew walking was so hard?

It is now week 10, which means we only have 3 more weeks before this term ends.

I am posting my work for Week 8 and 9 now, partly because I got lazy and partly because week 8 & 9 were both dedicated to animating a basic (vanilla walk). The first video shows the blocking of the animation, which means we only put in the most important poses but have yet to work on the walk on the in-between frames. The second video shows the final walk after everything is complete. These walk cycles are really challenging.

We also had two pose assignments: week 8 was strength and week 9 was concern.

For the next two weeks we are going to be animating a walk that shows personality.

Here are the poses:

Week 8, blocking for walk:



Week 9, final walk:

Going Nuts

Another challenging assignment this week. We had to come up with a scene and then animate Tailor (the ball with a tail) performing at least 3 bounces. This builds on previous lessons, particularly overlapping action.



Here is an HD version rendered in RenderMan. First w/o motion blur, then with motion blur - then repeats.

Overlapping Action with a multi-link pendulum

Week 6 is now complete and here is my final animation for our assignment. In this assignment the focus was overlapping action. Most of the animation was done by a selective breaking of joints and then copying the curves and offsetting them for each segment. After that I manually changed some of the offsets to better approximate the final parts of the settle.

Enjoy!

The wait is over. Week 5 final assignment for your viewing pleasure

A few comments on last week's assignments. The assignments consisted of animating a ball going through an obstacle course while factoring in anticipation and squash and stretch. The second part had us showing Stu being devastated.

Initially I posed Stu hunched over sitting on the ground, head buried in his hands. This pose looked pretty good, but I didn't like the silhouette with him wrapped so tightly. His huge head made that even more of an issue. So mid-week, I went in a completely different direction. I chose to push this new pose and knew that it probably would be too much, but I wanted to see how the pose would read and get feedback on something out of my comfort zone.

Next, the obstacle course. This was the most difficult assignment so far by several orders of magnitude. Most of my peers expressed similar sentiments. I had a working rough version up by Monday, but as I began to refine and adjust the animation it became a huge undertaking. In the end, after about 60-80 hours of work day and night, I finally completed the assignment Sunday morning before it was due at noon PST.

So here they are. By the way, the note Stu is reading that devastated him, informed him that his head is entirely too large :)