Back in action, AM class 2

So, we're back at it again at Animation Mentor and aleady about 1/3 of the way through the semester already. My new mentor is Dimos Vrysellas, a super talented and friendly guy who has worked for Dreamworks, Reel FX, Nelvana, and many other studios.

I have really taken a liking to his workflow for animating a shot, which is a blend of traditional and CG methods. Basically, this method stresses the blocking phase of animation by putting all your overlap, arcs, paths, etc. before moving into the graph editor. By doing this, we get to spend more time posing out the character or 'drawing poses' rather than working with spline curves, which is not very stimulating.

Here is a rough pass on my first shot of class 2, the shot called for 'Ballie' to jump over a gap. My goal for this shot was to improve my workflow and focus on the physicality of the jump.

While shooting reference for this I had the idea for Ballies 'story', he's a secret agent infiltrating an enemy position, so that is the idea behind the acting. As for my next shot, we have many options to choose from including Parkour, which looks super fun but I'm saving that for later, I chose to animate a simple dance move. There probably is no need to explain because this image will sum it up:

to be continued...

Class 1 Progress Reel

Class 1 is done! In the last three months I feel like I have learned a lot, yet still I feel there is so much more to learn. At leat for now, I have a good understanding of the principles of animation, now I have to put them to use. As our last assignment we had to put together a progress reel of all our shots and character poses. My mentor Rich Fournier, an awesome animator from Blue Sky, gave us all really good feedback on how to improve our work.

First Animation

So it humbles me to be animating a bouncing ball, but if we're going to do this right you gotta go back to the foundations of animation and learn them until they're seared in your mind like an old wound.

Animation Mentor!

Yes, its true I have been accepted into the Animation Mentor program. My mentor for Class 1 Basic Foundation is Richard Fournier who is currently working at Blue Sky, and animating "Rio".

That path that lead me to AM was a long one which I intend to blog in my next post, but since I'm back on track I needed to dust off the blog first!

Sketchbook and Update

So, I've been a bad blogger-ignoring my blog and not sharing. What is going on? Well I've been cooking a few things up. First, I've finished up a good series of next-gen character modeling videos. That was the easy part, now I have to apply all this knowledge and present it in a new portfolio, so that's keeping me busy. Also, I started drafting a concept document for a game that will coincide with the short film I mentioned many blog entries ago. But since so much of this work is in the draft stage, I thought I would share some sketches from the big book o' drawings.
Also, I decided to update my two original characters with the next-gen techniques I learned so here is a glance at how they changed. The models have better animation deformation and some better fitting armor.

Some other good news, the OC IGDA chapter is restarting and it's looking very good. Anybody who has been following this group knows that it was quiet for awhile, but things are shaping up to make this group a real stand out chapter.

Website!

Oops! I see that it is already May and I forgot to update my blog last month, which goes against my personal promise to update this page at least once a month, Doh! Well, that can't be helped now, but I do have good news, I made a website. Finally!

Before I studied animation at Cal State Fullerton I studied web design at Fullerton College, so I was able to put together my own website. I guess all that class time didn't go to waste. So here is a peak at the home page, if you like this blog and want to see more go to http://www.hybridcreator.com/

Civil War Zombie

Hey all, here's another piece from my modeling internship at Dream Machine. This time it's the civil war zombie, I don't know if he really had a name other than that.

As you might see, this is a low poly model-the budget was 1500 and I made it under with 1492 polys. It was quite fun to see what I could do with such a limited amount of polygons, if you haven't tried it I would suggest it. It really makes you think about where you are going to use your polygons in order to get the best silhouette and deformation.