Ninja Drop animation

I started taking a class in animating for physicality. The first piece I did was of a ninja dropping from the ceiling and then slinking away.

First step was to sketch out thumbnails based on my video reference.



I then took these and blocked in the key poses for the animation.



From there, I took the feedback from my class session and fixed some of the poses. I then I began splining the animation, first using linear and autoTangent and then finessing them a bit.



There was a number of issues, especially the "sticky" hand resulting in the IK/FK switching, which I hadn't done before. I fixed the issues I could and polished the splines, resulting in this rendered version of the animation, the final so far.

Acting to Dialog 2 - Blocking Plus and Polish Pass

The above is the Blocking Plus stage of my second dialog animation. The initial blocking stage is viewable in a previous entry, available here. In this stage, I have begun working on smoothing the animation together in splines, but haven't yet had time to really finesse the motion. I'm mainly trying to get the first set of motion in, to ensure the timing works and the body moves between poses well.



In this pass, I begin working in the graph editor to really focus on getting the motion as smooth and natural as I can. I mainly focused on body mechanics in the feet, hips and torso, as well as tracking the arcs in the punching arm and the head. I'll be making one more pass at this to refine the animation before moving on to my final scene for the class.

Acting to Dialog 2 - Blocking Stage

My second attempt at 3d animation to dialog. This is the blocking phase. I'll be pushing it into splines and revising some of the poses and layout based on received critique this week.

Acting to Dialog 1 - Completed

I finished my first CG Acting to Dialog project and will be moving on to the next one this week. You can watch the completed product below:



You can see the blocking stage for this animation in an earlier blog post here.

Acting to Dialog 1 - Blocking Stage

Here's the blocking stage of my first 3d animation set to dialog. Lots to tweak and fix, but I'm fairly happy with the results so far. Hopefully I can keep the quality up as I move into splines this week.

Ani300 Animations

Last semester I was lucky enough to take a great animation course from Suzanne Kaufman. In the class, I did a number of animations, including the following, posted in chronological order.

Blocking pass of Walk with Character:


Polish pass of Walk with Character:



Blocking Pass of "Mind the Gap":


Splines Pass of "Mind the Gap":


Final Polish Pass of "Mind the Gap":



Block Pass for "Valley Girl and Bomb":


Final Pass for "Valley Girl and Bomb":

Awesome cg animation

I found this neat little animation over at CartoonSmartBlog, done by Mike Winkleman from Beeple. It looks gorgeous in full-screen HD, I highly recommend enlarging from this tiny screen.


subprime from beeple on Vimeo.