31-01-14 - posemaniacs

Here's today's batch. I always find it rough for the first few, I panic and as soon as i manage to calm down they improve. I found for the first few today I kept focusing too much on the muscle structure rather than getting the gesture of the movement down first..

Weakest: 11 my proportions were right off and he has really stumpy legs
Strongest: 9. I think this one captured the subtlety of the pose and was fairly clean, I'd calmed down a lot by that point.

30-01-14 Posemaniacs

Today did not go well, Most of the posing is stiff but if you look I've achieved getting the entire body into the sketch in much more so i guess it'll be a compromise while I'm adjusting. 

Strongest: 9 It has the cleanest lines while still retaining the purpose and form of the body.

Weakest: 8 I lost the shape early on and tried to recover but ran out of time.

29-01-14- Posemaniacs

 Daily Warmup. Weirdly enough I find that the larger muscle man is easier to draw than the females also.. I was so close to managing to get the hands into every pose, tomorrow i'll manage.. maybe.

I'm going to start name my favourite and least favourite pose each day.

Today
Strongest. 4, despite being incomplete his pose is strongest especially with the direction of the legs, just a shame i didn't finish it.
Weakest: 7.. proportions went completely out of the window and i lost focus, the leg especially, even the posing isn't great

28-01-14 PoseManiacs

Some more posemaniac work, I've been trying to get into the habit of using it as a warm up when I first come in.

Same as before, I was trying to get the whole pose but generally I find that arms and legs are difficult to proportion if they are stretched out which intimidates me a little and causes me to hesitate. Hopefully more practice will train me out of this. 

Specialisation Ramble

I've been thinking about what it is I want to do properly for this and trying to figure out the sorts of people I should try to get in contact with and what questions I want to ask. This is tricky because I still feel unsure. I like animation but don't necessarily want to just do that as I like variety, but wouldn't that be what my spare time would solve? There's two questions for a start...

1. How do you keep your job interesting?
2. Do you have time for personal projects and if so what do you like to do for them? (i.e. Are they animation based or are they more varied?)

Still doesn't solve what I want to focus on though. I guess I like animation more than most of the things I do apart from sketching and doodling but usually I do that to help improve my poses and expression for animation so it links in. Who am I kidding. I'm clearly more of an animator than anything but with a curiosity about other parts of the pipeline like the technical side (rigging and scripting) and also the design side but more so I understand the essence of the character better. I think more in 3D, mainly with movement more than anything else, but still have a small fascination with 2D despite my lack of experience with it. It's probably healthy to take interest in other parts of the pipeline as it will help keep me informed of what's required from me but I definitely need to use this module to focus on producing a portfolio of work worthy of a professional. Which leads me to more questions...

3. What would you say are the most important things to demonstrate in a games showreel?

4. How useful is it to know other parts of the pipeline such as rigging and modelling?
5. What's your role within the company and what are your duties day to day?
6. What's the toughest problem you've had to overcome work wise?

7. Is it ridiculous to feel terrified that you're not good enough...

For other useful questions I've gone to the internet for help. I found a few interesting ones on a forum talking about "questions to ask a professional animator" which is someone similar to myself preparing to email a professional. 

Link: http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/art-discussion/questions-to-ask-a-professional-animator-tipposts/t.73479891/
Questions from there:

1. what the working environment is like?
2. What are they looking for in an animator?
3. How do you find jobs?
4. How do you get your name out there?
5. What kind of training is needed?
6. Where can you go to network?

There's also a blog I've come across called Ask A Gaming Recruiter which has a little section on Animators which I'll paste here:

link: http://askagamingrecruiter.blogspot.co.uk/

HOW DO I BECOME AN ANIMATOR?

Animators love to bring characters to life. And that’s exactly what we want to see in your animation reel: life! Good animation is very difficult to achieve and takes a lot of hard work and passion. The best animators absolutely love what they do and are willing to put in the extra time and effort to create beautiful, polished work that sells the character. As one of our Lead Animators says, “An animator can and should always bring their best work to any animation, from an exciting and complicated full cinematic scene to a simple leaf blowing in the wind.” Remember that once on the job, you’ll be working on more than just the animations that excite you the most. Even if you’re working on something simple, you’ll be expected to bring your A game every time.

Similarly to art, there are many great schools out there that teach animation, but you’ll get the best results if you combine your studies with research and hard work on your own time. Employers will want to see work beyond your basic school assignments.

What do employers want to see? Employers may want to see animation that is stylized, realistic, or both. At Respawn Entertainment we like to see realistic animation as opposed to cartoony, since realistic animation showcases weight, physics, and subtle movements that are very challenging and can really display an animator’s skills. Common mistakes in animation reels include choppiness, “pose to pose” rather than fluid animation, floatiness, and a lack of acting.

Employers also generally want to see good walk and run cycles, scenes that contain lots of action (as opposed to just dialogue or slow movements), great acting, and a strong display of good physics, weight, and polish.

Remove your weakest work. 

Tailor your reel. 

Keep it tasteful. 

I'll Ramble more another time I'm sure. 

27-01-14 Gesture practice

No matter what I do, as long as it's to do with characters I'll always need to improve my anatomy and posing skills. One part that's especially important for animation skills is being able to get motion and flow into poses to help exaggerate the posture. To help with this I'm using the 30 second pose tool on pose maniacs for practice. It shows a pose for a set time (I chose 90 seconds for this session) and then moves onto the next one. This session I used the tool for around half an hour. The results are below.

I tried to get the whole pose in but as you can see I generally manage to miss off the hands and feet which is something i need to work on.. also 14's...questionable pose put me off a bit. Especially as that was when everyone seemed to walk by.

More zbrush...

I wanted to try to make someone who was pretty.. I always struggle to draw attractive people so i figured maybe zbrush would help. I think it came out quite well.. I also gave the giraffe a body.

Used the zspheres to help with the initial form then I've started to work into him with more detail.

22/01/14- FoxRun

Decided to try to animate a foxes run cycle today. Still very inexperienced with quadruped run cycles so I've relied heavily on images and footage I can find on the internet. Below are some of the main examples I used to help form key poses.

This rough version took approximately two hours to complete. There's plenty wrong with it.

ZBrushChallenge

Characters are a main focus of mine, particularly character animation but being able to make my own characters would be a nice skill to have. I've started to learn zbrush as sort of a collective challenge/learning thing being done with some of my course mates. this challenge will hopefully happen every other week on a Wednesday so it won't be massively distracting. This week we set our challenge as "Vikings" but as I haven't used zbrush before i wanted to get to grips with its tools a little. 

I ended up with this:

I'm pretty happy with him for a first attempt at zbrush and I've already learnt a lot but next time I'll follow the challenge a bit better. Mainly i need to use sub tools more to section off areas and understand the whole dynamesh thing and resolution from the start so I don't ruin detail I've put in when adding sections to existing meshes.

UPDATE:

Second attempt at a model turned out a little better. Used my own concept image as reference.

21/1/2014- FoxJump

I don't know what this module is properly about yet as we haven't had the first lecture but from the title it seems like it's a chance to help us specialise in an area of work a bit better and hopefully will help improve our portfolios to achieve jobs in that area.

Today I started working on an animation of this gif....

I've had it saved for a while for just this reason. I like the shapes the fox forms when it jumps.

Here's my attempt:

Feedback from peers:
Generally- First half great, second half either too floaty or not quick enough or too quick.. (i haven't found the right balance yet.)