Week 7 & 8 - Tweaking Tailor & Intro to Walks

Jamming quite a bit of work into one post today. I forgot to post one of the poses we had to do in Week 5: "Devestation". Here are my quick sketches and the final pose I decided to submit:

Week 7 involved an in-depth view into the graph editor. "What is this, statistics? I thought this was animation dagnabbit!?" I maybe hear you cry but probably not really. The location of every object within the 3D space as it moves can be essentially graphed, since each point in time the object location corresponds to several different axis of movement. This results in a graph editor that resembles this:

AKA 'spaghetti', it looks daunting (and still can be) but once understood, manipulating these curves is an extremely useful tool for cleaning up un-wanted movements or further perfecting movements. This is my final tailor revision, much improved from my first attempt, but still not perfect:


Tailor Revision 2 from Aaron Skinner on Vimeo.

Week 8 pose: "Strength". Sketches, quick mock ups to decide which I liked best, then the final product follows:

And finally: Week 8 was an introduction to walks. Walks are things that apparently, many professional animators still have trouble with. This is reassuring, because the amount of rotation and movement that transpires during even a 'simple' stock-standard walk is mind blowing. There is so much to juggle all at the same time. I won't even begin to go into the mechanics here. For now, building upon all our previous assignments, we are just animating a ball (which represents the hips) with legs. Here is the plan + initial blocking pass (uploaded to youtube coz its quicker):