Week 7 & 8 - Locomotion and Advanced Posing

Dog walk turned out way better than I thought it ever would. It's a little hard to look back and even fathom how it got to it's current iteration. Tackling a 4 legged walk just seemed ridiculous, so it is a bit of a morale boost that it turned out the way it did. Not perfect - never perfect, but pleased nonetheless.

dog walk final 001 from Aaron Skinner on Vimeo.

Next up is the final assignment which is basically us working on a physicality shot of our choosing over the next 4 weeks. Being a games man I've gone for a fairly video gamey type shot, with Stella taking cover behind a wall, peeking over, reacting from a stray shot before diving over to an opposite piece of cover. Here's the planning:

I sketched this based off video reference I took which I won't upload now.

And here's my blocking so far that barely resembles the above planning:


Physicality Blocking 001 from Aaron Skinner on Vimeo.

The remaining weeks will simply be iterations of the above shot, so content might be sparse. I'll try find some other neat things/writing pieces to update with for any loyal readers out there :)

Week 6 - Creating Weight in Four Legged Walks

Continued with dog poses and blocking out the dog walk this week. Sketches and Poses:

Dogs @ Play!

Sloan with Bird Ball

2 Sloans 1 Pic

I realised I hadn't put up what I was using for reference for my dog walk. Most of my influence came from studying the first part of the video as it gave me a perfect profile view of a dog walk. It's easy to see the shape of the legs and the ups and downs of the chest, hips and head. I couldn't find any good reference of dog walks from a front view, so I filmed my cat to get the body mechanics right for the feet curls and arcs. For the rotations I spent a lot of time watching lectures (copyrighted so I can't put here) and really breaking down what was happening, even more so than my planning. My cat was also blessed with my presence more often as I gazed at his walk pattern endlessly.

Here's what it looks like at the moment:

quadreference compressed from Aaron Skinner on Vimeo.

assignment 001 from Aaron Skinner on Vimeo.

It kind of looks like he's limping, likely due to too much movement in the neck, but also bad video editing as I was having issues rendering the cycles correctly. I've still got one more week of polish on this, then it's onto our final assignment for the term XD

Week 5 - Understanding Weight and Physicality

This week marked the start of another 3 weeks of glorious head aches as we put paper to mouse (so to speak) and actually block out our dog walks in Maya. Detailed planning definitely makes things easier, as I was merely copying/translating the poses on paper to 3D and for the most part, it worked out alright. I followed the video reference quite closely, so the timing is pretty solid I think, though Mat says there's quite a few spacing issues with the legs. It's amazing how mentors can look over your work a couple of times and pin point/predict problems you have or are going to have. True mastery, or close to it!

Didn't end up sketching many poses this week (no time), but according to mentor the ones I did pick turned out pretty well. Here they are below. (Bottom one is a combination of 2 of the sketched poses).

Had a bit of fun with the new Squirrel character. Little guy is so adorable, it's easy to make him look appealing.

Shake Shake Shake

Here's the results of the key poses and breakdowns blocked out:

dog walk blocking from Aaron Skinner on Vimeo.

I took a layered approach to blocking it, which is critical, had I tried to move everything at once I'd fail fast. I started with putting the hind legs into position for the key poses, then did the same for the front legs. Then I repeated that for the breakdowns. Only then did I start thinking about the rotations of the chest and hip, followed by small details in the feet and leg positions. Finally I animated the shoulders and added a teensy bit of head and neck overlap, which isn't noticeable enough.

This week I'll be converting to splines, tweaking existing poses based on feedback and adding more poses in between THOSE POSES and so on until the thing looks decent.