Week 4 - Nuts & Bolts of Quadruped Walks

4 Legs is 2 legs too many! Getting my head around the 'Sloan' dog rig took awhile. He's much like the other rigs we've played with so far in terms of how his proportions are rather odd. Stubby body, mega long and fat neck. I really wanted to do a neck scratch/behind the ear pose, but putting all his upper body neck weight on that tiny dog butt proved too difficult.

Drawing quadrupeds is harder too, I find if the dog's hair is too shaggy in the reference photo I can't use it. My anatomy knowledge isn't good enough to be able to accurately comprehend what is going on beneath all that hair. Having drawn many humans before it's easy to know where I can push a biped pose, whereas with drawing dogs I find I have to be more conservative and more true to the reference picture.

 Found a surprising amount of video reference of dogs walking on treadmills on youtube, which is great to have for this assignment. (Thank you lazy dog owners!). This week I'll be blocking out my 'vanilla' dog walk. Don't let all this planning fool you though. I still have no idea what I'm doing.

Week 3 - Arcs & Path of Action

Not perfect (it never is), but here is the polished vanilla walk (with a dash of sass). Tried to touch up on it as much as possible before my brain shut down. I can see the head needs more overlap as it is relatively still and the feet could be a tad snappier on full contact. Spacing on the leg swing also needs work.


Vanilla Walk Final hiRes from Aaron Skinner on Vimeo.

More action poses for this week, RUNNING with the theme of sprinters and PITCHING the idea of baseball players. I didn't see it initially but my mentor pointed out the baseball pitcher pose is pretty broken. The shoulder is stuffed and her neck doesn't follow the path of her chest. There also isn't enough curvature in her spine. So what I thought was a cool pose turned out to be pretty mediocre apparently!

Next 4 weeks we'll be animating a dog walk!

Week 2 - Full Body Walks... Part Deux!

This week we started our first full body walk cycle! (Well, 'tis my first at least). I wanted to really make sure I did enough planning this time around so I wasn't second guessing myself during blocking. Despite this being the final planning, after I scanned them in I realised I STILL could have added way way more info. You don't realise what you're missing sometimes until you're in the midst of it.

Kristen was kind enough to my my video reference :)

The following is the planning based off video reference.

Now... I got carried away with the blocking and over stepped (no pun intended animation folk!) the 'stepped' keys. In the end I ended up keying almost every frame despite that being something I shouldn't have done. I guess it was more desperation since I knew I'd have very little time to polish the walk in Week 3.


vanilla walk blocking b from Aaron Skinner on Vimeo.

The arms are hitchy and the knees are popping. I haven't touched the head or hair either. These features fixed and more next week!

Term 2! Week 1 - Full Body Walks Part I

Relatively easy start to the term. My mentor this term is Mathew Rees, currently a lead animator of sorts at Aardman Animation (Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run, Creature Comforts) in the UK. Nice fellow! Seems very personable and genuinely focused on the needs of his students and our work (even offering to poke around our Maya files if need be). So I'm looking forward to his mentoring over the next 12 weeks.

New term means a selection of new rigs we get to work with, much more detailed and complex than the previous term. For the first few weeks we'll be animating with Stella! She has lots of controls, but I appreciate how easy it is to get a really nice line of action/silhouette with her. She's just so sleek. Assignment for this week is to familiarize with her and pose her out in a couple of dynamic poses.

We also learnt a lot about the body mechanics of human and quadruped walks. More on that later!

Week 11 & 12 - Exaggeration, Walks with different weights, term wrap up

Term 1 is over! And the second has just begun. I present my class 1 progress reel. Final version of my personality walk is in there too. Not much more to say other than I've learnt a lot and that in terms of things to learn - I have definitely jumped into the deep end with animation. I think I did pretty well this term, but we'll see how I go with full body bipedal and quadruped walks next term!



AaronSkinner AN01 ProgressReel from Aaron Skinner on Vimeo.

Week 9 & 10 - Hips and Personality Walks

Apologies to you loyal readers for lack of recent update. Has been a little hectic with assignments + preparing for job interview. So Week 9 was an in-depth look at hips, particularly how they move depending on gender, body type and other factors. A common issue with student work is that many don't realise the importance of hip movement and how almost everything we do is lead by the hips before anything else. Reminder to self: Pay special attention to the hips first, as they will influence absolutely every other part of the animation.

Week 9 Pose was 'Concern'. Keeping in theme with worldwide VFX layoffs thanks to a broken business model between VFX studios and Hollywood, I added a pink slip to the scene.

Along with that we finalised our walk cycle. This vimeo upload was a bit crap for some reason, seems like it cut a few frames from the beginning/end. But you can more or less get the idea from what's there:

Ballie Walk Revision from Aaron Skinner on Vimeo.

Week 10 (and the current week 11) has us dealing with personality walks with the Ballie character. It took awhile to think of a personality walk to animate. Originally I had envisioned a very short ice-skating, ballerina-esque animation. I wanted something that would be fun to animate while also really pushing myself. I even shot reference of Kristen doing it. After 3.5 days of trying to block it out in Maya, it just proved too difficult and beyond my skill level to even get the basics down. I quickly changed gears and fell on my back up plan of a gleeful skip.

But first, Week 10 pose was 'Exhaustion' aka how I feel after every 45 minutes of intense animation concentration:

Here is the planning for my skippity skip. Looking at it now it could definitely be MUCH more detailed. Following that is the rather unimpressive first blocking of the cycle.

personality walk from Aaron Skinner on Vimeo.

Until Next week, Adios :)

Blast from the Past

This is the first animation I ever did, first year university 2008. From memory, we had to create a themed iPod ad. I chose to make mine inspired by my favourite cartoon series: Home Movies. I basically just recreated the scene frame for frame. The timing is off and the audio prematurely cuts off at one stage. (I could never figure out why it played fine in Flash but not in .mov format) but I still get a laugh out of it today. Enjoy!