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.

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!