Lines of Action, Shapes and Silhouettes

It's been an interesting year. I was able to enter in Gobelins for the 3D Character Animation Course, and I'm really happy for all the achievements that I got, including learning french with the help of Youtube, books, and incredible french people who were willing to help me. So beside that, my experience in animation improved a lot also, and I'm really happy for what I got, still, this road never ends, and because of that, I decided to start studying more gesture drawing, so I can start familiarising with better shapes for my future animations.

Now I bring this small exercise that I did to get lines of action, shapes and the silhouette of the poses.

Running Cycle

I did this 2D analysis of a running cycle to do it later in 3D (Maya 2016), I still have some doubts about how the chest and the head should move, how the spacing should be used... but well, hope you enjoy this test :)

Timing and Spacing exercises

Well, finally I started classes at Gobelins in Annecy, a beautiful town in France. I'll be studying a training course of 3D animation. So for now, we've been looking at the basic notions of animation, which are Timing and Spacing.

Based of Preston's Blair Book: Cartoon Animation, I did a review of some spacing parameters, to start identifying how the poses should be distributed. Also.. the lecture remind me of how music is divided by crotchets, quavers, semiquavers, etc. But used in the space that a pose fits in a second of animation.

1. Slow In and Slow Outs

2. Spacing for Heavy Weights

3. Spacing for Light Weights

Lifting Weight but now... in 2D

This is my first time using Toon Boom. I created this guy, named Igor, just for fun, and I decide to try to do the same exercise that I did in 3D last time, but in 2D.

I found Toon Boom quite nice... except when I reached a point where Toon Boom decide to delete my keyframes and erase all my work... some kind of bug I think. It was a miracle that I recovered my drawings, and with those, I started setting the timing.

This is a sketch, and later I´ll start adding color, and pulling certain details.

Pulling Weight

My main problem with this animation is that I was going around, advancing little by little until I got desperate and I didn't enjoy it anymore. That, and that I've always had troubles synching the props between the IK and the FK, so there are some pops that are bothering me.

Swim swim swim

I saw that students in Gobelins do an exercise to animate with perspective. I tried to immitate this technic using photoshop for the animation... it´s really nice, but is not meant to use for render.

So this is my hand drawn perspective animation madre in photoshop, and colored with vectors at the end.

So many types of balls...

I created the rig for these different balls. Well... I start with something simple, and then, I started adding controls according to the things that each ball needed.