Refining the blocking pass

Walking in a heavy wind - Refining Blocking Pass from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Here is the same animation, this time taken a step further with more breakdown poses. This week I'm finishing and polishing it up.

Class 2 Assignment 2 - Blocking

Walking in a heavy wind - Blocking pass from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Here's my blocking pass of my new assignment. I'm to have the no-armed Stewie walk in a heavy wind for 120-200 frames, that's all the assignment asks for. I approached it the same way Mike Nguyen taught me during my time at July Films, to try to feel the forces and where they originate and how they act on the body and unfold throughout the animation to make for good clear animation. I think it's pretty successful and reads fairly well.

Saw Inception this weekend. It was really good and I highly recommend it. Interesting story, great acting, and an intense 3rd act. What is it with Christopher Nollan always making Cillian Murphy wear a bag over his head in his films?

Polishing pass, and Comic Con

AM Class 2 - Big step Polished Pass from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Here is my polishing pass on my animation for Animation Mentor.

I went to Comic Con today. Overall it was a bit underwhelming. I think I've been to too many in a row that I'm running out of books to buy now. I only got 4 books this time. Peck 'n Paw, Florian Satzinger's "Duck," John Nevarez' and Chris Sanders' new sketchbooks. Even Stuart Ng offered nothing that I had to have, closest was the oversized Daan Jippes process book that shows his roughs and final art on non-reduced pages. The $200 price tag however turned me away.

So that's it for this update, see you next week with a new animation assignment.

Refining

AM Class 2 - Big step Refining Pass from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Here's my refinement pass on Ballie. Got a few minor notes from my mentor on it, so I'll fix those and then take it into spline mode to smooth it all out. This is mostly on 2's with some 3's and 4's in there. I have to finish it up soon, San Diego Comic Con is this weekend and I can't stay up all night Saturday working on it.

And they're off!

AM Class 2 - Big step Blocking from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Class 2 is in full swing, I'm at the start of week 3 now, and this was the blocking pass for this 4-week assignment.

My mentor for this term is Drew Adams, he worked on the late 90's Disney films as an in-betweener then got into 3D for Ken Duncan's studio and ReelFX, and is now working on Kung Fu Panda 2 at Dreamworks. I'm really enjoying his teaching style, much more of a lecture/classroom-type of style with video reference and he gives in-depth critiques with plenty of draw overs.

I got quite a few notes from Drew on this so I'll kind of be doing another blocking pass on it before getting into all the little details. I figure AM is supposed to be preparation for a studio environment, so I'm treating my mentor as a director and will try my best to address his notes and comments. I wanted to go with something more cartoony this time around and this was the result but there are some areas he felt could use a little clarification and believability.

Class 1 Wrap Up

Animation Mentor Class 1 Reel from Matt Long on Vimeo.

My first class at Animation Mentor has concluded. Above is my work from the last 12 weeks minus the sketches that I did for the class. This is the first time my character walk has appeared, I'm not too happy with how it turned out, it can use another finishing pass to fix some of the timing and stuff. We get 1 week off, and then it's off to Class 2 where we will be doing things like 180 degree character turns, intricate maneuvers and even some parkour/free running. It should be fun so stay tuned.

Limitations of the computer

Vanilla Walk from Matt Long on Vimeo.

For the last two weeks on Animation Mentor we've been doing a plain vanilla walk using the Ballie rig. I've done quite a few walk cycles in the past, and they're something I admit that I'm not great at, but I'm fairly comfortable with them and can do them satisfactorily. Or that was until I had to do them in Maya and with Ballie. For a beginning walk assignment this rig is a horrible torture device for us naive enough to think he is our friend.

The first of these two weeks was the blocking phase of the walk. Simple enough, do the contact positions, and passing positions with a couple of breakdowns, and plan for the arcs and anticipate the overlapping parts and any overshoots. So we did that, all was well, and then this week it came time to do all the inbetween frames. This is when the true Ballie showed his evil self.

The greatest aspect of hand drawn animation is that you have complete freedom to draw a character any way you want, and you can cheat in ways that are imperceptible to the viewer and allow you to maintain the motion and feel you like. In Maya if the rig you're using isn't built for it, it's nearly impossible to pull it off because the controls just aren't there to do it. This week that was the problem with Ballie's knees. We have an extremely limited amount of control over his knee positioning, so when making the animation all look good on the rest of the rig, the knees will be popping into seemingly random positions or moving backward in relation to the movement as the legs straighten in the middle passing position. (edit: I just noticed you can see an example of this in the above video at frames 34-40 on the front knee, the knee goes straight and pops backwards, this one managed to slip by) It became infuriating. The only way to rectify it was to change the rest of the animation to compensate for the knees' limitations resulting in many awkward walks or lack of fundamental basics in the walks.

In my case I had to shift the foot position in a way that removed the straight leg from the contact position, removing much of the contrast between the contact and down position. This is something that is so important in an animated walk that I tried to work around it at all costs, but it was a futile effort. In the end the CG animation industry's need for pristine and smooth movement with no jitters or pops left me with no other option but to alter the animation for the sake of the knees. So I was left with an awkward walk that moves smoothly with little to no knee pops but is lacking by my standards believable weight and nice spacing and is being critiqued by campus mentors as not having enough of a straight leg in the contact positions. Talk about a lesson in frustration, damned if you do, damned if you don't.

This was the pose for Week 8, "Strength." I chose to have Stu lifting a manhole cover. I went with the first pose because of the strain he shows, it didn't really work out with the rig though. Stu lacks shoulder controls so I couldn't use them to increase the sense of strain, and he doesn't really have a rib cage either, so I had to exaggerate the pose more. Ultimately my mentor thought it was too much, felt broken, and wanted me to do pose 11 instead, or 4 or 9. I went with 11 due to time constraints but it seems a bit bland to me and lacks a sense of actual strength.
Week 9's pose was "Concern" This was a difficult one to think up. In the end I decided the best way to show concern was to show the person or thing Stu should be concerned about, and then come up with a small scene that will tell a little story. So here's Stu checking up on Tailor.