Ant walk cycle

Here's my first walk cycle of the ant we did in class.

Probably a little too much "wobble" going on there, but I'm pretty happy with the result overall.

Ant rig almost complete

Well it's taken a while, but the ant model is almost fully rigged and ready for animation.

Now that the work has been done to set up the puppet, now all that is required to get creative with the movement.

Character design for a 2d animation

This is a quick sketch I did of "Tony" - a character for a 2D animation that I'm putting together.

If you look carefully you can see some of my light pencil marks while I was working out the pose, but I decided against harsh angles in favour of smooth rubbery limbs for this goofy main character.

Cartoon practice

I spent some time just sketching and coming up with some character designs for a 2d animation I'm thinking about at the moment.

Credit where credit is due - this is a shameless copy of some of the work of Bernard Derriman.

I love his style - and although my characters won't look too much like this in the final animation, I'd really love to try to get as much as his style in as possible.

If you're going to steal - you might as well steal from the best.

Ant rigging

This is the first part of the skeleton and rigging for the ant I'll be animating.

So far so good. I have to say, I find rigging pretty relaxing. It's a lot like some of the programming I've done in the past.

It shares that same feeling of needing to be accurate, copying and pasting, plus remembering the correct sequence of events.

It's easy to lose an hour or two on this stuff and not even know where the time went.

Lighting lesson

Today's lesson was all about lighting.

I have to say - it's a bit of a weakness of mine. I don't have a background in photography and wouldn't say I have a great eye for lighting and composition.

Anyway - at least I have the basics (and something to practise to make my renders really "pop").

More ant modelling

I think that's about as much of the ant modelling I will do for now.

At least until I see what affect the rigging and binding are going to have on the model.