My first walk cycle

I had to post this, because it's just that magic moment when something you've been working on for a while suddenly starts to have a life of its own.

It's my first walk cycle and after many iterations I'm finally starting to enjoy the look of it.

Hopefully it will be the first of many. Actually - I need to do at least one more before the end of the year.

Showing concern

After looking at my video reference, I had a few different options for conveying the emotion of "concern".


There are so many ways you can go: concern for someone who is hurt, concern about the future, concern that your friend is about to leave the house in an ugly Hawaiian shirt.


Here are a couple of takes on concern for a hurt animal.

I like this standing pose, because it's all there - curve of the spine, the involuntary touching of the face, but there is a lot of action all bunched up near the neck and shoulders.

This one solves the problem of the hand, elbow, shoulder, neck all crowding the same area and gives more negative space, and pushes the line of action in the spine - but I think it loses something in the translation.

A feat of strength

For each week until the end of the Animation Mentor term, we'll be doing poses showing conveying different emotions and physical states.

This week we have physical strength - although I've seen some other really great ideas from other students so I might see if I can get a few other poses and ideas out there too.

Pendulum with overlapping action

No more bouncing balls again - ever!

Actually that's not strictly true. Almost every animation contains at least some of the bouncing ball principles, but this assignment was all about one of the other basic ideas in animation: overlapping action.

In this case, I started by animating the top of the pendulum, and gradually work down through the joints to give a floppy overlapping action to the character.

Obstacle course

This week's assignment was to animate a ball moving through an obstacle and adding some squash and stretch.

It really makes you appreciate the fundamentals - because this is harder than it looks to get right.

Truthfully - I can still see problems with it, but hopefully I'll get a chance to revise it.