Final pose: 'Surprised'

For my final pose idea I decided to do someone receiving surprising news over the phone. Again, I've uploaded several different views of the pose.

I think there's a fairly decent line of action in this pose however if I were to spend more time on this, the pose could perhaps be exaggerated further if I outstretched the arm holding the phone and had him look directly at it rather than looking straight ahead.

Second pose: 'Disappointed with result'

The idea I decided on for the 'disappointed with result' brief was based on a footballer missing a goal. I've uploaded several different views which can be seen below.

I was quite happy with the upper body and face on this pose but I think the legs could perhaps have done with some extra work. They just don't seem to be in a powerful enough stance. I may scrap the 'sliding on knees' idea all together depending on whether I can fix this. 

Walk Cycle: Old and New

I've uploaded both my first attempt at doing an ordinary walk cycle and my finished version. As can be seen above my first attempt had a lot of slide and generally felt a bit awkward. My final version however came out much better and is shown below. I'm quite happy with the arm movement and I've clearly progressed since the first attempt, so I'll be moving onto a more characterful walk soon!

The Box and Ball animation

The first version of my ball and box animation is complete! But I may come back to it. I think there's still a lot that could be improved upon; there are several places where the mesh deforms in a weird (though not that noticeable) way, and the ending is a bit rushed and doesn't really get across the story as well as I had wanted. If I were to do this again at a later date I would use lattices to make the job a bit easier - animating edges and vertices ended in some messy results.

First attempt at pose: 'Late for work'

We were set the task of creating three 3D poses from a selection of several different topics. My first attempt was a man late for work. Below are a few different views of this pose.

I think for my first attempt at a pose it worked rather well, and I'm quite happy that it seems remain quite strong even when the camera angle is changed.

The Box and Ball animation - Concept and Storyboards.

For this animation task we were given a brief that we were to create an animated interaction between two simple characters: a box, and a ball.

I began by creating some character traits for both of my characters. I decided the box would be a grumpy, grandfather like figure, and would have a short temper. My ball on the other hand would be an excitable, annoying, energetic grandson type character.

My story was based around the simple idea of how the two character's might interact, with the ball fooling around annoying the box before it snapped and lost it's temper.

Below is a quick storyboard of how I imagine the animation to play out.

Finally updated - Pose drawings!

 I've finally got to uploading some of my work to my blog! In this post I've uploaded some of my pose sketch work, which I've been drawing for use as reference and inspiration for my future animation work.

I tried to capture a wide variety of poses from life, and have been drawing my house mates as well as various folks from around town.

My aim for these sketches was not only to capture the physical pose but also to give some idea as to the character of the subject, and what emotions and thought came across in the pose.

For example in the first image I was pleased with how the guy drinking a hot drink came across as comfy and cozy. Equally I think that the picture of the man lying around on his mobile below him comes across quite relaxed and lazy.

The images on the right however I don't think worked as well as I'd hoped. The poses were drawn from people working at the library. This was fairly useful as it meant that I was able to capture some true poses from life that would be difficult to capture from other places, however it was hard to draw the poses fast enough before the subject moved, which is definitely something I'm going to have to work on in future.

The pictures below these however worked much better. These were taken from people in lecture's or doing work at home.

The picture of someone relaxing while drawing a picture in the middle has quite a nice shape to it, and the pose of the person bored in lecture also works quite well, as despite the simplicity of the pose he really seems fed up.

Again the image on the left was much more difficult as it was taken in town where people don't tend to stay still for very long! I think these were a lot better than the pieces from the library, perhaps because I'd had a little more practise of getting the shapes down quickly.

I'll be adding more pose sketches in the future and hopefully improving on capturing the pose quickly but also creating more exaggerates stances and gestures.