Boing, boing

More Springboard stuff

Week 3 was all about shading and rendering our scene. I didn´t like my old one anymore, so I decided to go for something new - something more simple - 

something I can finally start animating with! 

Well, my new characters would be one red ball with a cute green stripe, two black pipes, and something like a nail. The scene consists of the orange ground, the blue background and a very basic 3-point lighting system.

On week 4 we started to get down to the basics of animation, so I just continued my shot to come to this, eeeerrrm... final version, or my very first animation assignment!   

Week 5:

This is what I´ve been fighting last week. They gave us a forward-kinematic crane rig and I started my shot with this...

...added that...

...and died when one of my caring classmates reminded me, that there was a syllabus which advises us to not exceed 100 frames. From now on I´ll keep an eye on that thing!

This is the squashed version:

Springboard week 2 Assignment

Our first job for week 2 was to create a character from polygon primitives and  creating a basic hirachy for those objects.
So, please allow me to introduce B-Boy (v1beta), my first character created in Maya:

The second assignment was about creating a set for our character. 

Today I was eating like a sumo, what inspired me go for a dohyó. Maybe I will be trying something else, but I won´t hold back my first attempt:

And here we go!

My first springboard class assignment:

 the shelf was given

This is what I came up with so far. The perspective isn´t correct because I seem to have used the wrong camera settings, but that should be fixed quite easily. 

Second version without that wide-angle look and some minor changes

Maya Springboard

Yesterday, I finally recieved an email including the Springboard Class QnA times and my first mentor. His name is Dan Lauer and he is an AM-allumni, currently working on several animation projects and as a Maya trainer for our school. On top of that, he´s a 3d allrounder with a background in coding, so I´m sure we´ll be learning some crazy Maya stuff by a very competent professional!

This is Dan´s homepage:
http://danimateit.com/about.html

Here is a link to his current showreel.
http://vimeo.com/danimateit/demoreel

Let´s do this!

Posing test

Moom preparing for the big show:

Hi there:

Noooooo:

Thirsty:

Post-marathon-post :D

Just some more doodles:

Flachköpper

Ok, marathons might be very nice, but this one was too much for me :D
I had to take a 2 day break and today I made a little ball-pen animation tribute to Brösel´s "Flachköpper". Have fun:

Day 6

Day 5

I cheated,
so here are my 50 "drawings" for today :D

Day 4

A little late, but nevertheless:

Day 3

Today I tried to do 2-minute-poses. 

       I guess it worked....       

somehow...

better...

maybe...:D

Day 2

For today I made twenty pretty ugly and discouraging 60 second sketches of poses from posemaniacs.com . I couldn´t handle the most camera angles and one minute is way too short for me to get anything acceptable done. Tomorrow I´ll take more time for each drawing again...
much more :D

Sketching marathon (day 1)

Beginning with today, I´ll be taking part on a sketching marathon with some of my classmates and other AM eager beavers. It´s going to be a hard challenge for me and I really hope that I can keep up with the others!

• Rules:
  
  We start with 10 sketches on day one (Mondays) and and continue to do ten more each day. That means 10 on day one - 20 on day 2, 30 on day 3 and so on till we do 100 a day.
  
  So here we got my first 10 sketches:
  

  

  
  

  

City sketchin

Yesterday I bought some paper and today I had to check out the city. I tried to focus only on speed and the gestures.

These didn´t move:

 

Those did:

As you can see, there´s much to do! :D

The Little Painter (Kenny Roy´s animation marathon)

It was a true pleasure to be able to watch Kenny Roy´s 24 hour animation marathon today and yesterday. The experience of seeing a scene coming to life from the first sketches was irreplacable!

Here´s Kenny´s workflow checklist:

Kenny kept us updated with playblasts and very interesting workflow insights. Here´s a video to see how everything slowly came together (including the final render):

If you want to support Kenny Roy´s short film visit:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kennyroy/the-little-painter

or
http://www.kennyroy.com

It was a great and also a very rare chance to be able to look over a pro´s shoulder and see him doing a great animation just from scratch. Unfortunately I couldn´t stay awake for the whole time, so I missed the last little tweaks and the polishing phase. Some of my future classmates were attending the marathon as well and all of us had a great time in our little skype-group. I even know of someone who stayed through the whole thing and doesn´t regret a minute :D


So everything I have left to say is:

THANK YOU KENNY!

Edit:
Kenny Roy uploaded the whole 24 hour marathon on his Website. You can download or watch it here:
http://www.kennyroy.com/public/24-Hour-Marathon-Video-Download-Page.cfm

First post ever

Hello everybody,
since I´m starting AM´s character animation program in summer, I decided to create a little blog for my family, friends and classmates to keep track of my work. This first post will include the things I did to prepare myself for school.
I already got to know some very nice and inspiring people at AM, and even before class has started, we´re helping and motivating each other like crazy.

We´re eager, expect us!

First I have two walkcycles and a little sidekick fun created in Blender. I did the modelling as well as the rigging to get a basic understanding of the technical background:

The next things are my first pendulum, and a bouncing ball test in which the bouncing ball alone wasn´t enough for me (Blender as well):

And last bat not least we got my first steps in Maya 2011 and a little pencil test. I tried to finish the pencil step but the final result was too crappy to be uploaded. I´ll be coming back to this another day:

So that´s it for my first post, thanks for watching!