Class 208 : Dance blocking pass

Here it is, my first dance blocking pass! Man, it's hard! Still lots to do, but to get there I had to bend, twist, turn and do so many strange things to the poor rig :)
Hopefully in a few weeks I'll have something descent for my future showreel.

Parkour final

Here is my final refined version of the parkour animation. I've really learned a lot with this one, especially that things can always be pushed a lot further even if everything seems to be working well. I can't say that what I have now is perfect, I can already see things to change, but there is a big difference from what I had in the beginning. With a lot of help from my peers and my mentor I was able to change many things, speed up some parts here and there, remove a few frames and mostly rework a lot of the timing issues that I had.

There was a lot of frustration trying to effectively use the provided rig, especially in the spine area. We could animate either in FK or IK mode, and FK was my chosen option. The problem was that I had to counter animate those spine controls most of the time for them to look right. I also struggled a lot to get some good overlap into the spine. I guess that I'll be used to it with more practice.

For my next animation, the dance move, I've already started some posing tests. We're animating a character with arms this time!!! A lot of fun coming but lots of hard time too.
I wanted to try the IK spine but my first experiments with it convinced me to stay with FK.
There's a lot of work on the way, I hope that I'll get through it all :)

Class 207 Planning

Class 207 Video reference

Everything is going great with my work. I'm spending this week polishing my parkour animation as well as thinking about my next piece. My first work was more subtle and the second one had more broad movements, so for this one I'll challenge myself with something more difficult. I'll be animating a 10 seconds dance move. Below is my reference, edited from various sources. The dance is from the song "My love" by Justin Timberlake.

Class 206: Blocking plus

In this week I moved my animation out of the stepped mode and started working on splines.
It's always a very challenging step because that transition almost always gives a floaty feel to the animation. So there was a lot of refining, more breakdowns, and keyframes all over the place.
There were also a few areas where I decided to completely redo the animation because it just wasn't working. Here is what I've done so far.

Class 205: second animation blocking

Hey everybody. So this week was busy with the blocking of my second animation.
I'm animating a character running and climbing up onto a pillar and then doing a back flip.
You'll notice that the blocking is a bit different from what I originally planned, that's because in the middle of my blocking I thought that there was missing something, it just looked boring. So at the end I decided to increase the height of the pillar to have a more dynamic animation.