First animation

This week we began learning the technical stuff in Maya relevant to animation. Our first task was to animate a poly sphere. This is what I came up with - trying to implement some concepts from the Jason Ryan ball tutorial. However, when I looked at other people's work, I learnt a few new tricks which I will surely apply to my next animation and which will fix any floatyness that this ball may have.

Weeks 4-6 at AM

Weeks 4 to 6 of AM was essentially teaching us the basics of the non-animation discplines of modeling, rigging, surfacing and lighting, whilst simultaneously getting us familiar with tools and concepts such as hierarchies and cameras which will help in our animations. We had to build a simple character and simple set, put is some camera shots, wack in some surfaces and lights, and render those shots. I feel that the main relevance that comes out of this exercise for AM is that we'll be confidently able to set up our shots for AM exercises. Of course a lot of this was just revision for me, but I still learnt heaps, and after barely touching Maya for a year (though I did use Lightwave for work), I felt re-energised and excited about doing creative stuff in 3D.

I know that some of the shots are a bit dark, but seeing as I am trying to be an animator, I won't go back to fix that now, but rather put my energy into learning animation stuff.









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Some sketches

Unfortately I can't afford to do 1 evening a week life drawing classes at the moment, but as an alternative I've been sketching from photographs that I find on the net. I just think of a topic (sports are my fav at present) and look up images for that. As it's now the winter olympics, I chose snowboarding and ice skating for today. Oh yeah, I also managed to get some Col-erase pencils via ebay (Amazon was lame and didn't want to ship such things to Australia), so I've been using those to draw.

I think my drawings aren't anything special yet, but I am aiming to get more confident at capturing gestures. I think once I read and do the exercises in the Wayne Gilbert book, I'll be a lot better.