Zeke's Pad at the Elan Awards

http://www.animationmagazine.net/article/9950

I was a Lead Animator on Zeke's Pad so I'm really excited to hear that it took home some lofty awards, including Best Animated Television Production!

~Chris

Sergio Walk Cycle WIP

Started off with a couple quick thumbnails to illustrate the basic mood I wanted to capture in the posing. You can see how the idea was really rough with the thumbnail at the far left, and how I took time to tighten up the pose with the subsequent thumbnails. Also, it's a good idea to draw the pose from profile so that the angle of the character's body is being taken into account.

With my idea fleshed out in thumbnail form I start right in with the blocking. I approach my animation in a very systematic way, first blocking in the Keys, then moving on to Extremes, then Breakdowns. I keep my Tangents set to "Clamped" and "Stepped" while I'm blocking so that I don't get distracted by any fluid movement. All of the attention should be on the poses and their relationship to one another. Once I'm satisfied with my blocking, I change the Tangent settings and my curves in the Graph Editor to "Linear" (I've always gone straight to Spline in the past, but I'm trying something new this time).

So now everything is Linear, with offsets added only to the hands and head (The overlap of the head is bugging me. I need to work on that).

The feet always require the most attention in a walk cycle. The part of the cycle that I think is the most crucial to get right is the push-off from the toe when the foot is extended at the back of the stride. I try to get this working first before touching anything else.

I'll continue working on this cycle because I really like how it's looking so far and I'll update the Work In Progress as I go. I hope that somewhere, somebody is reading this and finding it useful.

~Chris

Posing Exercise #1

I wanted to practice conveying weight in this pose because I hate seeing poses that lack any sense of gravity and balance and I want to make damn sure that they aren't creeping into my work. This is the Sergio character from Strut Your Reel, I just made some small adjustments somewhere along the way but all copyrights to their respective owners.

I hadn't touched this character in some time but a friend of mine was asking me some questions about the rig which forced me to open it up and poke around. I think I'm going to animate something with this character because I remember really enjoying the rig in the past. But that's going to have to come at another time as I have some other, more pressing fish to fry at the present moment. I have some action analysis notes to post, as well as the current Work In Progress that the aforementioned action analysis has spawned. Not to mention the ongoing search for work. Hoo-ray.

~Chris

NINJAS ARE WAY COOL

There's a really awesome rig floating around in different animation circles affectionately known as Norman. For my money, Norman is the shizznit.

I've retro-fitted Norman a few times for some 11 Second Club submissions in the past but none of those retro-fittings even come close to this latest one. I put a lot of work into it and I learned a heck of a lot of technical stuff that I wasn't aware of before.

I also got to model a Katana which turned out great! Well, to be honest it's not a true Katana. It's kind of a mix between a Katana and a Ninja-to. Oh man , I've been geeking out over this retro-fitting for like two weeks.

Now that he's all finished I'm going to animate some scenarios because I seriously want to see this guy in action!

~Chris

Dog Walk All Finished

So that Dog walk is more or less finished. There are still some things that could be tightened up but since it was my project for last week I had to upload it in the state it was in. You can check it out here.

The camera angle is the reverse of what I had in the blocking but it shouldn't make a whole lot of difference.

~Chris

How my brain works for animation

I'm working on a canine walk cycle right now and a quadruped is something that I haven't animated much of for a while now. There was a dog character in each of the last two shows that I worked on but the shots that I got with the little fuzzballs were few and far between.

I've always been really attracted to quadruped locomotion because it just looks so cool. The perfect balance of movement in the front and hind quarters is so smooth and elegant. More so with some animals, less so with others.

Anyway, I cracked open my Muybridge books to study the phases of the walk and I noticed that if you can understand where the strides come into play and how the energy radiates down the spine from the hips to the head, it gets you a long way towards animating a successful walk. I've seen people animate these things in a really automated, computationally heavy way but that really doesn't work for me. I like to figure out what's happening on each extreme and really push and explore the possibilities in the pose before I start getting into the Graph Editor because it's a completely different part of the brain that goes into that initial building of the performance.

The Graph Editor, awesome though it may be, requires a large amount of resources from your Left Brain and if my Left Brain is working hard my Right Brain tends to not add much to the situation. That's why I have to work in a very systematic way. First this, then this. Okay, now that this is done, move on to this, and so on.

Anyway, I'm just rambling now. Check out the playblast of my blocking for the canine walk and draw your own conclusions.



I'll just finish by saying that this is the work flow that I follow about 99.9% of the time:

Heavy, in-depth blocking of Keys, Extremes, Breakdowns, and sometimes more detailed bits depending on the scenario. Then I switch gears to work in the Graph Editor, which is a pretty painless process due to the extensive blocking. Then I tackle the face with a similar approach and... BAM!... done.

I'll post more videos of this walk cycle as it becomes more complete. It's my project for this week so hopefully you should be able to see it fully animated by Friday or Saturday... schedules permitting.

~Chris