Returning to Normal

It’s been a rough month and some days. Most of it had to do with trying to find new residency then moving and finally getting settled. In between the day job, family and AM it I haven’t had time to blog like I prefer. But, things are now starting to get back to normal. I’m settling into the new place and even though it doesn’t feel like “home” yet, all I have is time.

AM has been a blast though. It’s tough…real tough when you have so much going on but I’m loving it. The assignments are demanding and you really have to maximize your time. Were on week 11 and next week is it for Class one and I cannot believe it. Pretty soon I’ll actually have my demo reel uploaded for class one. How cool is that? LOL

Starting in class two I’m really hoping to blog a lot more frequently and post more work than I did for class one. Seriously

Where has the time gone?

Wow..it’s been a while since I’ve gotten a chance to post anything. A lot has happened and I’ve been super busy! AM is great and were already into week 8. Insane!

The main thing that has been keeping me from posting is moving. Having to move sucks because it’s stressful and just complicates everyday life. So right now my focus has been family, work, AM and boxing up my house. I’ll be moved by May 31 and sometime there after I’ll resume posting.

There are so many cool little plug-ins that I have bought and tips learned that I just want to start blogging about them right now. But if I start blogging I wont do them justice due to lack of time.

Updates forth coming sooner than later

Moving Forward

Ok, I’ve written this post about five times already. Something fishy is going on between Veoh, wordpress and firefox where my post just keeps getting deleted. I’m just too tired to figure out what. So I’m not even going to rewrite all that I wrote…here’s to keeping it short

We have finally started animating and are beginning to focus more heavily on some of the core principals. Funnily enough the bouncing ball assignment is like “Hello World” for programmers. Learn the basics and the structure and you will go far but you gotta say “Hello World” first. I’d love to give one of my patented long winded post’s but I have a couple of revisions and my regular assignment due.

Time To Animate

It’s been a pretty busy week for me all around but informative to say the least. My mentor seems to be a bottomless pit of animation information. I actually thought I knew where all the good stuff was but thanks to Paul I’m sitting on a plethora of new stuff! I actually need to schedule time to go through it all and start putting together my own notes. From the looks of it I’m sure this is just the beginning so I better start categorizing this stuff.

My assignment this week was to draw some sketches of people from life. Basically go out into the world and start sketching. Afterwards, pick a pose you like and put STU in it. Below is a snap shot of the pose I created. Of course I would have loved to put in some fancy lighting, props and other stuff but my mentor was adamant about keeping it simple. So I adhered of course and will wait until the end of the term to spruce everything up for my class one demo reel.

A couple of post ago I spoke about incorporating a 2D pencil test pipeline into my animation work flow. For my Animation Mentor work I’ve decided to go with Jason’s grease pencil located here. If your using Maya this comes highly recommended.

Here are few screens to describe what I’m talking about. This image was posted by Drew Blom over at the “The art of Toon”. If you have a Wacom tablet you can just sketch right inside Maya on each frame and figure out some quick timing before you begin animating. There are so many possibilities that one can come up with via this pipeline that it boggles the mind.

Over at AM this week we start the all important bouncing ball assignments. I’m actually excited about them oddly enough. Can wait to see what happens…

AM_08|First Week

Well the first week is pretty much done. My mentor for this term is CG Animator Paul Allen. Just from the first few minutes of hearing him talk I knew that this was a really cool guy. Paul worked as an animator on the “Ant Bully”, “The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron (TV)” and was the Animation Supervisor for “The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron (feature)” amongst other things.

Paul seems to be very funny and laid back but you get the feeling that teaching is in his blood which is great. I’m excited to see how things progress throughout this term as I’m sure to be in for a really good time.

As expected, at least for class one, this week has been filled with getting re acclimated and reacquainted with the AM site and the new students. Animation Mentor is such a unique place, it is truly a utopia for animators, talk about positive vibes.

No animation assignments yet, more or less your responsible for just introducing yourself and watching orientation videos. This upcoming week will start the slow ramp up to the tepid pace that class one is known for. Better keep that notepad near by and a cup of coffee never hurts either.

On a side note, I’m planning to integrate more 2D pencil tests into my pre-planning/preparation work flow. This is something that has been on my mind for age’s but I never pursued it hard enough. Ideally, if I can get a comfortable work flow going that suits me. Then the incorporation of my thumbnail sketches and 2D pencil tests would be fantastic. Aside from some of the options I’m exploring, it would be nice to use the “grease pencil” and call it a day. We will see how it goes…

If habits are hard to break then you better make them good!

Let’s Go!

Well the day is finally here. In about 15 minutes I’ll have access to the site and start to get re acclimated with everything that is Animation Mentor. Man, it really seems like such a long time ago.

The only thing that sucks is that I’m still at work so I wont get the full compliment until I get home later today. But hey, that’s cool, I’m just glad it’s time to kick it into gear again.

On a side note, I’ve been wanting to get some new monitors for quite a while now. Currently, I’m using a dual monitor setup with 20 inch CRT’s. Yep, the big boys and they take up a considerable amount of space. So today I decided to go ahead and pull the trigger on a couple of 22 inch wide screen flat panel monitors. This is going to be really interesting once I have that setup LOL. Were talking almost three feet of horizontal space!

Finally…One week to go!

A week from today I will finally be back at AM. What seemed like an eternity is now only a proverbial stones throw away. All I can say is that I’m highly optimistic about returning and even have a stronger fire, determination and eagerness then when I attended last.

It’s funny how life can throw curves at you to really dampen your spirits but I believe these last few months away has taught me a lot on so many fronts. I’ve also learned that if things get hectic again I have the wherewithal to preserver and push on. Knock on wood, this was my first and last leave of absence.

On another note…the second Mecha. I know…I know LOL. Seriously, I started it and was moving along fine and then boom, just was not holding my interest anymore. I’m kinda funny like that, if something cant hold my interest I wont even screw around with it and I will just move on.

After I left Animation Mentor there were some goals that I set for myself to achieve upon returning. A few of those goals centered around Maya which if achieved would result in a higher comfortability level in using the tool going forward. I can say that I have at least achieved the level of comfort that I so much desired. This was important to me because of my visual and creative nature.

The ability to add you own personality, ideas and for lack of a better word, flavor to a scene means a lot to me. Being able to create props, character models, along with texturing and lighting really puts me into a flow. When I’m working on my “own” thing even if it is an assignment, I try my best to standout. What is or can be distracting at least for me is the shortcomings or gaps in my knowledge. Of course you can always Google and find a tutorial but in the environment that is AM there are deadlines and time just doesn’t permit in some cases. I used to always find myself saying “man, if this were only Lightwave, I would….”

Side note, AM doesn’t require that you know how to model, texture, rig, light etc etc. The school focuses on animation only and pushes that too. Animate, animate, animate… Just wanted to get that out so readers did not get the wrong impression as the aforementioned are things that I want to do “better” personally.

Today, I’m more comfortable in Maya than I ever were in Lightwave and that is still blowing my mind due to my heavy and well documented Lightwave Fanboy-ism, but you know what? I’m not at all surprised that I’m starting to favor Maya more and more.

You see how I got away from the second Mecha topic? Hahaha…yeah I’m good, I know.

I’ll probably revisit the second Mecha and drop an animation or something sometime during the summer without notice, who knows. This doesn’t mean that I wont be working on other things and I will definitely keep everyone up on my re-experience at Animation Mentor. I really appreciate those of you that cruise by.

Speaking of which, I was on Skype with one of my class mates who is now in finishing up class 2. His name is Fawzi Yahya and is a pretty cool guy. He was showing me his final assignment which was to demonstrate a character lifting a heavy object. During our conversation I offered to create a set for his animation and was delighted when he said “hell yeah!“. Below is a screen shot from the animation featuring the set I created. Had a really a good time putting that together, modeling, lighting, etc…fun stuff.