Animation Mentor Student
Another week at Animation Mentor has ended, and I’m starting to get the hang of things. Week 2 marked the first true homework assignments. We had to go out into a public area and sketch people in a natural situation and then select one of those sketches to apply to a character model, Stu. The goal of this assignment was to create a pose that was both dynamic and easily readable. Overall, the assignment was pretty simple and straightforward, geared towards familiarizing students with the controls in Maya and some of the basics of posing for animation. However, there were some challenges.
For starters, sketching people out in the wild is harder than it sounds, at least for me. I have always been a notoriously slow drawer…and I mean painfully slow. Unfortunately for me, people don’t tend to wait for me to draw them. One second, a kid is running by me, the next he is gone. So basically, I had to try to form a quick mental picture of the person’s silhouette, and then quickly draw the outline from memory. This method forced me to forget unimportant details such as clothing, hair, and facial features, and to instead focus on the action. My primary goal for my sketches was to have strong silhouettes.
The concept of strong silhouettes is one that I had known about prior to Animation Mentor, but had never really put into practice in my animations. For those who don’t know, strong silhouettes is one of the 12 basic principles of animation and states that you should be able to identify what a character is doing solely by the outline of the character. An arm resting in front of the body, for instance, is usually bad, because it tends to get lost. Instead, it is best to have open air behind important body parts. In order to get exciting poses, I thought it best to go to a part of town where people might be found doing things more exciting than just walking or sitting. Therefore, Hayswood Park was my destination. While the park wasn’t very busy that Thursday afternoon, I did manage to spot a few families on the playground. I drew from my car, trying to simultaneously observe and not look like a creeper. I’m not sure how people would react to being drawn by strangers. Fortunately, I carefully eluded being spotted, and completed 10 rough sketches that served to describe the action that was going on.
The rough sketches I did at the park.
When the time came to choose one of these 10 sketches, my classmates at AM proved invaluable in the selection process. Peer review is an important focus at Animation Mentor, and I managed to receive about a dozen or so comments on my work to guide me in the right direction. However, I also realized that it is important to think for yourself in addition to listening to the input of others. Because animation is so subjective, a dozen different people are likely to have a dozen different opinions. Therefore, it’s important to take everything into consideration. In the end, and upon the suggestion of several classmates, I chose a sketch of a kid preparing to kick a soccer ball for my pose. My sketch itself wasn’t that strong, but I felt that the pose itself held a lot of opportunity.
Posing the character Stu in Maya should have been a quick task, but I’m glad that I took my time on it. After quickly rotating all of his joints into a pose that mimicked my initial sketch, I rendered out an image and posted it on the Animation Mentor website for peer review. I knew that there was something “off” about my pose, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Fortunately, I had several days to go before turn in and thus ample time to receive feedback. It wasn’t long before my classmates pointed out that I could exaggerate the pose by putting more weight on the front foot. After much tweaking and revision after revision, I managed to emerge with a rendering that I could be happy with. I knew it wasn’t perfect even yet, but nothing in animation ever is, and eventually you just have to say “good enough.”
The first pass for my character pose.
Many passes (and more hours than I care to admit) later.
Even as I turned in my completed assignment, I knew there were some things that I could have improved upon. I would have liked to raise the horizon up a bit. Also, I should have pushed Stu’s pose a little further, really exaggeration that kicking pose (even though the kid I sketched was fairly subdued in his pose). My mentor Anthony Wong reiterated some of these initial concerns that I had in his critique, and added a few more tips that could really help to improve my pose and sketches. I may go back and redo this pose at a later date. Nevertheless, I got an “A” on this first assignment, which shows that I was definitely on the right track. I believe my results show the importance of putting that extra 10% into a pose, especially considering what my first “completed” pass looked like. Now granted, I’m not going to spend this much time on everything I do, or else I would never be able to finish an animation, but I will certainly be more aware of what goes into creating a good pose. Over time, I’ll only get faster and more efficient at my craft.
UPDATE (7/16/2010): I had some time this week to revisit my Stu pose to see what I could improve upon. I have to say that this final version is miles ahead of what I had before, and it didn’t even take very long to correct. It is true what they say that in art you are never done with a piece. I just can’t believe I didn’t make some of these changes sooner, as once you see the new version, the lacking aspects from the old become all too obvious.
It's amazing the difference fresh eyes can make when returning to a piece. This pose is now far more dynamic.
Hi I just passed by your webby while browsing around google. I have to say I love the flow of your development and how the tweaking in the final shot makes such a huge huge difference. and it’s beautiful
. Keep it up!