Well I’m already done the first class, and I seriously can’t believe 3 months has already flown by, two jobs and school sure helps me pass the time. No real assignment this week other than combining all my assignments into one reel, so here it is:

Tomorrow we find out who our new mentor and classmates are, its kind of cool that every three months we get new classmates and mentors. It really helps to build a community and friends and contacts. A big thank you however to Paul Allen for being such a fantastic mentor with great notes and advice. I’ll definitely make sure to pester him for another critique here and there down the road.

Man week six already. You know the problem with starting AM in the first week of January is that AM basically becomes your week counter, every new lesson is the next week, and I’m the kind of guy that likes to not now what day of the month it is let alone what week. I’m all to aware of how fast time is moving now, it is really messing with my mind.

Now that I have that off my Chest, noting too much this week, the platform with a pendulum is nothing new to me, like the old tail swing assignment at VFS. I do have to say though that while this was an assignment I was prepped for, this was the best lecture I’ve seen yet from the AM guys. Not only was it a little sorter than the standard which, well watching 1 hour lectures is a little tougher when your alone in your house watching a computer monitor. No the best part was their explanation on the various kinds of overlapping. All the terms they used I’ve heard and read before in talking about overlapping action, but sort of willy nilly treating them all as the same kinds of things, but these guys have actually carefully classified what each type of overlapping action is. I really liked that.

A little warning this one has Audio, I thought I’d choreograph it to some music, a small clip from Road to Eldorado.

This assignment was interesting for me too as I’ve noticed that I’m naturally just using the graph editor for all my animating so far on the bouncing balls and even the platform in this assignment, that when I began animating the pendulum, I was still shifting my keys in the graph editor instead of the dopesheet. for that type of offsetting of keys the dopesheet is so much easier, but I’m becoming so used to using the graph editor that i didn’t even think about it. It was an interesting epiphany for me as in any animating I’ve done before my process has been using the CINEMA 4D timeline a lot, and only touching curves when I needed to. I hope I can start to utilize my spline workflow in CINEMA 4D (well easier in C4D in fact because its tangent workflow is a little more intuitive)

No Sketch this week, but I also managed to do some revisions, fortunately I used a constraint setup to animate my ball last week so adjusting timing and such was easy without having to worry about how the ball interacts with the half pipe since its position was defined by the constrained object. Nothing new in the start, just the timing and how far it travels along the pipe on certain rolls. Also an update to the devastation pose, pretty minor was mainly trying to reduce the notch in his back, but wasn’t able to do much because of how he is weighted.

Well now on to week 7, and sure enough, its the first part of a two parter on Spline Editing in the Graph editor with Victor Navone, sweet.