Well with SIGGRAPH and then a hectic month building up to release of 11.5 and of course doing my AM assignments I’ve really slacked on getting them over to the Blog, so we are back again with Week 10, and I’ll try and get the prior weeks up as back articles tomorrow.

The site has been growing quite a bit now that I”m posting some articles related to CINEMA 4D, which is great as starting with next term I’ll now be focusing on animating my assignments in C4D. I feel pretty comfortable animating in Maya and am now more than ever able to quickly jump back and fourth between the two interfaces so now its time to get used to the weekly grind of assignments in C4D as well to make sure I’m equally capable and fluent at animating in both interfaces.

Anyways here is Stewie throwing his snowball, we are in the final refining stages theres some great things and some awkward things going on in there, I chose to do the arms FK the whole way but now I’m wishing I had bothered with IK/FK switching as the interacting in the snow at the start would be much much better with IK.

Okay I’ve been pretty bad the last Month, I went to New York for Promax BDA and haven’t gotten back into the Blogging groove since. My apologies, I will get the last few weeks posts up late tonight most likely, and I’ll have some more interesting news as well this week so keep an eye out for that.

This class we have the choice for 3 separate assignments or an animjam where all three assignments link together to with a single theme, hopefully telling some sort of story. I’m already at the refining stage of part 1 in which Stewie is shoveling snow and a snowball is on due course.

Anyways I”m off on a little Adventure for the day, need to get out of the house and away form the computers and TV, Crunching at work for Siggrpah and other projects along with trying to really shift over into being a manager and not a peer for my staff, along with Animation Mentor and now FXPHD (more on that in a later post) and I’ve just been killing myself. Time for a little relaxation.

Anyways here is Stewie Enjoy.

I’m grateful to have a mentor who’s is very prompt about getting our E-critiques done quickly, and offers not only a lot of comments about what is currently there, but direction about where you can take it. Mike liked the poop but took the idea a totally different direction where instead of just having the feeling something is there and being startled by it Stewie would smell something and then look around and when he see what it is, and scurry to get away.

So Monday night I had a choice to make either I take it this new direction drastically changing what I had and meaning a whole lot of new work or I keep polishing what I have. So I pulled an a late night till 4 AM reblocking the first half of the animation and boy am I glad I did. After our Awesome Q&A where mike did a walkthrough of how he animates, he took a quick look and offered me a little more guidance and This is what I got:

Now the concerning thing is that by this point in the assignment we should be at a semi finished state and the last week is supposed to be polishing, that final 10%, but for me it will be a lot more work, I’m way behind but I think the assignment will be much better for it.

Another week done, payments in for the next term it is hard to believe that I’m almost through the first third already. This assignment has been a tough one, first if you look at last weeks I had the legs all wrong int he sitting pose they have to be the other way around for it to work, and as I got into adding more poses and then into the starts of splining things I had to pretty much go frame by frame to make sure the legs never intersect or criss-cross and make sure the knees follow nice arcs. I spent way to much time on those damn knees that I kind of wish I was animating a Stewie no knees instead of a Stewie no arms.

I cut out a lot based on feedback and critique, the breathing at the end, the over blinking and especially the over exaggerated double take. I think everything feels tighter now. The other thing I really learned through all my feedback is a question I’d asked Mike regarding needing more poses between the steps as he moves back. To me it was clear that each pose in last weeks assignment were the poses where his feet were planted I wasn’t doing any pose where feet were in transition, but no one saw it that way Mike even commented that it still looked like the back foot was in passing rather than being planted. So yes clearly needed more poses in my blocking last week.

Oh and if you are wondering where Tailor went, i got lazy and didn’t want to animate him so I’ve replaced him with the pile of poop from my last assignment in Class 1. Might make an interesting trend of always appearing in final assignments for each class, I don’t know. Honestly though I may put him back in if I have time, I do have his his entrance blocked but nothing on the tail, and I just don’t know if I’ll want to put time into that tail when Stewie is the focus. I think it still works as it is now, I mean who wants to meditate next to that?

Busy week as usual, but I made sure to take some awesome advice from my mentor Mike Walling regarding inspiration. Back in high school and at VFS i had this trusty little 13 inch TV VCR combo hooked up to my PC that I would watch DVD’s and video on all the time. I don’t know what happened, well maybe its because I gave my sister that TV, but I sort of lost this concept. It wasn’t a distraction but more a constant inspiration anytime I looked away from what I was working on, Bam there was some cool animation on that would keep me going.

I also think it helped a bit with my common procrastinating by giving me a few seconds of something else to break up the grind without getting up and leaving to watch TV. So I ripped the old 27 inch TV from our Bedroom and moved the printer scanner to the side so that I now have a TV with video constantly while working, and I love it.

Now to the cons. First I’m still rehabilitating my back from NAB , so I have to get up and walk around often anyways, constant pressure on my lower back won’t help things. So the idea of the monitor keeping me from leaving the computer isn’t really working yet.

The other con is a big one though. After a recent DVD and BluRay rental at the local blockbuster a few weeks ago I looked at the price and knew that there are much cheaper alternatives like on demand., but Time Warner On Demand hasn’t really worked well for us. so I asked Rick at work about his Netflix account and how he liked it, and he not only recommended it but gave me a coupon for a longer free trial that they received for friends and family. Well I’m hooked already, haven’t even received the first disc but I’m catching up on heroes since I haven’t seen an episode since early season 2. So being inspiration and not a distraction hasn’t really worked out I wasted most of Friday night watching TV instead of working. Bahh what a stupid awesome invention. Damn you Netflix, Damn you.

Anyways here is the refined blocking so far, didn’t finish the end walk at all, but this is also a little different then what I handed in. I cut it down to the last five minutes on this one, too close. Sadly though I didn’t notice that a last minute tweak caused a major pop in my animation, it was a really stupid mistake, but there was not time to re-render and upload again, so I just added a note for Mike on my incompetence. Anyways I figured I’d fix that one issue before posting here. Anyways Enjoy.