observational sketches

cleaned up headturn

head turn

Managed not to languish over this one t00 much. really going for a quick process: understand the action, draw the keys, anticipation, break it down and inbetween. i found doing the keys, antic and breakdowns really rough and quick helpful. Then I cleaned those drawings up a bit thinking about the arcs created by the individual features.

3d practice

I have spent the last couple of months learning 3d software and trying to establish some sort of work flow. I have drawn mainly upon 2 sources, those are Keith Lango and Jason Ryan. I am currently jumping back and forth between the two styles and trying to work out what best suits me.

I have decided to work on a scene as an attempt to apply the knowledge I have been trying to fill in my head with. The first thing I am trying to do is establish the story telling poses of the scene. This was achieved through a combination of thumbnailing and video reference.

Once the main poses were figured out, I timed them out in flipbook.

2d blocking

For the most part I was happy with the flow of the movement and things seemed timed out pretty well. From here I decided to apply some of Keith's process and create the key poses in maya using the stacked method. Here you don't try to time out the scene you just focus on the keys and create them one after the other in the timeline. To flesh out the action I included some breakdowns and eases.

The next step was to time these poses out. I exported these individual frames using monkey shuffle into monkey jam. Now I could plan the timing of the 3d stuff quickly. For the most part I used the timing from the 2d blocking.

3d blocking

The next stage is clean up. I am finding this stage difficult to get my head around. Once the piece is splined out it loses its energy and turns into a mess. I need to control the flow of movement by defining the holds and the easing in and out.