Progress is balls

Not much progress this week. However I've begun animating my ball. It was an interesting challenge to make the roll believable, trying to stop it from looking like it's slipping and sliding. Though I think i'll continue working on the rough movement and animating the roll, squash and stretch in afterwards.

Drawing Tools

As part of the module, we've been assigned to undertake regular sketching exercises to improve our knowledge of natural posing.

We've been told to go out into the real world and sketch people in day to day lives, but it's raining today and I'm tired! So instead I've done some life drawing studies in the comfort of my own home.

There are a few websites that offer many great life drawing photographs as a practice tool, but my absolute favorite has to be that of Pixelovely, this website offers a huge range of photographs (including animals!). But the best feature has to be the options of Standard and Class mode. By doing a study in standard mode you can set a specific time interval in which the photos will change, great for training yourself to speed up and put down expressive poses quickly. Class mode is an extremely powerful setting where you pick how long you want your drawing class to take, and it will set images with progressive intervals, starting off with a few quick sketches to warm up with, and build towards longer, more detailed studies. Though if at any point you want to stop and take a break, or simply spend longer on a photo, both these settings have  pause, forwards and backwards buttons to let you control your session yourself.

Here are a few studies I've done using this website.
http://artists.pixelovely.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing/

 

Getting the ball rolling.

This blog is to keep a record of all the work I do towards my 3D Character Animation module this year.

I will be uploading work specifically for the assignment, as well as reviews on animations/films/websites I like, and sketches and designs that I've done to support my assignment projects.

So I'll start off by uploading the storyboard for my first assignment project. The ball animation.


We've been tasked to produce a 10 second animation featuring a ball. We are to give this ball energy and personality. My Idea is of a toy shape sorter that toddlers use, and a ball decides that even though he's supposed to go through one hole, he can go through any hole he wants to. What a non conformist ball he is!

Ball Animation Storyboard.