Glib Rig for Animschool

I rigged this character completely from scratch for the Intro to Rigging course in Animschool. The model was provided by Animschool.

It is my intention to animate a scene with this rig, so I am optimizing it for cartoony animation. For the moment, the expressions are animated with blendshapes controlled by the facial GUI to the left of the head. There is a joint for the jaw, and I plan on adding joints for brows, cheeks, and lips down the line. 

This was my first rig completely from scratch. I've learned a ton in the process and found that rigging is more fun than I ever thought it could be!

Heavy Object Polish

Whew! So when I hit spline, the rotation on the hammer exploded quite extremely. Tried Euler filters, tried reanimating from scratch, and had the same issue. Luckily, my buddy John Fielding is a MASTER of Maya and helped me out. Turns out the rotation order was wrong for how the hammer was spinning. He copied the animation onto a locator and was able to troubleshoot which rotation order was correct. Now I can do that for next time I face an issue like this. I hope to hear critique on this and spruce up the environment and post it to my reel!

Heavy Object Blocking Part 2

Hey! Finished up my blocking pass - instructor said to tone down some of the arm jiggles that happen after he releases the hammer. Even though they are in the reference, its good to clean up the motion for animation - like one would do with motion capture. So now I hit spline and hang on to my butt!

Heavy Object Blocking

Hey! Working on the final assignment for my Animating Characters Class for Animschool.com. The assignment is for a character to interact with a heavy object. Found some footage of soldiers in Afghanistan participating in a Highland strongman competition, which was incredibly all shot on tripod. 

Here is my blocking stage - about a pose every 10 frames. Went back to stepped this time for blocking. I had been doing autotangents for blocking since I was doing cycles. I feel a lot more comfortable in stepped, and I am pretty happy with this pass. I'll post next week with revisions from class and blocking every 2-6 frames. Enjoy!

Running Jump Assignment

The second assignment for my first semester at animschool.com is a running jump. Again, the main goals here are achieving realism with body mechanics. I did push the jump some, since it is a pretty unrealistic distance to jump over. I feel like I have come a long way, even since the first assignment.

From the crit, my instructor said to decrease the length of the jump, as he seems to be being propelled by a rocket a bit in the air. Also, on the landing, the end needs work. He was saying the final step should happen sooner, and there should be another step after that. Finally, he said to slow down the standing up at the end, and overlap more.

Walk to Stop Second Pass Polish

This walk is due tomorrow - I feel like I am mostly there. I want to sleep on it and have fresh eyes in the morning to make any final tweaks. All in all, I know its not perfect, but I need feedback to figure out exactly what is wrong. For me, subtle and highly mechanical animations are the most difficult for me, hence my struggle with this shot. Almost want to start from scratch again now that my method is more solid. 

Cycles are so different from performance pieces, because you are working on everything at once. I think I am pretty happy with it and I am excited to hear what people think of it!

Walk to Stop Progress

Hey guys! Animating a walk to stop now for my first class at AnimSchool. This is my first pass of polish post-blocking. For this walk cycle, I did blocking in autotangents - my first time blocking not stepped and also my first time using autotangents in Maya 2014. Feel free to crit! I am waiting til the final pass of polish before I fix the knee pops - so please try and ignore those!