007 - Picking up a box animation

Here's another Maya animation.  This one is a fair bit longer than the first, though still really not that long.  It's exaggerated  but that's what I was going for.  Kind of like he's putting on a show.

This one was a little different than the first animation, in that I had to get two hands on there (with the basketball, only one hand actually controls the ball).  I was probably working on this for around a week, and I  got better as I went a long.  The initial bit with his hand scratching his head, then throwing his arms out feels a bit stiff.  I improved it a bit, but it's tough it was touch to fiddle with too much because everything after could be affected.

I like how his hands shift as he lifts the box.

I tried to get it to feel like his leg helps lift the box up.

I think the box looks decently heavy as he takes a couple steps and drops it on the table.

If I do another animation I'll probably try to plan it out a little better ahead of time.  Maybe shoot some reference and plan the camera angle out ahead of time.  On this one I animated everything like it could be seen from every angle, so both his hands do separate things.  If I had known what the final view would be, I could have probably saved some time by focusing more on what would be seen from that view.

It was fun though.  I'd also like to try messing around with the facial expression next time.  On this one I just focused on the motion and left the face alone.

006 - More Life Drawing

Here are some drawings from a couple nights of life drawing.  I'm trying to do a bit of self-editing, but we'll see how that goes.  I like showing both drawings that I like, as well as the ones that I almost like.  The drawings are set to show up pretty small, but you can click on any of them to open them up full size in another window, if you want to see a little more detail.

30 second gestures to start the night.

OK I like this one.  I tried to mix up the straight vs curve bit by focusing on lots of curves.  Feels...graceful.

Tough view of the back from almost straight on.  Think it worked out alright.  The shoulder twist seems to help.

Not bad for a 1min.  I didn't quite get the front foot to feel the way I wanted.

Like the looseness of this 1 min, but it still has structure and weight.

Quite like the flow of this pose.  Seems to draw focus up as the lines get heavier.

Almost like this one.  Botched the hand and possibly forearm.

Here are some from another night.

The model was a little late, so some fellow drawers did a few quick poses while we waited.  I'd been looking at some great gesture drawings from some other blogs where each pose conveyed a story.  I was thinking of that while doing these.

1 minute poses seem quick with clothes.  Sketching more this summer has helped a bit with speed.  Need to buy more paper so that I don't have to cram so many drawings onto one page.

Tried to think of this as a bit of a character rotation, but with different poses.  Also tried to think of it as a scene with three separate but similarly scaled people.  Or maybe I was just worried about running out of paper still.  I think these were 2 minutes each

Two 5 minute poses where I had enough time to get some muscle anatomy and landmarks in there.

10 minute pose.  Remembered to stay light initially and add weight where I wanted it.  I like the press of his hands down on the front leg.  I tried to capture the tired feel that the model/pose were giving off.

That's all for now!

005 - Basketball Animation

Here are a couple views of my basketball animation.  It's the same animation just from different angles.

I did this as part of the summer course I just finished at Capilano University.  The character is an existing model that's all set up to animate.  The character rig is called Morphy.  A lot of student animations use it.  It took a little bit of getting used to, but I was starting to get the hang of it.

Picking up the ball was both easier and harder than it might look.  It took a bit of work to get some commands set up so that once he picks up the ball it "sticks" to his hand, but once that was set up the hand and ball remained together until the shot release.

The net was kind of tricky to.  For just a few frames of animation it required some controls called deformers (I think) to be placed on it.  Something like this would have been much easier to do traditionally I think.  The mesh is actually a cylinder with the top and bottom cut off, then with the bottom shrunk, then with a texture applied that was transparent except for where the mesh was.

I added the second character after setting up the controls for having the ball attach to the first guy's hands, so ended up having to move the ball and hands manually, which took some time.

It was fun to do though.  The ball ended up feeling pretty close to the way I thought it should.  The ball is animated too, I didn't add gravity to the scene and then use a physics model or anything like that.

Maya is the program I used, and you can actually manipulate the individual curves for each attribute (like location in x,y,z and rotation in x,y,z).  So there is actually a lot of behind the scenes physics stuff to think about.  Like the vertical movement of the ball is in the y direction, and it's an arc.  If I flatten out the curve at the top, then the ball hangs a little longer.  If the curve is pointier, then the ball changes direction much faster.

There are so many little things that can be tweaked that it's tough to be "done".  But I'm done with it for now.  A lot of work for 6 seconds though haha, so watch it twice.

004 - Life Drawing

More life drawing.  They've started up the evening life drawing again at Cap which is great.  These are from the past two Thursdays.  Second one went better than the first.  Still a little rusty, and still not liking drawing sitting down.  Hopefully both issues will get sorted out shortly.

Tricky angle on the top face, came out alright though.  Some 30 seconds, 1s, and 2s.

Annoying not being able to easily rotate the page for horizontal poses, then I end up trying to fit more poses in per page since I have odd space remaining.  It actually kind of helped on the bottom pose though, as I ended up really pushing both legs to fit them into the space I had left.

The model brought a Nerf gun, which made for a couple cool poses.

This was the start of the second night.  The model was running a couple minutes late, so while I was talking with my friend James I started drawing him at his drawing stool (incidentally he's sitting on the "donkey" that I like to complain about as being uncomfortable and annoying to draw on).  James told me earlier in the day that someone had loved that he looked like a pirate today.  After that I kept seeing him kind of as a pirate throughout the day.  To be fair though - other than the parrot and sword, the rest of  the gear is pretty accurate.  I like this one.  I showed James at the end of the night and he had a good laugh over it.

Here are a few pages of 30 second poses.  The pose on the left of the last page is pretty weak, but the other three were a nice mix.

This page came out pretty well.  Some nice straights and curves, fairly efficient line.

Nice to get a couple full page poses in.  The feet are a bit off in the 3 minute one.  The left foot should be a little farther forward or angled differently.  Don't really like this one, but parts of it are kind of interesting.

Weight seems pretty good on this one.  I like the feet leading up to the hands, up to the shoulders, to where the head is looking.

These came out alright, but the faces bug me.  Sometimes I remember what line weight is though.

Just messing around.

I like this one too, well most of it.  Right foot is good, left foot...not so much.  Tough angle on the face too, usually I really botch these kind of faces.

Last one of the night.  Ankles and feet couldn't quite get along.  Overall a pretty good night of drawing though.   Definitely nice to get back into it.  More on the way soon!

003 - Dr. Sketchy

Here are some life drawings from yesterday.  I went to this Dr. Sketchy session with my friend Christine.  It was a pretty cool set-up: instead of a studio it was held in a restaurant/pub.  It made the roll of newsprint I brought kind of useless (since there were no easels), but luckily I had my sketchbook.  These are all pretty tiny compared to normal life drawings (5.5" x 8.5" instead of 18" x 24"), but it was definitely a fair trade since I could order a beer.

These first ones were 1 minute poses each.  Heavy pen so I tried not to let it get too "sketchy"

These were more 1s.  The scan kinda messed up the pencil lines, but these weren't anything special.

I used two pens and one pencil (oh and some colour later) for the whole night.  This one was just a regular cheap "clicky" pen.  It has way more of a heavy/light gradient so I tend to sketch a little more with it, kind of roughing things in before darkening things up.

This is how the other two pencil ones were supposed to look (colour wise), I like this drawing better too.

These last two 5 minute poses came out pretty well.  The atmosphere and model were a neat change from the usual life drawing.  Funny how even though the model always had clothes (albeit sometimes just barely - do tassels count as clothes?) the poses were purposefully "hot".

The paper in my sketchbook is actually slightly off-white, I tried highlighting the last one with a white marker, but it didn't really show up.

Played with perspective a bit.  Anyone from Art Fundamentals remember the Bigfoot project?  Thankfully this one took 355 fewer minutes.

Ya this one's a little off.  Lots of people seem to sit with crossed legs, but I still haven't quite figured out how to draw it consistently.  Eyes are a little bizaro too.  I doubt I'll usually post all the drawings from a session, but I put up nearly all of them from this one since it was quite different.

Ha ha...So this one...This one was part of a little mini-contest where the winner was supposed to get a free drink.  The theme was most outrageous anime girl - or something like that.  I don't really watch much anime (although I did catch a few episodes of Soul Eater this week, and incidentally it's kind of awesome but back to this sketch) so other than going for some giant...eyes, I would have been at a bit of a loss.  The catch was that halfway through the time we were supposed to trade sketches with the person next to us.  Luckily I'm pretty sure Christine has seen one or two anime, so she was able to ratchet up the outrageous factor a bit.  If you like this one you can thank Christine, if you don't you can blame the start I passed to her.

This was the first pose after the intermission.  The costume for the second half was "bad school teacher", and I'm not really sure what the costume from the first half was: anime-burlesque-pop?  Either way they were pretty cool, and the model had fun with them.  This was a 15 minute pose, so I tried to go for a clean line once I had some rough structure in there.

Christine brought some nice pencil crayons that I realized part way through, were actually water-colour pencil crayons.  I might try brushing on some water to see what happens to these.  Kept the line looser on this one.  I like the right arm here.

We arrived a couple minutes before the event started, but most of the tables were already full.  Our spot actually ended up being pretty good, except it was a little hard to see just above the bar - where most of this pose was, so either I was stretching to see the feet or guessed somewhat correctly.

Decent enough job on the crossed legs.  The knee socks were actually helpful for finding contours.  Added a little green to contrast the red.  Maybe a little too Christmasy?

Last one of the night.  Might be my favorite too.  Stuck with just a little red against the black.  Decent enough job getting the hips in there, and it actually feels like she's both leaning and sitting.  The feet both seem to have a slight turn to them (rather than being straight profile).  Shoes (especially heels) are oddly annoying to draw, but these seem alright.  I like how the one hand rests on her belly and the other slightly curls around the chair bar.  Nice weight to the pose.  Also, I didn't wreck the face this time and even managed to get the glasses on there.  The elbow bugs me a tiny bit, but I've certainly drawn worse.

That's a wrap.  Pretty fun way to spend a Sunday night.