Long time no blog...

So, besides my last post, I haven't updated my blog in over a year... so sad. I decided to write a few updates on what I've been up to since I started school at the beginning of the year. I started at AAU in January. My first semester I took 3 classes: Character Animation 2, Maya 2 and History of Character Animation. I really enjoyed the History of Character Animation class. It was taught by the director of the graduate animation program, Tom Bertino. Tom is really cool and he sure does know his stuff. I learned a lot about the history of animation that I hadn't learned before. It was really informative, a lot of fun, and I got to watch animation every week!

In my Maya 2 class, I worked on a 3D self portrait for the first half of the class. It turned out alright, but certainly nothing to brag about. For the last half of class we did a bunch of different dynamics simulations with Fur, Hair, nCloth, & nParticles. I learned quite a few cool tricks and workarounds, which might come in useful in the future. For the final project, it was pretty open ended, and we had to pitch an idea. I decided to take one of my animations from Character Animation 2 class and finalize it, build the set, texture, light and render. It was only a 100 frame animation, but it was quite challenging to finish none the less. This is how it turned out:



The last class was Character Animation 2. I had it with Jeff Cooper, a senior animator at Sega. Jeff is a great teacher, he gave me a lot of good feed back on my work. I only wish that he spent less time on critique and more time lecturing. We did quite a few projects in the class. We started off with a bouncing ball and a simple pendulum exercise. We then had a choice of doing a 2 or 4 legged walk cycle. I had never done a Quadruped walk in 3D, so i decided to give it a go. This is how it turned out:



After the walk cycle, we were given an assignment to animate someone answering the phone. The catch was that we had a 100 frame limit and only one week to finish. This is the same assignment I decided to complete for my Maya 2 class. After the 100 frame exercise, we moved on to a gear-change/ emotional shift exercise. I decided to do a snobby wine-o at a wine tasting. I got way too ambitious with this assignment and it ended up being almost 11 seconds, so I didn't finish it. I hope to go back and polish it up in the future. After that assignment, we moved on to a dialogue piece. I found a good clip of Madeline Kahn from Young Frankenstein. I decided to go outside my boundaries again and try to animate a woman character. I feel like I did pretty well. I haven't quite finished it yet, but I will post it up when I do. The last assignment was another 100 frame exercise. This time, the theme was lifting a heavy object. Again, I tried to push the assignment by trying to do a super hero lifting and throwing a car, which ended up being way to complicated to finish in a week. I got some good feed back and I have to go back to blocking with it, so yet another piece on the back-burner.

That is all for now. I'm going to do another post soon with a recap of the summer semester and how fall is going so far.