Made a work in progress video for the Parkour test!

Arms blocked in!

Just want to do a little clean up and exaggerating here and there before moving on...

Landed! Now....

So I've landed him, my next move I'm going to make him take a step/hop back and half turn to do another parkour move over an obstacle!

OR....I should probably do his arms before I move on no? arrgh this is where I hit a cross roads with decision making! >_<

Just need to land him...

Starting some parkour stuff!

So, it's been recommended to me to try out animating some stuff from parkour reference and then implementing an interesting action camera afterwards.

Just starting off with a little hop and jump, then we'll see where this goes.

Got 2/3 of the blocking done today, he's about to do a cool flip and land I promise :)

My Animation Reel!!!

 

3rd Pass and starting to clean up....

I this rig had facial controls I would have liked to do more with this, but for now I think I'll keep it as the little test piece it is and move onto flight animation next :)

2nd Pass...

Added a bit of head movement, a sniff here and there and some chest and hips movement....

 

Finished Blocking!

Now onto the fun stuff!!
I'm going to go back and clean up those legs, make some nice poses and key sections and we'll go from there!

Working on the footfalls first...

Silliness!!! Am I setting myself up for a headache?

Step 1...Planning my route and timing, kind of :P

 

Step 2...I'm going to force my legs to follow along, and then go back and tweak spine and feet relationship, I could be mad or this might work..

Exciting news!

"London Calling: How Sarah Smith Plans to Bring Animation Back to the UK"

Nice interview here in Animation World with Sarah Smith (previous creative director at Aardman Animation) discussing her starting of a new UK based animation company Locksmith Animation!

http://www.awn.com/animationworld/london-calling-how-sarah-smith-plans-bring-animation-back-uk?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook

and the article from Variety earlier on in the year announcing it:

http://variety.com/2014/film/news/elisabeth-murdoch-double-negative-back-sarah-smiths-new-u-k-animation-house-locksmith-exclusive-1201155345/

Had a day off so another quick update....

Dog Run Cycle Animation ~ Addressed Feedback

I tried to address the feedback I was given and speed it up a smidge, here's the result:

My Push&Pull project, half finished....

Someone recently reminded me of a project left half finished.  When I realised I lacked fundamentally in creature work I stopped all else and concentrated on creature body mechanics etc

So I stopped this character project where I was just playing about with push and pull poses and frustration in general.   These blocking frames were as far as I got, so here's some stills:

and just for fun, here's all of that stitched together for one superspeed package delivery....

Next time I have a break in between jobs I'll definitely try and finish it, it's a bit long for a test piece, it's more the length of a short me thinks.

Dog Run Cycle Animation ~ Clean-up and a bit of secondary animation and Feedback!

So I think I've pushed the basic cycle as far as I'm going to, some of the blendshapes for the rig aren't right for the exaggeration I was trying to create in the shoulder muscles but it brakes the rig.
I've added some secondary animation (would of loved to have the jaw open and tongue flailing in the wind but for this rig currently there are no facial controls).

Next up, I'm going to try and bring some character to him!

Some feeback I received for this was the following, with which I'm going to try and address for next time:

• his back looks a little too bendy, probably more from the shoulders rather than his hip..
• head might read better a little lower when his front legs are coming forward..
• also his rear legs if you bring them forward on the contact to nearer the shoulders, where they are they look like a hop rather than a push..
• front legs are feeling good, maybe offset one a little more so they hit the ground further apart..
  

Dog Run Cycle Animation ~ Blocking 2

So the hind legs were working out to be a bit of a mess, and after many passes of trying to fix it so that I could save all the nice stuff I liked, I broke all the connections and zeroed it out.  So then I just had the front legs going and all the body motion, from looking at it in this layered manner, I figured out when my hind leg footfalls should be and first off did both hind legs as one like this:

Then I offset one of the legs by just a smidge, as I've been seeing in a lot of reference footage it almost looks like a Doberman is using both his legs synchronized, but there is in fact the slightest offset.  And hopefully I can start finessing it tomorrow:

Art Station

Brand new community and portfolio website service for professional artists. :) It's still in the Beta test stages and you can only join if you're invited to start with, but once this grows it looks like a great resource for artists and employers alike :)

http://www.artstation.com/about

Dog Run Cycle Animation ~ Blocking 1

Here's what I have so far after Blocking out 6 key poses that I recognise from a dog run from reference footage and imagery.

As you can see, I haven't really looked at the run from the front, the legs are going in a very linear direction and there isn't any in and out movement from his feet.  So this is something I have to consider for tidying up.

I think from here I need to solidify those foot falls, it's all very floaty at the moment.....

Behind the Animation

There's a great new channel on youtube where it seems they are collecting a lot of nice animation progression shots from the professionals.  It's really nice to see how they are all pieced together, I insist everyone subscribe to channels like these:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn-Rn1NqLkY64R_KKPILTSQ/videos

a few examples:

Starting Dog Animation work!

Found this lovely new FREE rig on creative crash and got inspired again :)

http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/dog

It's been a long while because I've been working on Guardians of the Galaxy but my time is starting to free up again.  In celebration (and completely not doing the normal thing of planning a holiday), I'm going to have another crack at animating dogs - my Achilles heel so far. 

I have loads of nice little ideas for dog animation, something grabbing it's attention, sniffing around a tree, running after a fake ball throw etc etc

But my usual problem is I try to skip ahead to the fun nitty gritty animation before getting my base work done and planning.  I'm going to re-familiarise myself with dog walks and runs first.

So, I give you - planning!!!

I've compiled a bit of reference, some inspiration, some real life footage, some good old Muybridge ref:

And just plenty of inspiring 4-legged work here :)