Posing Exercise

Here's my latest side project!

In order to keep up with practicing my animation and incorporating my drawing more with my work I took up this posing exercise project. I wanted to get to grips with blocking more and really nailing the initial poses. But also to get more comfortable working in the graph editor, and splining animation.


 I'm quite pleased with the result. I have been watching a lot of tutorials and guides on splining better; things to look for in the graph editor, how to quickly use it to edit poses. Just generally trying to get more comfortable with it. But none of that is useful unless I can block well. I feel like blocking is the most important step but also a big balance. I know that in that stage I shouldn't be touching the graph editor. But the more key frames I add in the better the movement gets, but then changing timing gets trickier, its definitely a balance.

 In terms of just this animation, the last pose could have used a bit more work. The timing took a lot of time to get down, especially on the jump but I found shifting just a few keys around made a big difference before I got into splining. I found that for some poses I felt like I got a really nice flow between them, and I think this is important. When I sketched out the poses I wasn't really thinking about this. But when the weight of the character makes nice arcs I think that's when animation looks really nice. Arcs are definitely important and I want to try and make more use of this fact in future, right from when I'm planning my poses.

 I had originally intended to render this in Renderman, that meant swapping out the materials on the character to Renderman specific ones, this worked ok at first, but seems to have slowly destroyed my Maya, a total reinstall, plugins and all fixed it. Definitely not something I'll be attempting in future, and if I do I'll totally rebuild all the materials from scratch.

 I'd like to do more Animation practice like this. I do want to move onto a new rig, so I'll be looking for one soon, or think about creating my own if I am feeling brave!

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