Saturday, February 14, 2009

Talking about Inspiration!

Something Animation Mentor always pushes us to do is to look at, or do that one thing that fires you up. Be it watching movies, playing video games, drawing, reading, hanging out with your friends, going to the gym etc. Basically anything that will help you find inspiration and keep you motivated. For me it's different things. Like, watching movies, playing games, looking at holiday pictures and also...looking at stuff like this!



This gave me such a motivation boost the other day, but it also had me thinking of how lucky I am to be able to study 3D animation. What really blows my mind is that the incredible animator who made this is completely self-taught. So, what I'm going to learn at Animation Mentor for the next year and a half, this guy had to figure out all by himself. Unbelievable!

After seeing something like that my assignment of this week will look like child's play... But it really wasn't that easy. Check it out!



Sure, go ahead and laugh....:P Anyway this assignment is to teach us the importance of overlapping action or breaking of joints. Basically what that means is that you make things look loose and not so rigid. For example when a girl with long hair jumps. It takes a few seconds for the hair to follow the movement of the head and followthrough. Other example is in the video above. The dinosaurs tale moving left and right, reacting to the body.

So you see all these little assignments that we are doing may seem useless to some people. But it applies to all animations, cartoony as well as realistic. Getting more advance as we go.

Now for the next assignment were actually going to move to the next level. We have to make a ''squirrel like character'' jump using the principles of Squash and Stretch and Overlap. Here's next weeks model called ''Tailor''.