My previous post confused a few people. They didn't seem to understand that I kept the splines/tangents/f-curves linear so I'm posting this to try and stop the confusion from spreading. I have worked on the cannon ball and feel quite happy with it's timing and weight. Also worked on the splines/tangents/f-curves *sigh* so it will look better. My question is how does it *FEEL*?

Tags: Work In Progress

This week has been a bit hectic so I'm a bit late with my work. This is the first blocking pass of the light vs. heavy bouncing balls. Just trying to get the timing right before I continue to work on the tangents.

Tags: Work In Progress

Ok, so here's my final work. Let's start with the planning stuff:



My planning thumbnails for the bouncing ball. And here's my final submission:



Those planning thumbnails came in very handy when I was roughing it out. And now on to the excitement pose.



Couple of poses I drew, and I liked the dynamic feel of pose number 14. And here's the final render:



I'm feeling quite happy with how things turned out.

And the poster for this week:


Well, time to take a break tomorrow and rest for the next week's work.

Tags: Final

This is my Bouncing Ball assignment for this week's refining pass. It's almost there. Some minor fine tuning and I'll be happy with it. We don't have to do squash & stretch for this week so it's a basic timing exercise. Also helped in planning out the scene.

Tags: Work In Progress

I'm still waiting for my ISP to fix my internet issues with regards to connecting to the AM Student website so that I can upload my work in progress. Decided to put it up here for now. Had loads of fun with this, and it's also my first assignment I done using my Wacom tablet.

Tags: Work In Progress

I received my first e-Critique today. Thanks Mark! Some very neat tips he had for my drawing skills to improve them, and also how to make my pose a little bit better. So here is the revised version. Moved the hips slightly to screen-right. Brought the character's left arm out slightly to leave a gap between the fist and the torso. Also tweaked the hip-rotation a bit so the character's right leg seems better in the crotch area. I'm truly happy with it now. This way I learn what small things to watch out for.

This week’s poster:


Off to sketching and animating the bouncing ball, and also find some excitement.

Tags: Final

This is what my final pose is. It has been a very difficult choice between this one and the beer drinking one (pose 11). I'm pretty happy with my first real assignment for Class 1.

Tags: Final

I chose the top 3 from the previous sketches and posed Stu. So far I'm really pleased with number 9 and 11. But, number 11 might win by a fraction to become my final entry for this week's assignments.

Tags: Work In Progress

Got to say I think this week's Q&A was quite interesting. It was the first "real" Q&A we had pertaining to animation and our assignments for this week so a lot of good questions came out of it. And Mark's work showing us examples was just spectacular. Awesome stuff from an awesome man. Time for me to toddle off and go pose Stu. Will post my work here soon for you all to enjoy.

Tags: Q&A

So far this week has been off to a good start. Our assignment this week is to sketch general everyday poses, and then choose one of those that has the best potential of being a strong pose.


This is my first set of poses I drew. After confusing the hell out of my fellow students I promised to redraw the popular poses using the body shapes of the character we use.


After getting some wonderful feedback I chose the top four poses and redraw them. Here they are and I know I can still improve on pushing some of the poses to more extremes. however that is something I would definitely do when posing the character.

Will keep you guys updated as to which 1 (or perhaps 2) pose/s I would use for posing my character.

Tags: Work In Progress

After having done a dry-run of my workflow for the weekly assignments during last week, I'm ready to rock this joint and churn my assignments out on time (or rather that is what I hope).
The assignment for Week 2 of Class 1 is just sketching some quick poses of people in everyday life. Living in a really small town with no park and just 1 coffee shop makes it quite hard to do so. I have been considering driving somewhere to a shop and sit in the car and sketch people.
Easiest would be to fire up a movie and just sketch people from that. The option to pause it and have a good look at it is enticing but I think the whole idea is to be able to take a snapshot with your mind and then draw from that snapshot. I guess I will have to hide the mouse in order not to hit the pause button. Will post the sketches soon.

I’ve also been thinking about creating some posters to post on my fellow student workspaces. So here goes the first one:

Michael Taylor, who is an alumni over at AnimationMentor, posted this list that his girlfriend, Jacquie Gouveia, posted on her blog. I found it quite brilliant and hillarious and decided to post it here.

This list goes out to my counterparts in the animation world. Enjoy!

1. “The Illusion of Life” is on your bookshelf. There is a yellow glow around it and you hear angels sing every time it’s opened.
2. A trip to the toy store isn’t for the kids.
3. When you hear the word arc, you know it has nothing to do with Noah.
4. They strongly believe (and you must agree) Wall-E should be nominated and win an Oscar for Best Film. In fact, the academy shouldn’t even waste there time nominating any other films, why bother?
5. “When She Loved Me” by Sarah Mclachlan makes them cry.
6. Lasseter, Stanton and Bird have become the guy friends who won’t leave.
7. You have some sort of Star Wars paraphernalia in your house.
8. There is often a video camera set up in your bedroom, but it isn’t for kinky reasons.
9. They have convinced you that the pot of gold at the end of every rainbow is a myth. It’s actually Pixar.
10. All the love and passion they express for their craft, is nothing compared to all the love and passion they express for you.

So we just finished our first Q&A for Class 1. It was an introductory one where we got to meet everyone as they were put on live cam to chat about themselves and briefly tell us who they are, where they are from, why they want to animate etc.

Mark is also a really cool guy. Loved the work he did on Garfield and Garfield 2. Working at Weta must also be a blast. One day when I'm big I hope to be able to work for a big studio like that.

Seeing as this first week's assignment was really not much I decided to start working on next week's assignment already. Got a few poses sketched out and I'm busy posing Stu.

Tags: Q&A

Last night I downloaded the AM menu with tools and installed it as per their instructions. Only to find that it didn't want to communicate with their servers to download the latest codes for all the tools. I logged a ticket and Kevin replied with a few things to try and tell him what the results are. Which I did and he couldn't understand why it would happen. He then scheduled an remote support session with me at 1AM his time! How's THAT for customer support?
So we connected and he started to remotely troubleshoot. Turns out that it seems like my ISP's proxy is to be blamed for the problems. Kevin then proceeded to compile a license for my PC, and then proceeded to download all the latest code for the tools to my machine. I'm now the proud owner of the grease pencil tool and other wonderful tools and utilities. Now just to create a shelf for it.

Tags: Support

So the campus opened up and the thundering noise of the students rushing in could be felt over the internet (and Facebook for that matter). Having done the Springboard semester end of last year I felt comfortable immediately. However, a few (and that is quite a few) new content was added. We gotten access to Stu, which is the basic biped character. And then there are some more Tools that got added (like the custom AM shelf for Maya) and also some more training videos.

And almost immediately messages from fellow classmates and other students in higher semesters started pouring into my AM Inbox. And with me being notified of every incoming messages, so did my GMail Inbox also start to fill up with notification emails. However, there was a problem. For every one message received in my AM Inbox, I got two notification emails in my GMail Inbox. Also in my workspace the notification box for messages showed every message notification twice. But the actual messages was only appearing once in my AM Inbox. So I quickly hopped onto the Technical Support page and logged a ticket. It was not even an hour when I received a reply from Jay thanking me for informing them of the problem, and that they will investigate it. As the day progressed I started noticing that I only receive one notification email and after a few hours, my student workspace notification area also only showed the messages once.

As I was busy trying to watch my pre-recorded video lesson for the week stream to my PC, it would stop every 30 seconds or so and wait for the streaming buffer to catch up before it would continue to play (thanks for the telephone line Telkom that I cannot get because the area I live in is not in your planning for this bookyear or the next bookyear to get a telephone line, even though we are surrounded by houses that does have your monopoly-telephone lines and there is an exchange less than a kilometer down the road!)
So anyways, again I logged a support ticket explaining my problem to the support guys and lo & behold... two hours later Jay responded saying that they have disabled the no streaming option for my account and that I can buffer up the video first for a while and then hit play to watch smooth, uninterrupted video! Isn't that just the best? I am so stoked about the support guys. And the rest of the school are the same kind of people that doesn't have the word "cannot" in their vocabulary.

That's it for me for now. Peace out and see you guys on the flipside.

Tags: Support

Ah yes. The silence before the storm. After having gotten my feet wet by attending the AnimationMentor Springboard class, I feel so much better prepared for the full course. I have gotten some hands-on experience with the website tools. To me, that is golden. Now I know if my system and internet connection is ready for what I can only explain as the most incredible 18-month learning experience I have ever attempted. I will also update my gallery weekly showing my progress and final submission for the weekly assignment. I might even post some blog comments about my thought process.