Neil's Lectures

Arm Drop

This is my arm drop animation exercise. The first photos show the frames I drew together and how they work together to get the timing right.

This is the animated version of the arm drop.

Moving Ball

This exercise was to animate a ball rolling down the hill and up the other side, we had to get all of the frames to have the right timing which meant, it would have to go fast at the start and slow down.

Character Turn Around

This was a random character turn around we were asked to do to see how well we could do one after being a long time.

Head Turn

We were asked to do a head turn drawing to see if we were able to get all of the angles and proportions the same again. I enjoyed drawing this quick head turn, it's always fun to try it with a completely different styled character.

Posing in Maya

 This is my posing a zombie character into an angry pose. I love posing characters, because it's always a challenge to have a pose that is an obvious movement without a description or explanation needed. I needed to change the original because the shoulders and waist looked too stiff and straight so emphasizing the shoulders adds to the angry look.

This is my example of a happy pose, if I was able to make the mouth smile it would look happier, rather than shocked. I do really like this pose so after tweaking it a few times I kept it like this.

Light/Heavy Box

 This was my example of a character lifting a heavy box. I tried to put all of the weight into the hips and legs because I thought it looked much more like it was a really heavy object and showed him struggling.

This is my pose for carrying a light box that weighs nothing. I thought the character would be in quite a casual pose if they were holding something light, and I used myself for reference. I had to move the torso and hips a few times to make the legs and arm holding the object make sense with the pose.

Short Animations

This is an animation test of someone pushing something heavy. It only shows the keyframes to show the important movements and showing where the weight is.

This was a short test of a jump that shows the anticipation of the movements. Looking at the hips was where the root of most of the movements was coming from. This was the hardest to do after looking at all the reference.

This is an animation test of a person standing up from a chair. I think this one works the best of all of them because the movements are very smooth and natural.