Head Turns

Our first test was to do some head turns, here I did the study and then also completed a head turn of my own character.

I found that the head turn was quite hard to get my head around (pun intended).

Here is my test: 

And here is my character head turn:

Horse/Dog/Cat Run

The run of the four legged creatures was actually my most fun. I think in particular because I was beginning to get better at my line work and understanding the capabilities of flash. I decided to have more fun and add more to the original designs than I have with others.
These to me, are my best works yet.

Dog (semi cat hybrid):

Cat (with secondary motion of the bell):

Horse (Centaur - Mixed horse with my Character)

Lip Sync

Oh my lord, this was a toughy!
The first time I did this, my mouth came out way to fast, as I had animated every single phoneme in the voice. Unfortunately at 24 FPS that comes out looking like a really bad rapper.
After talking to Vaughn he suggested stringing out specific starting phonemes more. I think the end result turned out MUCH better than the first.

This GIF however is a bit fast - (It speed up?) compared to the actual file..
I am unsure why.

Jumping/Lifting

I looked at the jump sequences that were given to us as reference, but found them to be rather boring (Sorry Vaughn) But I did come up with a jumping roll, it isn't the greatest but i'm fairly proud of it! :P

Running Jump Sequence.

Lift Sequence:

Frame that I worked from.

I was really happy with my lift sequence - the added shadow, particularly to the bottom of the rock, helps give a sense of grounding and deepens that idea of being lifted. As its lifted the shadow gets smaller and weaker.

Run Cycles

For run cycles I really wanted to try capture a sense of secondary movement in my character, as he is a larger lad, I wanted to get the movement of his belly particularly to move in conjunction with his steps. As he comes up, so does his belly, and he comes down etc etc.

Side Run:

Front Run - Robot!

I decided to go with a robot, I had quite honestly had enough of my character and felt like spicing things up a little.

Walk Cycles

Man this one was hard! Getting my character to walk in three concepts was no easy task, and unfortunately each cycle has a different walk pattern.. Annoying but I was unsure on how to appropriately fix this.

Test Walk Cycle:

Front Walk

Side Walk

3/4 Walk

The 3/4 Walk was by far the hardest. And literally blew my mind!

Bird Flight

Bird flight was an interesting one, with the movement of the wings, and getting the tail to move in proper conjunction with the body.

My first attempt was a side view, which I then added a second bird and a surprise ending.
A real tear jerker!

My front view I tried to add another object to offset the movement of the bird, but also to get an understanding of how the movement of one object affects the movement of another.

Bouncy Ball

This one I had lots of fun with, originally I was really unsure about what to do to make this ball unique, until I had the fun idea to burst somebodies bubble!

Freehand Drawing

Added some shadows to give the ball grounding.

POP!

I decided to give the ball an almost 'balloon' effect when it hits the spike. Which zooms around the room before coming to rest fully deflated.

Ease In/Pendulum

More motion studies dealing with how we can trick the eye to give a sense of physical realism in terms of gravity etc using frame distance to give a sense of 'speed'.

Pendulum:

Ease in - Ease out:

I find it interesting how just the adjustment of distance apart per frame can give a sense of accleration or slowing down.

Final Pose

After all the phases, it was time for me to create my final pose. My final pose was selected from one of the five that I created and taken to a 'new level'. For this I decided to add colour, but also add the character into a scene. This scene in my mind had to give credence to the back story of the character as well. As such I chose to create a 'dojo' scene.

Colour Pose

This was the pose I selected from my list, mainly for the flow of action and expression. I also rendered the clothing and added colour to this final pose to give it a more animated and animation feel. the Skintone colour I found online via google. This allowed me to colour pick a reasonably nice skin tone inside Photoshop.

Final Pose with Scene

My final pose with the scene I painted. This scene is meant to represent a dojo or martial arts gym which he practices in. I also added the shadow to give him a sense of 'grounding' within the image, as he is a cutout from another file.

I am overall very happy with the final result!

Character turn around

Well, this has been the hardest thing for me so far in Animation. The turn around's really started to do my head in, in particular the 3/4 turns. I think in general however I managed to figure them out fairly well. My character really feels like it is coming to life. I actually had begun my Turn around before my poses, but I did not finish my turn around until after my poses, majorly due to the nature of getting it as accurate as possible!

Kung Fu Panda was my main influence for my poses, but also my character's physical features.

Turn around Sheet

Final Turn around Animated

Poses Sheet

I was really unsure how to pose my character, so I searched some martal art poses, and found this useful image from Mavinga.com. These became my resource, however I still had to compete with the fact my character is not your 'average' martial artists, but rather a rather fat one. Because of this I had to do a lot of trial and error sketches underneath the character to which I later removed.

Reference Images

My final poses

Overall I was very happy with the final pose, I get a feeling of flow and movement from my character and I believe overall I worked out the intricacies of these poses with his belly being the major defining factor.