Flipping Into Class 2

Greetings all,

It's been a few weeks since the end of class 1 and since there was no real break involved I have been happily animating for my newly assigned mentor Nate Wall. His background is with Blue Sky Studios where he did work on Ice Age 3, as well as the wonderful Rio which I absolutely adored. He is now working for Dreamworks and is super nice and chill, but most importantly knows his stuff when it comes to feedback and working through a shot. So I am very lucky indeed!

So for my first shot of class 2 I decided to do something I've been wanting animate for quite some time, a backflip:) Before taking it on I did a whole load of research ranging from pictures to tutorials and videos on youtube.

I came across plenty of flips and gained enough insight on the physics and body mechanics, but as far as the anticipation beforehand and the recovery afterwards went I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted. I did the best thing possible and acted it out myself and came up with a great improvised sort of stumble. Here's my compiled reference:

With a nice idea taking shape I dove straight into sketching out my important poses and breakdown keys, and making a rough plan for how the shot would play through in terms of the timing and spacing.

Now having a clear idea of all the goals I want to achieve with the shot I can start blocking out and putting down a solid foundation to work with in Maya. In this stage I'm setting clear story telling poses in place as well as poses that really point out the given amount of change that happens through the timing from pose to pose. Treating every pose in CG as a drawing makes this a fluid and creative process.

After this the process of getting feedback and making changes is very important, and not being afraid of changing something you worked on (or redoing something entirely). Here's first pass at seeing what the inbetweens are doing:

At this stage I needed to further implement some intelligent feedback. Mainly concerning some of the timing; like the hangtime at the apex of the jump, as well as correcting some of the drag and follow through in the recovery. After working through the feet,knees and body some more (tweaking those curves we all know and love) I came up with my final result

Is by no means perfect, but deadlines are deadlines;) and I am pleased with the result and am again much better off in terms of my workflow and creativity as a result of challenging myself.