Today was the final Class 1 Q&A. Salem was the only student missing. This class was a blast and Cassidy was definitely the right mentor we needed for our entrance in the animation world. See you all the Euros at Annecy!!!

Regarding my last assignements, I am now suffering from a start of CTS (Carpal Tunnel Syndrome) and will probably have to leave the last 3 assignements as they are. I will try to give my wrist some time off for the moment. I have been using a Wacom tablet since the begining of AM but that still didn’t prevent it to happen. I have now bought a chair with Armrests and next week I am gonna buy a proper desk or just reorganise my old one.

Planning of the Sneak walk:

Spline mode Vanilla walk and first pass Sneak Walk

Stu pose exhausted. no time to do too many sketches this week and it looks like I made the wrong choice.

Revision 108 refining. This is when everything started to go wrong. Too busy at work to spend time on AM, CTS worries, Step mode to Spline workflow issues…. as you can see I deviated a lot from the original planning in order to fix knees pop but I am now ending up with a walkcycle too even on the Y axis. I am still trying to find a workflow in order to fix that.

My first AM walk cycle. It is meant to be a Vanilla Walk (the most basic walk) but I ended up doing a cartoony walk…. will try to fix it for tomorrow.

I have a big issue with the hip of the coming forward leg during the passing position (breakdown). Cassidy is saying that it should go down when I think it should go up. I actually shot some references of myself to confirm it but I am not gonna show u what I look like in Underwears 😉

Taylor…. fun exercise someone said? well… not for me 😐 Everything went wrong this week. I started with an ambitious planning, set up few shortcuts just in case, and decided to animate in step mode for the first time. After more than 20 hours and 2 hours before the deadline, I realised it was going pretty much nowhere. I scrapped it all to restart from scratch, with no planning. No planning? well that was a mistake again. I went ahead for a 2 bounce animation when we were asked to do a 3 bounce. The animation was pretty much finished and adding a third bounce when the overlapping action was done for 2 bounces was not a very good idea. In animation it is called a “hookup” I think. It is something that animators dread and I just experienced why. Luckily I should have time to polish it this week and probably redo the entire tail animation.

did you see my face on the screenshot from Animation Mentor Q&A? yes I have a big issue with the 5.30 AM Q&A…. I just can’t do it! Once again I missed this week Q&A… It is not every day you have the chance to speak to someone who has worked on movies like Shreck 1,2,3, Madagascar, Shark Tales. It is not every day but for me it is meant to be every week and unfortunately my internal clock just can’t do it. Cassidy is a great animator and also a great mentor who wants to share all his knowledge with us so that really sucks….

There’s also this big weight I am dragging with me at the moment… Hopefully this will be resolved in few weeks and I won’t need to work that hard anymore. Well… I am not actually known for being someone who takes it easy but we will see 😉