What's your poison

Well there are a few things I would change here but I think it looks nice as it is.

I had a lot of fun acting for this shot :P

What's your poison? from Joao Viegas on Vimeo.

Clarity and Overlapping Ideas

Well this is my "finished" animation and my idea for the new animation.

Epic dive from Joao Viegas on Vimeo.

This story board feels still a bit unclear, so I'll explain, person picks and throws dead body!

God I haven't updated this for ages... My project is "finished" though there is soooo much it would like to improve it, man one day I will finish a project and think "yes I did all it could be done"

Untitled from Joao Viegas on Vimeo.

On other news I found a new way to hurt animation mentor's beloved character Stewie, this is my plan....

Walk-Through a Shot

Well I was decided my first assignment for the term, a very simple gag: A Sunday golfer tries to hit the ball but he hits a puppy by mistake, I made a basic storyboard acting the main poses of this short piece.

Soon enough I'll have a block test laying this animation

End of term

I have been really busy in my last two weeks, so I didn't have much time to publish posts... anyways here is my latest progress reel,

Untitled from Joao Viegas on Vimeo.

09 Timing and spacing

Well this week I stated splining my animation this is what I done so far... the last steps feel a bit light to me...

Splining the feet from Joao Viegas on Vimeo.

Arcs and Path of Action

Alas my final result, again there is some stuff to improve, I could tweak the secondary animation on the hands and make the head more stable, and perhaps exaggerate some positions, but it's fine for now :)

Block Test Arms from Joao Viegas on Vimeo.

And the torso was made, it's ironic that it was animated when I had a massive back pain and could not move it :P

block test, torso from Joao Viegas on Vimeo.

The block test for the legs of my tap dance sequence, I hope to have the torso fully done By tomorrow!

Block test legs from Joao Viegas on Vimeo.

Walk-Through - Blocking to Final

After a long painful week I polished the animation, the "last 10%" I never though I would make it...

Untitled from Joao Viegas on Vimeo.

I'm still not happy with some minor details but It's time to move on and start working on my next piece

Walk-Through- Blocking to Final

This is the semi final version of my work, so much to do tough, well I have a hole week to make it look smooth and sort out the time :) I hope it will look nicer then

Untitled from Joao Viegas on Vimeo.

I am starting to wonder why I give the posts these names... They really don't relate with the work I'm producing, they are more the titles of the video lectures, well I guess it maintains a certain sense of order!

This week I decided to publish a post a little bit earlier because I am feeling that I'm not having enough results on my block test, so if anyone wants to leave some feedback about this animation, specially around frames 78 to 129 . Anything will be welcome

Parkour re-block from Joao Viegas on Vimeo.

Introduction to Staging and Composition

This week my mentor told me that I bit more than I could chew so I cut down the animatic by 30 odd frames

In-depth Look at Hips

Finally I get to do the Parkour exercise. We are to animate 200 frames of parkour running sequence . I'm really exited about this.

Here is my final animatic and video reference:

Walk-Through Blocking to Final

My passing from blocking to a refined animation would not have been possible without the " Arc 3D tool" This tool is everything that the motion trail tool from Maya should be! If you are in to animation go to animationrigs.com and get their tools, they worth the money they charge for them

Walk-Through Clarity in Blocking

Finally found some time to put my work in, this is a playblast of my block test, no much to say except that I learned the importance of adding hip movement and anticipation at this stage.

I have been away

I have been not posting work lately, cause It's mainly planning stuff, and I would like to put an old animation that I made. It's rough on purpose I wanted to have the feel of an early stop motion animation, like the ones I used to watch when I was a kid.

The main reason I'm putting this animation here is to remind myself of what first drive me to animate and where I want to take my work as an independent animator. I hope you guys cab enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it! I had a LOT of fun... :) Good old days

Walks with different weights and review, end of term

This is the final week of class 01, basic foundations, it was an intense trimester but it was also a lot of fun. I'm going to miss my mentor Don Kim and a few other blokes at am, Sean, Angela, Shomari, Paris and Caroline to name a few. Always giving good advice and a tap in the back when the work was not so great.

I just made a progress reel for my accomplishments for this term, I might change it if I change tailor...

God I feel nostalgic :P

Spline Editing Part Two

This week I interpolated last weeks block test and added a 3/4 prespective

Here are my thumbnails of my process

This week we needed to make a pose that communicated balance, this was my favourite pose although I still feel I can improve...

Here are the sketches

Introduction to Walks with character

This week we started walks with character. I made an exhausted walk cycle block test.

The assignment for this week was exaustion

09 - Exaggeration and Weight

This week's lecture was about exaggeration and weight, or the importance of them. It is interesting how much there is to consider over something that seems so self explanatory, like how exaggerating a real pose can make it more real than the real one... Well in this week we had to apply those principles to our last weeks assignment, the block test, and transform it in to a nice walk.

It was in this stage that I came to realize the things that seemed trivial in my block test made a great difference when interpolated. So I redid the block test...

And still after the most careful execution of a block test that I ever made there were still errors that I had problems fixing. Mainly how the IK handles can cause a very disconcerting knee popping, which was corrected by adding some squash and stretch in the legs. The rest, like the foot roll and the head bob are to be fixed next week.

My mentor found that the poses reflected concern, although they were very similar in the legs. Which I find him to have a good point. I'll try to have more mixed motion on next week assignment .

Well here is the selected pose converted to Stu, I feel that slowly I'm getting in to grips with posing, but I think I need to be a bit more lose when it comes to posing, I try to make the character to follow a path rather than free his body.

Introduction to Walks

Hello everyone

This is the work made on my week 8 of animation mentor. This time around we were given "Ballie", a cute little ball with legs that we were supposed to do a block test of a vanilla walk. Vanilla walk stands for the generic template walk, so this block test has to show the least personality possible.

Well this is the planning that I have made to create the walk cycle, more and more I find drawing to be the best way to start animating. I guess it's because the more I draw the easier it becomes, and it's way faster than posing characters...

Speaking of posing characters, here are my weekly pose sketches. This time around I used my pen tablet, It is not as expressive as a proper pen and paper I find, but it is easier to correct your work which makes up for it. Who knows maybe one day I'll be good at using it.

I'm kinda pleased with my Stu pose but The suggestions of my tutor were very good I might redo this one for next week

I was unsure if I should my revision file or not. I am really not happy with the result, but the objective of this blog more of a diary than anything else, so all things considered I will pot it. In the future I might find it amusing rather than annoying.

I really hope I get the chance to work on it again, I really want to get the grip on overlapping, action.

Spline Editing Part One

Hello everyone!

This has been a long time since I last updated this blog.

At animation mentor I went over with a few of the principles of animation.

So in this last exercise we were given this character called tailor (a ball with a tail :P) and had to make it do a least of thee bounces.

My bounce as inspired by the Super Mario triple jump.

So here is the result!

Well and here is the planning that I have made for this animation.

Planning actually helps a lot ;P

Overlapping Action

I have been told that overlapping action is one of the hardest things to get right in animation. And it is true this was not something so straight forward as the bouncing balls that I have made so far, but practice makes it perfect right? (Lets hope for my sake).

So in this attempt I animated just the first joint of the pendulum, making it like a clock, then I created a offset of that same motion to the following pendulums, this animation was mainly made in the graph editor.

Well, here is the planning I made for my pendulum and here it reveals one of the situations were I can still improve. Reduce the pendulum speed more in the ends to create a greater speed contrast.

Anticipation and Squash and Stretch

For me Squash & Stretch must be one of the most fun things to animate so far. Well as long as you have the timing and spacing animated just right :P. So this week we were given an obstacle course to throw our bouncing ball in. Once I made sure that all the arcs were spot on and the timing was acceptable I started adding the squash and stretch, It kinda felt like adding a new layer on top of that I already made that got my animation looking so much more interesting.

Okay and here is the planing, as you guys can see here there are the error that were transported to the animation. The most pertinent one being the overly gradual squash and stretch.

And of course, we had another pose to show off some emotion, this time devastation.

This pose was based on the second pose from bottom right, I rotated it 3/4 and added a bit of more curvature to the spine, and of course the hand on the head. I personally find the hand a bit of a cliche, but devastation is such a hard emotion to read only from body language that is probably a good thing to be a bit cheesy.

Introduction to Timing and Spacing

Hello everyone

After my animation was submitted under the analytical eye of my mentor, I remade my bouncing ball with his advice in mind.

I evened out the arcs of the ball and worked a bit on the timing making giving a more sudden landing on to the ball. I still find the first arc to need some improvement and the ball probably still holds itself in the air for too long on the second arc. I might remake this one of these days.

This week's assignment was to create a heavy and a light ball bounce in the same scene. I used a ping pong versus a bowling ball. I did some thumb-nailing to plan this project but I based it heavily on life footage.

It was interesting to notice that although people reacted quite well to the ping-pong ball everyone felt that the bowling ball was too bouncy even though I was quite faithful to the live footage. I concluded that animating seems to be combining what is real with what feels right and at the same time I have to correspond to peoples expectations.

Here are my thumbnails, The more I make them the more useful they seem to become. Both of these projects are by far not perfect. I received positive and sharp criticism back from them. The bowling ball fall needs a bit of a tweak when it is falling down. Also I was told how to have the right frames in the right place to improve the ease in and out. I guess I am trusting on Maya graph editor too much.

My second AM assignment

Well this is part of last week's assignment. Here are a set of sketches of poses to express excitement. The next step would be use the AM Maya character and pose him according to one of the drawings. This was the result.

Oh yes, and lets not forget, my very first official exercise of a bouncing ball!

Exiting :)

Well that's it for last week's work. Today by 8pm (GMT time) I'll be presented with a couple of new challenges.

Speak to you guys soon!

My first post

Hello Everyone

Today is a beautiful Sunday morning in lovely Bournemouth in the UK. I woke up in a good mood, went downstairs and made myself a big bowl of cheerios. While chewing them I was going over my head about all the stuff I set myself to do during this week. Doing this blog came to my mind. I have been wanting to create a blog since I joined animation mentor so I could post some of my work and see what feedback I can get.

So I guess the next thing will be posting some material right.