Stella, splines, and sports!

Our assignments are due on Sundays at 3pm (noon PST). I submitted my final pose (had to make two poses showing motion) at 2:59 Oo. Not from a lack of effort. I've been working as much as possible all week and simply ran out of time. I spent way too long on my Stella animation. Splining = moving your animation from the 'blocking' stage to a finished/polished stage. It refers to the interpolation between the keys, see the pictures below of the graph editor in Maya (the graph editor is a visual representation of the keys and how the animation moves between them...think of it like a graph in algebra class. Time is horizontally along the bottom and the value of the key is vertically along the side)

Changing from blocking to splines can be very unpredictable. The computer might not have the same idea that you have, and if you were not detailed enough in your blocking, you may suddenly find that now you have sliding feet, things poking through the ground, some strange hitches and really floaty movement. The whole challenge is to block as intelligently as possible, and then move to splines one piece at a time (For example, with Stella, I started with her hips, converted them and then played with the splines until I was happy with the motion, the easing in and out, etc. Since the hips affect every other part of the body, it's a logical place to start. Had I started with the legs or the torso, and then changed the hips, I'd have to go back to the other parts and fix them). It's challenging for sure, but I'm definitely getting faster at it.

So without blabbing too much, here's my final Stella Vanilla Walk (Stella Vanilla...haha)!

And the two poses I created (I am anxious to revise these, I'm not very pleased with my work here)

and finally just for kicks...this is a screenshot of the graph editor for Stella's keys Oo

And now...it's time to relax! The next FOUR weeks are going to be spent animating Sloan (which is the new dog character!) The thought of animating four legs is.....exciting? Time for a beer!