alexiss dawn

I’ve been taking a bit of a new approach in work flow as I’ve been animating my film. I’m spending a lot more time outside of Maya right now as things get fleshed out. I started doing it when we were getting into layout during class 5 and am keeping at it now that we’re into blocking. What? Why?! In the ramp up tutorials Jason Ryan has been doing I’ve been seeing his approach of sketching it out before getting into Maya. I tried for a bit on my tiny wacom but man alive, it just doesn’t translate well to my big monitor. The day I get a Cintiq will be beautiful. But for now, I’ve been doing it all the old school paper way. Yes, my tool of choice is a Sharpie. It’s been great so far for figuring out what I want from the poses and how the motion is going to flow between them. Seriously! I feel a lot more prepared when I get into Maya and I get through it faster than I have before because I go in knowing just what I want.

Back in class 1 we had to do several poses almost every week with Stu. Now more than ever I see the reason for it all. The more you practice posing and just loose sketch, not worrying about how it looks and just going for the motion, the more you start to understand about movement and the body and appeal. Not saying I know a ton, but I’ve come a long way since class 1. The sketches from a year ago…oh man. I’m no 2D artist, but I can totally see how important it is to sketch and explore posing and motion. And it certainly prepares you more to jump in and get those poses in Maya.

Sharpies…available at your local, well, pretty much any store.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 7:44 pm and is filed under Animation, Animation Mentor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.