Life drawing

Here's all of my life drawing stuff. Some of it is from classes, some of it is from life drawing classes, some of it is stuff I did in my spare time.

Hand study. Very pleased with this, mostly because it's the first time I've ever been able to actually draw hands.

Quick fire thumbnails of the modeler in various poses.

First drawing ever done in life drawing.

Quick head study in response to a video I found of a formula to drawing heads (can be found in my resource materials).

More thumbnails.

Model sat down. A few parts of the body are off, but I've improved a fair amount since drawing this.

Hand study done in my spare time, using my own hand as referenced. My personal favourite out of these.

Model reading a book.

Model laying down.

Study of the head similar to the previous, although couldn't completely remember the steps involved.

Next three are notes I had taken of the aforementioned method.

Thumbnails of model. Second one from the left on the bottom row is my favourite.

Miscellaneous

This is extra animation that I've done on the side. I haven't done as much as I'd hoped I would as I had hoped to experiment a little more outside of the boundaries of the task set, but I am nevertheless pleased with what I produced.

At the start of this project, we started simple with a bouncing ball rig. Quite simply, had to make it bounce. This was my first attempt. It turned out quite well in my opinion, although I think it should have stayed on the floor a little longer.


This is the second ball bounce I did. After what I had learned from the first one, this was much easier to do and took far less time. The ball also seems more solid when it hits the ground and the timing seems to be almost spot on.

This is a parody I did of, quite obviously, a scene from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. It was a joke that came up into conversation and I eventually felt inclined to do it. Although it is just a short 3 second animation of Moom's head, I did have to pay close attention to the timing and get it almost perfect for the animation to fit in with the video. This took longer than I had expected mostly because I didn't know how to green screen and it took a good while to figure it out. Still quite pleased with it though. Don't really know why the video came out in such bad quality, which is disappointing because you can't see the full effect.




This one was me trying to really challenge myself. It's a simple one legged hop animation. When doing it, I thought carefully about what I knew about weight distribution and how the body would react to the leap. I'm overall very pleased with it, although I think the hands could have used more rotation as they moved in the circles. For some reason, Moom doesn't like being in mid or high resolution with a missing leg, so I had to render him in the low resolution. This was also the first time I had remembered to clean up the keyframes and delete unnecessary ones. Before, I had been lazy with the keyframes, just hitting the shortkey to keyframe the entire control just because it was easier. But with this animation, once I was finished I actually went back and deleted unnecessary keyframes.

Source material

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XiwtiDTlYU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EPNYWeEf1U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8Veye-N0A4

Idle Cycles

I had to do these more from memory and what I know about the shifting weight of the body rather than from visual representation simply because I doubt there's a video anywhere of someone doing these actions. I did have a look at myself in the mirror and took a video (which has since mysteriously disappeared) and tried to replicate the actions. The second animation, being a silly dance, does have source footage that you can find simply through the music video.

This first animation was an attempt at Moom becoming a little bored from standing about and looking about. I tried to replicate the shift of weight by having him lean more on one leg than the other and also attempted at having the arms sway, which didn't turn out so well. There are a few minor hiccups, such as the arms not moving when they weren't supposed to (I would imagine a missing keyframe that was supposed to stop them). I think this turned out ok, even though the movements stop too quickly for my liking.


This second animation was during a moment of boredom and thought I'd try something random. The animation isn't at all complicated and took way too little time to do so it wasn't really much of a challenge. Nevertheless, minus that I think it should be a bit faster than it is, it turned out just fine.


This final animation was when I was trying to put more emphasis on the shift of weight on the character when his body moves. I looked at how the body reacts when it stands on one leg, as well as when you lean forward. A little bit of swaying of the body might have been added into this animation as the character constantly adjusts to stay upright, but nevertheless I think this turned out well.

Run Cycles

There's something I can't get my head around with the first two run cycles. Each one of them has a point where parts of the body become out of sync. I suspect it may be that the keyframes are different lengths (i.e. the left foot may take longer than the right foot to do a cycle) which might be the reason that they go out of sync.

This first animation is a fairly basic one, I was trying to get the weight distribution right and think more about the movement of the arms and legs than the rest of the body. I think I needed an extra keyframe on the left arm to stop that sudden jerking movement (it may have been a frame that I accidentally deleted as I'm sure I'd fixed that before.) Towards the end you can see the legs go out of sync with each other and it looks more like Moom is preparing for a leap. This would help in a leaping animation, but not here.


This second animation I concentrated more on moving the whole body and thinking more carefully about the weight distribution, as the first animation Moom was leaning too far forwards. Very quickly though, the arms do... Whatever it is they're doing. I have no idea what's going on or how to fix it, but as mentioned before I suspect maybe the keyframes are misplaced.




For this final animation, I took a look at a video from Youtube, where someone explains the "proper" way to run (how the foot should land, the body position etc.) I noted down everything he talked about and implemented it into the animation. I also adjusted the position of Moom again to be more upright so he looks more like he's doing a gentle run rather than running a Marathon.

Walk Cycles

This is my first animation of Moom, a simply walk cycle. It's quite stiff and blocky, but for a first attempt and using no reference I thought it came out fairly well. It was helpful in learning the controls and gave me an idea of timing.


 This second attempt came out a bit better. I had given a bit more thought into each part of the body, such as when the heel leaves the floor. I didn't use any video references for this, but I did spend a lot of time studying how people walked through the city centre, picking out common features between them, such as the length of the stride, the arc of the arms and such. The movement in this is more fluid as it transitions more smoothly (although this could use a bit more work by smoothing out the lines in the graph more).



This third animation was made based on a video of a walk cycle I found on Youtube. Watching this video gave me a greater insight into the small changes in movement and weight that the body does to keep itself stable. I still think the body is too stiff though and I should have put some movement into the spine. Additionally, I should have tried using the arms in an FK setting rather than IK as they seem to be rigid as well and it's difficult to manipulate that in IK.

(any mention of references can be found at my sources material page).