Morning Class – Alec:
This morning we talked about assessment 2 and watched some examples of walk cycles, run cycles and body mechanics from previous students. After this Alec explained how the Jack Rig works, he showed us how to move it the limbs and change the rig from IK to FK.
Alec then set us an exercise to do, research a pose you would like to use and position either the Jack or Jill Rig in that pose. I decided to use a fencing pose as I liked the movements and it looked very dynamic. These were my reference images.
After I researched how the pose works, I blocked out the positions of the of the rigs only positioning the body, shoulders and legs to get the basic pose. I then refined the pose by moving the elbows and twisting the body to match the reference better. Finally, I tweaked the positions the hands and gave them a cone to act as a sword. This is how it turned out.
Overall, I found this task very fun. I think it came out really well, the pose looks good, and the silhouette is very clear.
Afternoon Class – Sorcha:
Sorcha started by showing what After effects can do and how it can be used for animation. Then she explained how the tools work and I tasked us with animating a ball bounce, I found this to be a bit of a struggle as the scale tool and the rotate tool would not work properly.
The next task was to animate a human character walking.
I enjoyed animating the character more than the ball as I found having a base model already there to be less daunting than adding the shapes into the scene and changing the settings.
Overall, I found Adobe After Effects quite challenging as I was a bit overwhelmed by the number of controls and since I have never used it or any other Adobe program, I found it difficult to get the hang of it, but I managed it quite well in the end.