I finally went on a trip to the LA Zoo with Alina on Sunday morning. The weather was cool so the animals were pretty active. There were some baby animals wandering around as well! I tried Vilppu's technique of creating "scenes" by drawing various subjects in one drawing regardless of whether they were all there at the same time. This little group of gerenuks was alternating between attacking the leaves on the tree and chasing each other around the yard.
Finally finished off the secondary motion! Here's the finished product:
Had a heck of a time with the tail, as usual. I kinda wish I had made the rig with global tail controls instead of local ones, that way the tail wouldn't swing around wildly all the time. Or some kind of nifty local/global switch like we have on the rigs at work. But I'm not that smart. :)
In other news, I've been trying desperately to inspire myself to draw something, anything. It's tough when I'm not in a regular drawing class and my job and student film both keep me glued to the computer. Yesterday I forced open a sketchbook and messed around with some thumbnails until I came up with one that looked decently cool. I decided to make some "fan art" for a video game I play called DragonFable. I have a Rogue character named Caelum and thought he'd be a good refresher course for some figure drawing. I even yanked out my anatomy book for this one!
So here's the rough sketch done up in Photoshop:
He's gonna be holding some daggers in the final version. We'll see if I have enough patience to color it!
I'd like to find some web resources of dynamic figure poses (y'know, martial arts, anime, fighting, dancing, acrobatics, flying through the air, matrix-y stuff). I think they would help me visualize the body in motion and in perspective. Portfolios or photo galleries or video sites, whatever. Anybody have any suggestions?
So here's that shot a week later, unfortunately it's going slow because of work deadlines and such, I don't have much time to work on it. But I moved the center character out of breakdowns and into cleanup. You can see I haven't gotten to the fingers, ears, or tail yet, but the important part was getting the torso, head, and limbs moving naturally before getting into details.
It's funny, whenever I move from stepped keys to linear interpolation, there's always some kind of timing issue. For some reason, something that looked fine in keys/breakdowns will end up being too fast or too slow when in-betweening. But it's easier (for me anyway) to fix those timing issues since I still have easily readable keyframes to adjust. After this, there's no turning back! If I have to make any major timing changes at this point, I'll just start deleting chunks of keys because the dope sheet is such a mess that it'd be almost impossible to make changes on a macro level.
Someday I'll draw again. :) Alina, when are we going to the zoo??
