justin owens

Finally had a day off today, it was wonderful. I spent it relaxing, buying coffee, talking with maiki and going to a wacom workshop at school.

I didn’t get any homework done today, but during the workshop I did start a painting. I’ve been hoping to use the wacom workshop as a chance to do some quick speed paintings, but today was the first time I was able to (previously I had too much homework). I was flipping through one of my art books before the workshop and was digging the forest images.

Here’s what I have after two hours. I have lots of ideas on how I want to proceed with it, but regardless I want to keep it loose. At the moment though, mainly I think because of the linework, I think the house stands out a bit.

Hmm, I had a lot to blog about … yesterday, but now it all seems so in the past. And forgotten. Mostly forgotten.

Between work and school, and the rare attempt to sleep inbetween, I’ve been keeping quite busy. I’m so incredibly excited by my classes this semester and feel that I’ll be leveling up by the end of the year.

In my advanced animation class we’re starting out with a martial arts routine. Last night we went over how to do the first pass blocking, I was surprised by how simple it ends up being. I feel like any complicated character animation is doable at this point, I just have to break it down into the most basic poses.

I turned in the falling leaf project in my intro to 2d animation class yesterday. I felt it ran a bit fast, but my teacher really liked it. The main focus of the animation was ease-in and ease-out, having the keyframes get closer and closer as the leaf comes into a curve and then the opposite as it leaves the curve. I had such a hard time finishing the animation. I kept wanting to wrap it up, but I’d have the leaf moving too fast and so I’d have to add another curve to try and slow it down.

 

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I’m working the bake shift this evening/morning, Tues from 4am to 8am. It’s going to add up to a long day, but I’m excited to be baking pastries!

I’m working at getting some homework done at the moment. I’ve been pretty busy this weekend and hadn’t really gotten a chance to get much done in that department. On Saturday I helped cater for a wedding, that was a lot of fun, I hope to post about that specifically in the next few days. On Sunday maiki and I took a nice walk around Berkeley, sampling many treats along the way. Much conversation was had.

I had a simple exercise to do for my Advanced Animation 2 class, a basic ball (of the heavy variety) bouncing in place and coming to a stop, using the techniques learned in the last class. I did it pretty much as he wanted, but in the end I opened the graph editor and adjusted the curves so the ball had more apparent weight. Specifically, I broke the tangets of the curves to make the adjustments I wanted, though that wasn’t something he showed us. He had mentioned that technique can lead to problems when scaling an animation, but I didn’t really know of another way to get the same effect, without overloading on keyframes.

 

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Well I’ve been MIA for a while. Yo, welcome back.

I started back to school last Thursday, I had my Intro to 2d animation and my 3d animation (advanced animation 2). Both my instructors are very inspiring, I’m really excited by both classes.

I went in to the 2d animation lab after work this evening and did my homework. I had two pieces to get ready for this friday. The first is a circle bouncing in profile, the second is a circle bouncing in perspective. It was a really interesting process.

I sat myself at an animation table and set my paper into the peg bar. On my first sheet of paper I did a rough of the whole animation. That included the background and all the main key poses I knew I’d need. I pretty much use that as a template that I can reference back to (I keep it under all my other sheets, with a flip of the light switch, I can see it decently).

I found that I could only see through about 8 sheets of paper (to see through to my reference sheet). I ended up needing to cycle out the older frames, to be able to use my reference. I really just let go and animated one frame at a time. Meaning I didn’t think about it too hard and tried to let it flow. I knew this first pass wasn’t going to be perfect, that wasn’t my goal, but instead to get familiar with the process. Success!

I look forward to doing more!

justin_o_ballprofile_tk01_sm.mov

justin_o_ballperspective_tk01_sm.mov

I’m trying out the Wordpress media uploader for these videos. A test to see if I shall use it in the future.

I got some drawing done today. It felt good to pick up my pen again.

I started from a photo of a guy walking down a street and had some fun with it.