Waiting for the Bus - Acting and Blocking

I started work on a new shot a couple of days ago. I wanted to animate a simple shot that reveals the emotion of a character.

In London whilst waiting for a train I started looking at how other people on the platform were standing. It was clear what emotion a person was in by the way they stood, or how they shifted weight from one foot to another or how they checked their phones. It was cool because these simple actions revealed so much about the person.

I thought this would be fun to try in a shot so I picked a relatively bold emotion for the scene. An impatient businessman is annoyed because the bus/train is late. By giving the character a tiny story like this it informs me as to how he would act when waiting for the train.

I shot some video reference bearing in mind the back story to my character. Whenever I felt like what I was doing was unnatural I refreshed my memory as to what the story behind the character was which really helped. After a few minutes in front of the camera I felt like I had some of the key acting poses down.

I set up my scene in maya and imported the video reference. I keyed every frame and then played with the timing of the reference until it was something I liked (kind of animating the video reference). From here I blocked out the key poses in one pass and the extremes in another. The third pass was to neaten up the poses a little bit and make sure the movement made sense in a playblast.

First blocking:


Waiting for the Bus - Blocking from James Saunders on Vimeo.

Next stage: critiques, re-blocking and then spline!!

Character Walk 01 - Second Draft (extra swag)

I took onboard some critics from my 3D thread (http://3dhit.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=25342&page=3#entry297680)

I added some polish also to help tighten things up. I'm almost happy with the result but i'm ready to move onto another shot now :)



Character Walk 01 - Second Draft from James Saunders on Vimeo.

Character Walk 01 - First Draft

I wanted to do a walk cycle that had a personality to it instead of the standard walk. I filmed video reference of myself doing a proud and obnoxious walk. After a few minutes of walking around getting comfortable I felt like I had some good reference to go on.

Using the standard walk guide from Richard William's "The Animator's Survival Kit" I flipped through frame by frame to find the extremes of the walk.

I tracked the motion of the hips through my walk and saw that I did a little double bounce. The hips would move up between the contact and down pose.

By drawing out the hip motion I could see more clearly what was happening.


I then caricatured these key poses into the Jack rig from animsquad and timed them accordingly in maya.

 Screenshot of how I set up my computer.

After playing around for a few days I have come up with this first draft.

Character Walk 01 from James Saunders on Vimeo.

After some critiques It's clear that it still needs some work.

Updates soon!

My semester B animation showreel

Throughout semester B we had weekly animation exercises to complete. The classic exercises helped us get used to the concepts of timing in spacing among other principles of animation. They also helped us learn many Maya skills involved with animation such as the graph editor and keyframing.

The result is this showreel:

UH Animation Showreel 2014 - James Saunders from James Saunders on Vimeo.

The animation was rendered in MentalRay and Arnold