Disney Animation Supervisor, Jason Ryan Delivers Animation Tutorials

Came across Jason Ryan, a supervising animator at Disney and mentor at AnimationMentor. I highly recommend heading over to his website and registering for the newsletter [just got my first two today] as they are packed with animation tutorials. His website is still under construction [mostly I assume because he's working hard on making the tutorials at the moment...so far about ten of 'em!].

Tutoring Session 5

Want to come back and put some more detailed notes here, and in a few other posts below...and will do so after tutoring is over [don't you love you can edit past posts that way?!]. For now I am working on turning the lower half of a character around 180 degrees. Below is what I submitted earlier this week to Stephen. It's pretty rough still...kind of robotic...but much better than what we looked at during out last session. Biggest note out of the last session was making sure the body's weight shifted to the weight bearing leg well before the other leg started lifting off the ground....and of course to be on the look out for arcs in the hip area [will break that down when I edit this post].

Feedback welcome...as a beginner really trying to nail down body mechanics and figure out a good working method in Maya.





-As you can see the end isn't quite worked out yet...legs are a bit off..too far of a stretch.
-I've got some leg popping happening..part of what I think is leading to a mechanical feel.
- Animated this pretty much straight ahead, though I knew roughly the poses I wanted to hit. Of course at the moment I'm not quite hitting them.

Received AnimationMentor Log-In

Fun day! Just got an e-mail from AM to set up my account for school, fill out my profile and watch some orientation videos! Soon we're be able to cruise the virtual campus as well. WhooHoooo!

Tutoring Update

Well...it's been a little while since I posted anything. I'll post some more detailed posts soon, just been SUPER busy animating and with work. In a nutshell, Stephen and I decided to pull back on the character jump since it was a bit of a, uh, "LEAP" from the bouncing ball. I did a couple of overlap and drag excercises [which I will post soon w/ notes, etc.]. Then of course we had a week off and now I'm back at it incorporating the overlap lessons into a 180 degree character turnaround of just the lower body.

I did some planning drawings outta my head, shot some reference material and then made some drawings from the footage using FlySketch [allows you to draw on top of anything on the screen] to build a little animatic. You can see the animatic below. Trying to do more pre-planning before jumping into Maya on this one.