Pre-Pro & Strong Poses

The second portion of the class revolved around the importance of pre-production in 3D animation. One main point that became clear to me this month, is that no matter what medium you specialize in - be it 2D or 3D - you're going to have to spend time working on the other medium at some point. 2D animators will eventually have to learn 3D (and the highly feared Graph Editor), while 3D animators will have to work in 2D to create pre-pro. In my case (the latter), creating good pre-pro was extremely important. It makes an animators life so much more easier when they transition their ideas over into a 3D workspace. The goal of my pre-pro was to explore as many dynamic poses as I could to prepare to transition to 3D.

The focus of the second half of the project was creating strong silhouettes using a sample rig in Maya while using my thumbnails as a reference. The rig was basically L'eggy's rig except instead of the egg half, it was a complete upper torso of what appeared to be an ant. I had so much fun with this part of the project (maybe too much fun).

He wasn't having as much fun as I was

I was instructed to pose the rig in seven poses which were supposed to read as; relaxed, fear, angry, happy, sad, disgust, and balance. After countless tweaks, I felt I was finished with my second project. However, I do feel that I could've made the last balanced pose a lot better at storytelling. Here was my final submission.