I thought that it might be a good idea to keep track of what I've done the past week so I can track my progress as I go!
I'm going to make these blog posts weekly to the best of my abilities. To me, posting a few second clip of animation or some scribbles as I learn don't have much merit as a separate post.
Since my first post was on Tuesday, it's going to be a bit shorter compared to when I get a full week of stuff done next time. I'm thinking of putting together a list of what I want to do during the week, but I have some reservations about doing so. On the one hand, having a itinerary of things that I want to go during the day will more than likely get me started on it much earlier than just whenever during the day. But on the other hand, having a set task for a certain day might not work out well (for example, if I feel like doing one thing when I scheduled another).
My original plan for scheduling during the week was to have a type of random number generator that would determine what I would do for every day of the week, with 1 being animating, 2 being drawing, and 3 being sculpting. I would then roll numbers and see what I have to do (I was thinking of having a bit more bias towards 1 and 2 because sculpting isn't really high on my priorities right now). However, I found that just doing alternating days works decently well for me if I mostly disregard sculpting. As much as I would love to have custom 3D models of my OCs to animate with at my own pleasure, actually getting a job in animation and learning to draw are things I want to do more at the moment. I'll certainly try to focus more of animating, especially since I was able to get some drawing in later at night on a day that I did animating.
I'd say it's enough preamble, and I'm ready to show you what I got up to this week!
First, some animation!
In terms of animating, this is incredibly simple. A bouncing ball is not particularly much to gloat about, and I can see some problems in the timing of the bouncing (unless I'm going crazy!). I wanted to simply get back into the groove of animating with this one. I haven't been animating for the entirety of this year, and I definitely felt rusty while I was doing this. It feels like I'm starting fresh more or less because of the aforementioned lack of animating, but I think this is a good opportunity to re-learn some of the basics that I didn't nail down the first time around. When I was animating last year I had a pretty big problem with getting my animation to look nice after splining, especially later in the year when I started to use more complicated rigs in class. I would attribute this simply to my lack of practice and understanding on the core fundamentals of animation and my lack of a lot of animating as a whole. I have been using these before, but I'm going to try and stick closer to these animation exercises to hone my skills more. (btw, this rig was found here, with a bunch of other free rigs to use for learning and personal use)
It was certainly disheartening looking at all the amazing stuff that some of my classmates were making compared to my own output during college. Obviously, I have no ill-will against any of them and I wish them all the best, all of their stuff was amazing. I suppose I'm just a really jealous person when it comes to creative fields that I also want to excel at. There's something that I've been hearing online that's something along the lines of "Comparison is the death of creativity" or something like that. That's certainly something that I have a problem with, simply because of all the great artists that I follow on social media. I think I also need to understand that I simply haven't been doing this as long as they have. I've really only been animating for about 1-2 years, so I still have a lot of stuff to learn. I'm also not particularly in a rush in life in general. I think that something that soothes me is seeing a lot of posts online talking about how people have pivoted their careers into 3D or animation or programming at age 30 or 40 even. I have a friend that was doing architecture for a long time after they initially left Uni who started college for 3D at about 25. I especially have a lot of time in terms of my life, I'm only 21. My life has barely started. I won't make that an excuse to be a layabout, though! I think I've had enough of that.
The last thing to show is some drawing!
(This is very difficult to see, but this is some practice on making very light lines)
Attempting to take drawing seriously is a very interesting undertaking, but it's interesting in a good way! Starting from the basics, I had to even learn how to hold a pencil properly for drawing. It's strange learning to use a pencil in a different way than what I'm used to, but it certainly feels like that it will help me out in the long run. It definitely feels like learning to draw is going to be a much slower endeavour compared to animating. Considering that drawing is such an old practice, I'm not surprised. I'm incredibly happy that there's a lot of tutorials online for what I want to learn. What I'm using in particular is Alex Huneycutt's Internet Curriculum. This PDF has the benefit of having assignments for the user to go through instead of just dumping a bunch of videos on them, which I certainly think is a part of why I prefer to be in a proper learning environment than learning on my own. Having set tasks to do helps me to have structure in my learning instead of just trying to follow along with a video.
(Experimenting with different types of lines. Using different lines can help guide the viewer to what you want them to see.)
I'm very hopeful that this course I'm using will assist me in learning how to draw. I used to draw quite a bit when I was younger, but I think I stopped sometime in my early teens simply because I found more satisfaction in video games. While I don't think play video games have been detrimental to my learning, I think they've certainly impacted it in some way. I was the type of kid to leave my assignments in high school to the last minute, which I wouldn't be surprised was because of my gaming habits. However, there was a feeling that I knew that I had to get something done but I just simply didn't have the initiative to actually get it started, and I would feel bad for myself when I didn't do it. I don't know if that's just how my brain worked or if it had something to do with my habits as a person, but I really hope that I can get out of that habit in the near future.
That's all that I have to show, and I quite enjoy posting online like this. I will certainly try my hardest to make some interesting stuff for next week's post.
Thank you and good-bye for today!