Just your friendly neighborhood Ale

Puppet: Homestuck is back! and it decided to take me back with its return! The character for this test is a fantroll designed by me a couple of years ago, but now he is more detailed and in this case fully animated and moveable! Sort of. Dagger Squalo the alien troll decided to experiment with the capabilities of his body and see how far he can twist his body. Puppeting is something that I felt complicated at first but it turns out that when you have all the pieces connected and the puppet is ready to be used everything starts making sense. Puppeting definitely tested what I understood about pegging and it gave me a helpful tool to blend and experiment with frame by frame.

Walk: I'm starting to see a pattern with walks because I've done a couple of walks before the actual practice. But this is a good thing! Around this time I felt more confident with balancing the character's weight to make the walk look more realistic. It is a simple walk but so far is the best one of the 3 walks I did. I must admit I enjoyed working with a cycle. The character used in this test is Reigen from Mob Psycho since a friend of this Ghostly writer is really fond of the character.

Weight: Welcome to Axe Swinging practice! just kidding, although there is axe swinging involved. In this case I tried to experiment a little bit more and start with a walk towards the axe before Ajna lifted the axe and swings it. I kept a full body reference of Ajna from Indivisible to make sure that the character felt on point with her shape, and I recorded myself multiple times swinging a baseball bat to get a feel of the movement that was needed for the idea. Since a baseball bat is more light than an axe I had to make sure that the object looked heavier than what I had recorded for my reference. The bandages in Ajna's legs boil a little when she stops to lift the axe, so I will come back to update some moments of this animation. Reference:

Head Turn: Some more videos coming up! Full disclosure, head turns are something that I need to take more time to practice. They are fun to work around and you can get interesting shifts of expressions, or you can make them more serious. I would say there's some room for improvement in this practice, trying to keep the hair more consistent could benefit more the animation, just as some minor moments with the change from profile to 3/4 view.

Gesture Drawings and Pantomime: Hello for a third time! Probably, the order of the post isn't from earliest to latest so who knows? Right now we have two things in one! Mr. Flour Sack the thief. The concept behind it was having our Flour protagonist as a terrible robber trying to sneak in and steal a diamond. Flour Sack was interesting to animate and a good practice to understand how a "body" sort of kinda works in movement and to express emotions with only body language. There are some body control issues when Flour Sack touches the floor, and during the walk the feet slides a little but it was a good practice before trying to do walks since it helped me understand the timing of a walk. 

Overlapping Action: Updating everything to have the blog more organized. Welcome back! In this case we move from a simple bouncing ball to an overlapping action, with a bouncing Kirby attached to it! Triple overlap! The whole assignment was a fun experience that helped understand how one object/thing can be directly affected by other when they are connected. In this case the idea came from those crane game machines where you try to pick up a plushie, but in this case you have a living being inside the machine which does not want to be part of the game and tries to get free from the crane.