Week 9 Initial Re-block

Week 7 Final Shot!

Week 6 Blocking and Initial Spline

Week 4 Final Shot

Week 2!

LAst week our assignment was to plan out our animaton, with thumbnails and video ref. Decided to go far and old\frail person walking up some steps, one a a time. Will post final blocking later on...

And the blog plays catch-up once more!

Week 12 has come to an end which means so has class 1! Amazing how fast it goes! Here goes my pose for the week "balance". Not too happy with this one, it feels like he's about to become off balance. Below is my Class 1 Progress Reel:

Week 10 Personality Walk blocking

Personality walk before revision, was going for a heavy character.

Week 8 and 9 our first Walk Cycle - Vanilla Flavour!

Tailor!!!!

Decided to go for a simple bounce and focus more on the overlaping principles.

Pendulum Revision

Tailor!!!!

Gosh Tailor is a tricky little bugger! Trying to get the basic mechanics dow before spicing it up!

Week 7 here we go!!

Week 7 Already!! It's all going so fast! This week we will be tackling all the principles we have learnt so far. So decided to make a list of the principles to stick on my monitor:

Assignment Week 6!!

This week we wee introduced to overlapping!!! Quite tough! will definitely have several more tries at it!

Assignment week 5!

Here go my assignments for week 5!

And here are my "Devastation" sketches and pose:

Revision!:

Catching up!!!! End of week 4 already!

Wow! Crazy busy weeks so neglected the blog a bit...

For our assignment last week (week 3) we had to revise and tweak our pose, in my case Stu kicking down a door. Tried to make it more cartoony, like he was flying towards the door!

We also had to animate a bouncing all, yesssss our first animation!!!!! I went for the basket ball. It's amazing how much you can learn from bouncing balls!

We also had to pose Stu in an excitement pose, which was quite trick and not easy to get away from the cliché poses. I ended up going for the old heel click. Revision vid is below.

For this week (week 4) we had to revise our Stu pose for excitement, and also animate two bouncing balls with different timing. A heavy all and a light one.  I went for the bowling ball-ish weight and the beach ball-is bounce;

Here's Stu's excitement revision:

Here's the heavy and light bouncing ball Assignment:

Also chucking my sketches so I can hopefully look back later on and see some improvement!

Wohoo Week 3 !

Here we are in week three!! Here is the final Stu pose I submitted for Assignment 2.

Stu Pose in Progress!

Started Posing Stu, still a lot to do on him. I am trying to go for the kicking down door action!

Although now it looks more like he's leaning...

Sketches !

Hey guys here a my sketches. I still do need to improve my sketching a lot! So any tips crits techniques are more than welcome. I Went for pose 9, cos i think it has a good sense of motion.

It's also on my PR page so comments there would be coooooll.

Thanks Guys!

Basic Rendering and lighting tutorial With Springboard Trainer Saeed Abdul!

Hi guys! Saeed Abdul Gafoor,  who was my springboard instructor created this tutorial to give us a hand with basic rendering and lighting with mental ray in maya. He was more than happy to let me put it online so others could benefit from it as well. Check out his work at www.saeedag.com. Enjoy!

Basic Lighting and Rendering with Mental Ray in Maya from Nicholas Matias on Vimeo.

Q&A with Shawn Kelly!

Man o man! Had a Q&A with AM co-founder Shawn Kelly yesterday, well actually very early today. He told us a bit about his story and some adventures in the animation world. It was just awesome, because he's super enthusiastic, funny and a really cool guy. It was really inspiring to hear how he got into the business and what drives him as an animator.

I guess I speak for all that attended that, it really got me pumped and exited about what is to come. More and more I feel that I made the right decision joining AM and embarking on this AMazing  journey! 

First Q@A!

Yesterday we had our first Q@A which was really cool. Got to meet all my classmates and our Mentor Chad! Was great getting to know everyone and just listen to Chad talk about some of the ins and outs of animation. Simple assignment this week, updating your profile and cruising the campus. It's Amazing how friendly and available everyone is. Which makes it easier to approach the "older kids" in the higher classes!

The excitement just keeps building!

Day one!!!

aha!! Finally! after waiting anxiously here we are. My mentor for this term is Chad Stewart, it's great just seeing what he's worked on. You can check his site out at www.animationfreelance.com.

It's been great "meeting" my new classmates. I say "meeting" because we've only been introducing ourselves  and posting on their workspaces. It will be cool to see them all live and learn all about them in our first Q&A. All very exciting! I guess this is going to be an easy week where we meet everyone, and browse the AM site and the tools.

Going to post a demo reel of some of my work before AM I guess it will be good to compare certain things and just show everyone a bit of my work background. There is bit of everything, animatronics, 3D, and Physical.  Please feel free to comment away!

Happy start everyone!

Wohoo let's get this thing rolling!

Not long to go now! Well finally got my AM blog set up. Im's basically going to track a and post my progress throughout the course. This is crazy, the energy is building and  everyone is good to go! All very exciting. Woud just like to inaugurate this blog with a big shout you all you Eager beavers! Tchau!