The Plan: Daily Practice. The Goal: Animate to music. That is all I have ever wanted.
Step 1. Find a handful of good videos on YouTube. I know the gist of animation, like the principles and whatnot.
Step 2. Get a decent night's sleep. Then, do the exercises I know I need to do.
Step 3. Avoid burnout.
- Bouncing ball
- Flour sack
- Rotating shapes
Day 1 - Bouncing ball.
I feel like I got the motion down well enough. This took me about 10 minutes using ctrl+t and the gridlines. It goes wonky near the end. Got to work on my stretch/squish. (2-1-26)
Day 2 - Bouncing ball.
Made a chart today, drew out the arcs first and did easing in/easing out. It's 5 in the morning and I found a copy of the Animator's Survival Kit on the Internet Archive. Time to go eat breakfast.(2-2-26)
Day 3 - Basic walk cycle.
Started this last night using a guide from the animator's survival kit. It's one of the first to come up when you look up "walk cycle". I learned a good bit here. It's a bit exaggerated and kind of janky but I feel way more confident animating now. My first walk cycle!! (2-3-26)
Day 4 - Chicken walk cycle.
Starting to lock in on my particular goals. It's gonna be fun engineering a walk cycle for my characters. There will be experiments in biomechanics. I'm not using the term "engineering" lightly. But! I'll do a walk cycle with arms tomorrow. Need to improve how I maintain volumes. (2-4-26)
Day 5 - Alien walk cycle.
This took about 5 hours over two days. I had to study anatomy and come up with a bone structure. The feet need work. I may have to go full James Gurney and make a maquette. These are from a story I've been working on, hence the crazy effort. Arms have not happened yet and I am dreading learning them. (2-6-26)
Day 6- Went completely apeshit.
I'm making a snippet of an AMV for Inertia Creeps by Massive Attack. This will take a while. I'll post updates when I can.
Also, I may start making tutorials because the people making CSP animation tutorials are... I'm sorry, they're SO bad at explaining!!
Keyframes are particularly annoying to follow tutorials for. Like, no, no, it was not that simple.
