Ahoy Captain Waynes !
Firstable, thanks and congrats for all the great course/tutorial you made here.
From the Fundamental of Animations to this Animation Bootcamp passing by Directing The Camera, I really enjoying my animation journey following theses. The learning, pacing, funny tone and general quality are top notch ! Nevertheless I think the most "bang for our buck " comes from your detailled feedbacks for improvements and cheers ;)
I'm really looking forward to jump to the Body Mecanichs lesson asap!
But before I like to have some advices regarding my animation goal.
I'm a professional programmer with a full time job (and kids) so I can only spare a reasonnable amount of time per week on my new passion.
I want to "specialize" in gameplay animation to combine my programming & animation skills.
My main goal is to create super pleasing and rewarding character control and gameplay mechanics.
To do so I'll like to have your advices on the learning flow I should follow.
Should I continue first with the Body Mecanichs lessons and stay focus on the general animation principles?
Or from what I already learnt here I can already start to create game animation like Idle, Walk, Run, Strafes, Start/Stop transitions etc.
If the latter could you give me some tips / starting point about the Idle and the Run animation please ?
* Happy Panda Wave *
Hi Franck,
Thanks for the kind words! But you, sir, are top notch!
Right, so what should you do next!
Definitely the Workflow and Body Mechanics. Game animation is body mechanics heavy so having a strong understanding of this will really help. But the big lessons in that course is the workflow stuff. Once you've made it past level 1 in animation you will see how important the Planning, Blocking, Spline and Polishing workflow is.
I would also recommend recording your own reference for these even though you are time poor. Actually doing the actions yourself really helps you understand what's happening when you look back at the reference. Yeah it is going to take an hour or so to set up and record, but if it's something you actually want to do it will be fun.
Depending on the age of your kids you might actually be able to get them to help you. You can film them all in the one session too and maybe even film the run cycle as well. And if you have people helping you, they can hold a second camera so you can get 2 views (having that second angle can help clarify what's going on)
Hope that helps!