Alright lets fire this one of with the rolling ball exercise. Perhaps not the most exciting content for a polybook but it has to start somewhere. :)
https://cgcookie.com/exercise/rolling-ball/exercise_submissions/17423
I found this one pretty tough and I am still not completely convinced by my final results. I wanted to refrain from calculating the correct rotation value for the distance covered and do it by feel. In hindsight I really don't know if that was beneficial to the point of this exercise or actually one of the things that made it unnecessarily hard.
What helped me in the end were a few different things:
Hope it helps someone although I feel these might come down to preference more than anything. :)
3dioot Hello JW , i cant give any helpfull feedback for ur animation , it seems good , but i think that the pelvis has to balance up and down maybe .?
i read books like eat that frog , the 7 habites ,but it had no influance whatsoever on my work of life , it may seem silly but watching Rocky is my best way to get motivation and go on ! i was having a lot of personal issues lately , and sculpting and drawing was a very positive way to deal with them . and reading through the different thread here on CGC is helpfull ( especially Miranda's)
3dioot hi JW, good progress. As for feedback The hand seem to come at a sudden stop when it goes forward, and everything still feels a bit "robotic" (lol), but I'm sure you'll get it where it needs to be. I saw your stomp and that one was terrific! So you'll get there :)
Ah yes, letting perfectionism go is good to strive for when learning, doing a lot of work is the best way imo. Hard though! Struggle with this myself always have too high expectations
I read mostly Dystopian books like the Hunger Games and such, sooo.. not very life changing :-p though it helped me keep up my English since I only read books written in English (because things get lost in translation to Dutch!).
Have a nice week JW, good luck with Rivet :)
mmalhomsi Hey Malholmsi! I agree the pelvis could use a little more up and down, its on there but hardly noticeable at the moment. :)
Thanks for sharing what motivates you! I doubt you are the only one that gets a kick out of Rocky. I feel those movies are practically written to inspire people to go for their goals! XD
Judging by your thread it seems art therapy definitely works for you. ;) Keep it up, I love seeing your work.
So I am nailing the character! Apparently I am better at this stuff then I thought. XD This evening I much improved the legs but one of them somehow ended up asymmetrical which means one leg pops much worse than the other one. I will try to fix that tomorrow, I am getting close though.
I understand what you mean on the arm. I fiddled with that for a long time but think I finally figured out the reason. At the apex of the arm swing the torso also starts twisting back and this is what gives it that snappy appearance. Not certain how to fix that yet, maybe offset the curves somewhat, I'll figure something out. :)
'Perfectionism'... /me shudders. I actually feel that book could serve you as well. Its a real eye opener to me and has practical advice on how to improve. As far as your books, whatever helps you relax! :) Only thinking about 3d stuff is a great way to lose interest quickly!
Thanks Miranda, you too!
3dioot I'll put it on the "to read" list!
I read a book every day in bed before I go to sleep 😊 Reading and playing games are my go-to-relax-stuff. One night a week I have a game evening to make sure I get my head out of 3D for a bit and get the relaxation I need to keep going 😬
And now for something completely different! (please set it to loop in youtube its only one cycle)
I've been interested in motion graphics for a long time now. It always appealed to me how the only thing that matters is whether it looks nice. For some reason I've shied away from it and I am really not certain why. So I changed that last weekend. There are some things that are missing here but I ran out of time and wanted to post something; for now it looks nice enough. ;)
Here is the tutorial I learned this from: https://youtu.be/xYXTrQhrm5k
It taught me a ton. It uses a wonderful shader group that the author refers to as "broken glass". I recreated it from the video which was pretty hard because that part was sped up so why not share it.
http://pasteall.org/blend/index.php?id=51411
All of this is rendered in EEVEE btw which means that you can see that shader perform its magic in realtime in your viewport. Its like staring into fire only better; i work with computers and I still find this stuff magic! :D
Anyway.. My plan is to do more stuff like this in addition/combination with animating, started learning color theory too. :)
Hey ssmurfmier1985 
phoenix4690 and other (hopefully) curious people!
So I decided to give myself the 36 days of type challenge. Its not running right now but I really liked the concept. You need to animate one letter or number each day until you have all of them covered! This is a great way for me to be creative every day.
While I have not managed to actually finish a movie each day (it averages more like two days for one letter now) I am working each evening, experimenting and having fun! Here is my stuff so far, hopefully I'll get quicker and better at these as I get further along. :)
The letter O was a simple circle mesh with inset and the inner faces removed. Solidify modifier, bevel modifier (with weighted edges) and a subsurf. The holes were created by a particle system where I used metaballs as the source object. After converting the particle system to its components I tweaked the metaballs by hand before converting them to a mesh and boolean subtracting them from the letter O. The stage is just a flat plane extruded up at the back with a bevel modifier. The lighting are two rectangular area lights placed at left top and right mid. I did create a simple rig that autorotates with support squash and stretch. That was it. :)
This letter took way, way, waaaay too much time. The materials were a rush job but I am really trying to move forward. There are plenty of letters and numbers left to get the materials and lighting to look better. The scale effect was done with animation nodes. I used this tutorial as a base: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcjrD5SwQBw&t=310s It needed quite a few alterations to work properly with a curved shape such as this. :)
Ill be posting more letters and numbers soon. Ideally every day but if not at least every other day. ;)
I sure did Miranda! :) Pretty much anything goes which is part of the fun, you can really experiment (as much as time allows that is)
Malholmsi yeah they will definitely be busy... That S kept me up till the small hours in the nigh and that was on the second day I was working on it! XD I am creating though which is the most important part. And thank you!
Allright time to throw some stuff in here. Creating a letter per day might have been a bit much but I am still trying to at least create something a little more often. So here is some stuff in no particular order. The ooze was created with the remesh modifier of the sculpt branch. It supports openvdb (I think) which allows you to do fun stuff like this!
The letter M was both really fun and quite annoying. Turns out there are serious issues with dynamic paint and rendering in 2.8. I.e. you will see dynamic paint in the viewport but not in your render! Quite chuffed with how it all turned out in the end though. The cookies in the CGC discord were instrumental in motivating me to get this done. So thanks guys!
