Luke Figueroa Blog

 The walk cycle was by far the most challenging project I had to do because of how easy it was to confuse which leg was in front or in back and to make sure it was smooth. I originally had my character moonwalking because I confused the legs. After hours of frustration and focus, this was my final product which consisted of a character walking with a purpose. He stomped hard and kept his head down to get where he needed to, similar to how I was while working on this project.

 The weight project included a life-like character trying to move a heavy object. My animation included a bigger geometric character that violently dropped the box that he struggled to lift. This made the box and character feel more alive.

 This was one of my favorite projects since I was able to animate a character from South Park, named Stan. I focused on Stan turning his head in a natural manner. To make it as natural as possible, I made his head sweep down during the turn and added a slight blink since humans eyes typically blink when switching from focusing on one thing to another thing in another direction.

The flour sack was the first human-like figure we animated and focused on making look alive. I chose to hand draw my flour sack before working on the animation since I could make it seem more alive on the paper. When animating the flour sack I had to think if I was in the situation and how my body would have responded to the actions - the car lift arm breaking and shooting through the flour sack. However, I had to remember that it is still a flour sack and remember to keep that characteristic in the animation which made it a slight challenge and more enjoyable.

The overlapping action assignment stressed the natural laws of gravity since the pendulum in the project needed to keep uniform speed, ball size, and wire length. All of these were easily noticed if not executed well and made detail important. 

  The bouncing ball assignment trained my mind to focus on being smooth and focus on volume control since it is so easy to see these changes in the ball.