My Animation Mentor Journey Begins

I decided a few months ago to shift my career fully into 3D character animation. I had dabbled in 3D animation while working on commercials with my previous company and really enjoyed it. But character animation is pretty darn hard and if I'm going to do it, I want to be awesome at it.

That's why I enrolled in Animation Mentor. It's an exclusively online program and the instructors are all professional working animators. The demo reels produced by students of the program are excellent and the demo reels are what matter in this industry. I went to a USC Cinema job fair a few months ago and I was encouraged to learn that the Pixar and Dreamworks Animation reps both spoke very highly of the program.

Well, now I've been in the program for a couple weeks and it's been great so far. Let me share with you my very first real assignment. We had to go to a public place and sketch people in different poses. I went to a mall. There weren't a lot of people there but I got some interesting ones.

The point isn't to make a great sketch. The point is just to have enough information to recreate the pose using a 3D model that Animation Mentor provided. I chose the circled pose above to recreate. It's a kid who was swishing her hand around in a fountain.

And here's my recreated pose in Maya. I haven't gotten feedback yet from my mentor so we'll see what he says!