Onward and upward

Had a great time at my last company, Wildworks. Fantastic team and really great people. I was there for about 2 years and learned a ton! I learned to rig simple assets and gained a greater sense of ownership after animating what I've rigged. I learned more Unity than I ever thought I would before this job. I also learned that my organizational skills and penchant to "make a doc for everything" can really help the team and to an extent, multiple teams across the company. Unfortunately, layoffs are part of the industry and though I'm sad to leave, I'm looking forward to the next places I can learn and grow.

Latest Animation!

It's been a while since I posted any updates, so here it is! I finished another class of Animschool, and I wanted to put the class final up here. My main focus was the grave digger in this shot and really made sure everything was working with him before moving on to the other characters. In the future, I would definitely make sure I'm working on all three moving parts at the same time. The zombie and the skeleton hand are not at the polish I think they should be and I'll be posting a real complete version in the near future. But for now, here it is!

New demo reel!

Well, it has been a while since I updated my demo reel. Here it is! There are some of my favorites that are still great and I wanted to to include my quadruped walk cycle. A few of these clips are from my work at the Waterford Institute. I am grateful that they hired me for my first job out of college and I look forward to future opportunities. The characters at Waterford helped me learn a wide variety of character personalities and shapes. I learned a lot from animating Marmot's round shape, Salamander's long tail, to Pete Repeat's somewhat tricky feathers. Pete Repeat's landing, dialogue and fly out are 3 separate animations put together using the TRAX editor in Maya. Along with the flight animations, I animated multiple animation sequences that fit together like puzzle pieces. Pete can hop in, go into an idle cycle, celebration animation, and hop or fly out of frame. If you have any questions, email or comment!

Body Mechanics 2

Here's the latest from Body Mechanics Plus. It's funny class 2 and class 3 are both called Body Mechanics, but this one was much more in depth about body movement. I really like body and movement and obseving movement. I was lucky to be able to film the reference for both biped characters.

First assignment was super tricky! The teacher wanted more of a cartoon off balance, windmill arm movement, but I didn't do that in my reference much at all. The end shot was created by a combination of teacher help and making it up.

Second assignment was to have a character climb something then jump down. I had a lot of fun filming that reference! I had a lot of fun animating this one, the hardest parts were the IK/FK switch in the arms and getting the run looking right. At first I had him running in a curve away from camera and it just looked like a zig zag even though the arcs from above were correct. This was my favorite of the three assignments.

And finally, a quadruped walk cycle! Slightly faster than a walk, both feet hit the ground at the same time.

Body Mechanics

I have been doing Anim School for a while and just finished Body Mechanics Class 2. Here's the three assignments, lots of fun and learning the past semester.

First up, simple walk to stop with a little attitude in there.


Second was a jump assignment. I was lucky to be able to film the reference on a balance beam myself at my university's gymnastics gym.


Last, and probably the funniest reference I've ever found online, was the "interacting with a heavy object" assignment. After I found the little gem of reference, I couldn't resist.

Examples of Modeling

A few things I've modeled. I wish I could find the file of the violin! The original file is lurking on an old laptop hopefully. I'd love to have a turn around of that one.

Little cute gem I found

While hunting down some old files, I found this cute one! Hedgehogs are the cutest.