4 weeks of 3D Anim with Erik C. Schmidt

After the first 3 weeks of "introduction to Maya" we got a great teacher called Erik C. Schmidt. He was born in Denmark. Then he moved to America and worked there in many films (Spirit, Eldorado, Bolt, etc.) as a professional animator and supervising animator both in 2D and 3D in such studios like Disney and Dreamworks.

Erik C. Schmidt

He has a very good sense to teach and to give motivating critics. The structure of the 4-week animation was very well built so at the end we`ve learnt how to use the different tools in Maya to be able to build up and keep our animation in hand.



Week 1
We started the animation basics with simple objects like the Pixo lamp and the floursack. At the beginning we only had one day for every animation. It was quite fun and sattisfying to animate the lamp because you can get a result very fast. The assignment was to animate: sniffing, laughing, and looking around. We had to animate the floursack (I did a ballet spinning) dancing and jumping off somewhere.

Here are some of the daily animations:

Week 2-4
The following 3 weeks we get into character animation first just making poses to express different emotions. Mostly used Hogan rig, because it is quite simple. Then we did little pieces like weight shifting, a take, a bow, lifting weight and the last week the walk and run cycle. During these tasks we learned how to use the graph editor and a specific workflow. These are Erik's good advices to be aware when you are animating in 3d. They were very useful.