October project thumbnail concept

I have talked about the benefits of creating, analyzing, & using reference; last month, the value in copying animation, this month's piece is a little different. The animation is something, that I am not physically capable of doing, and I want it to be unique to my piece, so I have done a quick concept pass. Thumb nailing is definitely something any animator should take time to develop skill for. To quickly scribble out something that helps you visually create your concept is the goal. For me with this test it was more about a quick zippy action that would make my character interact with the BG painting. I took a digital painting of mine I did in my "One a Day" challenge I did last year and imported it in maya onto an image plane, then used the Grease pencil to thumbnail the animation. Tangent: I challenged myself to drawing something & paint and post it every day of the week for a while year. Here's a link to my website page where I posted these paintings. Now the interesting thing that happened when I did this is that I was creating a bit of style guide for my characters world. When I look at a lot of what I did, it is to me, very clear that it's a rough study of my characters world. It wasn't exactly my plan to do this, it just happened.

Here's a shot of me setting up my scene, I'll be mapping the painting to the geometry I'm building here in order to rig it and animal the interaction. Testing phase begins.