Strike a pose!

Last friday it was drama and acting time! Fun and giggles! The assignment was to choose five emotive states and try to act them out to use as reference for creating the poses. This assignment is meant to be a practice for the final animation: How to act out your own reference and pose your model after it to make it look convincing.

I chose the emotive states Happiness, Hunger (which looked more like pain in the end), Pity Tiredness (which came out to be more like: "Look at this asshole!") and Exhaustion.

Even though not all the states came out the way I wanted them to (probably because my reference wasn't all that amazing, hurrdurr) I'm glad the poses still seem strong (especially pity, exhaustion and hunger/pain) 

These two were the easy ones for me. With pity I was struggling with the legs at first, but when I found out where the problem lay (turn those hips gurl!) I got them at the angle I wanted them to. After that it was mostly letting those limbs hang in a natural manner (fingers are still a bit of a pain, I tend to either over-bend them, or keep them too straight to look natural.) And I also really love the fact that I found the hair switch (I saw some tests on youtube where the hair was moving and I was like WHHAAAAAAAHTTT HOW DO I DO THAT! Answer was simple in the end. "hair controls: on."

Hunger/Pain was a tad more difficult because I couldn't quite find the balance of the pose and the arm over the stomach didn't really move the way I wanted it to, the placement of the hand was a bit hard but it looked okay in the end I guess.

These are my least favourite poses because they are just plain ridiculous, the way they ended up, so I thought, why not have a bit of fun with it. I tried to convey at least a bit seriousness with the facial expressions, since the reference for "tiredness" wasn't really strong.

Here I made some renders without adding extra lighting or surroundings. I really like how Mery looks in front of the black background, it somewhat adds depth to some of the poses without adding anything to it at all.