Ecroche

I just finished my ecroche class for the summer. It's a sculpture class where we build the human body from the inside out. You start with the bones and work your way out to the external muscles. It was pretty intense, since I'm not much of a sculptor, but I really came out of it knowing a whole lot more than I did about anatomy.

I've also noticed that, since taking the class, I've begun approaching my animation from a different mindset. In CG, it's so easy to break the rules and bend the model all different ways. Sometimes that's necessary, but a lot of the time you forget that the leg can only rise so far before it hits the bone of the pelvis. Or that the vertebrae running down the back of the rib cage are fused, so they can't really bend. Or that the entire arm swivels from the collar bone, so those shoulders are going to engage of the arm moves.

So now, when I move the cg puppet around, in the back of my mind I consider anatomy with every pose I make. Really really awesome stuff!