I’m not living on a couch in Philly anymore so I can post again.

As the past few posts probably reflected, I’ve been doing some fundamental animation exercises. I backed it up even farther and started relearning from the beginning. At this point I’m working on real fundamentals like spacing and timing, ease, anticipation, follow-through, etc. I’m really trying to not jump ahead and take it one step at a time. The exercises I’m doing are so rudimentary it’s not really worth posting, thus the lack of content. But these are a great refresher as I don’t get to animate much at work as much as model, light and texture. All this is leading up to my revamping my animation demo reel with much better and more suitable material.

So I thought I’d share some of the resources I’ve been studying lately.

http://massiveblack.com/
Great art education DVD resource. Shawn Barber’s painting DVD is amazing.

http://www.jasonryananimation.com/
Posts great animation tutorials in quicktime format with audio commentary in a mailing list. I think only the first 8 were free. I have a feeling it’s going to be a pay service soon. But if the prices are within reason I would still highly recommend them.

Book: Animator’s Survival Kit
I grabbed it off Half.com for like 10 bucks and am currently about halfway through, reading a bit every night and trying out principals the next day. Pretty much a must have.

Book: Illusion of Life
You wanna be an animator and you don’t have this book you need to order it now. Not the cheapest book, but it’s like a tome. You get way more than you pay for.

http://www.brianlemay.com/
I have yet to read this guy’s stuff, but it’s coming highly recommended by some highly-knowledgeable long time animators I’ve been talking to at Cryptic Studios.

Flip Blog
Just packed with great information and videos.

CarlosBaena.com
Way more material than I’d ever want to personally post so I’ll just piggyback it. Insane amount of tutorials and articles.

These are just animation related. I haven’t even started on modeling, mapping and drawing stuff I’ve been studying. I feel like I’m back in school. Only now I’m learning something.