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Cartoony Baseball Swing

For the last two weeks, the 11secondclub.com have held a mini-challenge based on the theme ‘Sport’s Swing’. Since I’ve just purchased the fantastic Kenny Roy lecture on ‘Cartoony Animation’  I decided to try something in a ‘Cartoony’ approach. (Kenny’s lecture was full of those fantastic ‘Ah-ha!’ moments, and his delivery was really clear – I highly advise you guys check out his tutorials).

I began looking around for some inspiration, and found a pretty lovely short by Goofy called ‘How to play Baseball’. It was full of great little gems, so I decided to use him as my inspiration for my shot:

http://vimeo.com/26918115

I’m quite happy with how he turned out. I tried to really push the Norman rig as much as I could (Mod by F.C. Kiral – Cool Sports Norman), by really pushing the poses, but there’s a few poses here and there that I think, looking at it now, I’ve pushed a little bit too much, so I will go back and address them. It was a good exercise, and I learned a great deal, also getting some really great feedback from the folks on the forum.

As for the render – still trying to get my head around it. Been reading up on some great tutorials, and it’s starting to make some sense. For Normal, I’ve faked the back lighting, and used the Illuminati script for the Global Illumination effect.

If you want to see my ‘Work in Progress’ on this, you can check out the different stages of the animation click this link:  11 Second Club, Mini Challenge Thread

Here’s the Challenge Blogpost on the 11secondclub Blog: Give it some Swing

I shall post an update when I’ve corrected some Issues I have with the piece.

I submitted this animation for the awesome folks at Anim Dalies for some feedback, and they’ve just given me some awesome review of my shot, which I’ll be addressing over the next few days. To read the feedback, check it out here: Iestyn Roberts – Cartoony Baseball Swing, Anim Dailies