How to get a job as an animator

I also found this article today too, how to get a job as an animator, on theoryanimation.com that I wanted to share as I thought it was well worth a read and has some great advice. Let me know what you think.

The 25 fastest ways to fail at animation

I found this article, the 25 fastest ways to fail at animation, on animatorisland.com and felt a lot of it rang true and was definitely something to think about each time you are doing some work. I know its something I will be referring back to again and again but check it out for yourselves and let me know what you think.

Class 1: Weeks 5 and 6 - Pendulum Tips

Scott Lemmer showed some great tips in the Q&A for offsetting the keys, playing with the tangent handles etc to give you the successive breaking of joints required to show overlap, drag, and weight, but there are also a great set of videos from Keith Lango about on the Pendulum which you may find useful:

Also here is the wave principle from Preston Blair's book Cartoon Animation page 142 that Scott was talking about:

Pendulum Rig - How to only have curve objects selectable:

As Scott mentioned in the Q&A you don't want to move the geometry on the pendulum rig, so the easiest way to only have the curves selectable is to go to the object selection mask on the top shelf (the one with the blue plus, blue backward S etc) and turn them all off, then only have the blue backward S turned on, this should then only allow you to select the curves on the rig.

AM Class 5: Progress Reel

How To: Maya freezes at 98% - Fixes

I had a major issue with Maya last week where it would try to load my scene file but freeze at 98% and never actually open. My scene file was referencing multiple other files, 2 characters and 1 set. I save iteratively, as I know that is good practice, so I checked the previous saved file and I had the same issue there too. In fact the previous 10 saves were all like this and after lots of investigation I found the files to be corrupt. I did a lot of Google-ing and noticed lots of people had had the same issue but struggled to find any resolutions, however I did manage to recover my whole file and all animation in the end but it took me a whole day to figure it all out so thought I would share my findings and how to fix the issue to help someone else who may run into this.

AM Class 4: Progress Reel

AM Class 3: Progress Reel