Lecture/Assignment
Week threes lecture talked about the 7 Planning methods on animation. Visualization, Your First Idea, Observation, Thumb-nailing, Video Reference, and What the Director Wants.
Then we went over Block Methods of animation.
Layering, which is animating one part of the rig at a time. This will be used while animating the AM rig "Tailor".
Pose to Pose, this methods consists of posing out the key poses of the animation and then going in between the poses and refining it.
Straight Ahead, this means animating frame by frame with no key poses.
The Assignment this week was to animation a bouncing ball, with the weight and texture of a soccer or basketball. My mentor Raymond Ross did not want us to add any collisions with walls or add rotation or squash and stretch. He wanted us to keep it simple and focus on timing and spacing!
One of the sketchbook assignments was to plan out our ball bounce on paper. I used video reference to determine the spacing and timing of a basketball. The most difficult part of this animation was making it look real but not so realistic its not interesting. I also experimented within Maya to see what felt and looked right, then applied those things to my plan.
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| My ball bounce animation planned out. |
The REVISED version of the ball bounce. After applying eCritique notes.
The second part to the assignment was to sketch out poses expressing excitement! Then apply it to the "Stu" AM rig. The difficult part about displaying excitement within a single frame is to avoid Cliché poses. I went with a victorious, celebratory pose. I also kept "Stu" on the ground to avoid to repetitive overused leap into the air pose.
My final version looked like the below image. I added the notes from my Mentor Ray Ross's eCritique, and then applied them.
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| Mentor eCritique Notes |
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| Final Pose |
I learned so much this week about planning animation, and the immportance of knowing where your going with the animation and the meaning of it before you dive in. It is easy to notice if an animation was planned out or not.
I am starting to observe more often now, with all the inspiration I am getting lately everything looks like it would be fun to animate!
Looking forward to Week 4! Happy animating :)