Animation Week 5

This session I learnt how to pose a character doing certain emotions. I learnt how to create strong poses that make my animations easier from blocking it out to fine-tuning. To check if my poses were strong or not I did silhouettes of each one, looking at them I can guess what each one is so I believe I did well.

As long as my poses are readable for people and they can guess what it is instantly I am happy. I tried to make it as simple as I could, and I feel the emotions I have shown below are easy to read.

I believe I am now stronger at posing the 3D character and I can create my key poses much better than before which will come in handy when making my animations as realistic as possible. It was important for me to get the facial expressions to match the emotion, but as a silhouette you cannot see them, I did not want to use other items to help define each pose but for two of them I felt it was needed.

*drawings are in sketchbook*

I think I need to improve on my squash and stretch more and timings which is the process after posing the character on the key frames.

Animation Week 4

This session I learnt about animation walk cycles, I learnt more and understand about IK/FK, the task was to research for reference of a walk cycle and produce that in Maya using the rig, this was quite difficult at first, I had to identify the key poses, the image below helped a lot because I could identify which pose is on which frame, I had to keep as realistic as possible, the leg movements, hip movements, the only difficult bit was figuring out the hand and wrist movements, and also making my character a little more unique.

The images above show some of the main poses within the animation, after all it wasn't as difficult as I expected, just getting those main poses looking correct and the animation looks fine to me, lucky for me the timing wasn't an issue because it was basically given to me, in future I'll struggle to identify the correct timing of animations I think.  

Animation Week 3

This session I learnt a little bit more about the graph editor, and comparing two methods of animation, one which is in-betweens and the other using the graph editor to create a ball bounce.

This shows what the next few frames will look like, allowing me to have more control over my animations, which is very good. This is the last week I will be working on ball animations, now onto the more complex stuff!

I was then introduced to a rig that is used for the final project, I messed around with it, getting used to the controls, and seeing how it works.

Animation Week 2

I now know the importance of timing and understand the scale of animations, I was introduced to "ghosting" which allows us to see our animation in a different way.

Firstly I started using the graph editor to modify my ball animations, making them look more realistic and smooth, comparing this with references from last week I believe I have done a good job. I continued with my bouncing ball animation from week one and made it look a lot better by toning down a bit on the squash and stretch.

You can really tell the difference here, the basketball doesn't have any squash and stretch and it bounces for a good while, the bowling ball doesn't last long, it is very heavy, even the first bounce isn't very high, and the bouncy ball lasts for the whole duration of the animation.

Animation Week 1

My task was to create a ball animation in Maya, I began searching for tutorials on YouTube and then started to animate my ball, at first I felt the timing for wrong and I used squash and stretch too much. It didn't look realistic enough.

I tried to make improvements in the animation below, it looks less floaty and has some force when the ball is falling towards the ground, maybe too much, this is something I need to work on.

For the session task we got into small groups of four, one person marking the results, one bouncing the different balls, one timing the tests with a stopwatch and me filming the actions of how the ball reacts in different ways.

test results

                                         

Now with some Video and YouTube reference I was able to start working on my first task which is to create 2 different ball animations, I decided to do a basketball and a bowling ball, then I added the characteristic squash and stretch ball to the scene. This video shows comparison between the 3 different balls.

Some Reference videos;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIxbouDiA2M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYfi5DPunUo&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nLlsdAZZHs&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGSJkBujQWI