Animation Week 9

This week I began to think about starting my final project which is to create a sport animation for the summer Olympics, which I chose tennis, mainly because I wanted animation that challenges me and I quite like watching tennis, so it appeals to me more than the others. 

This week I was also introduced to a new rig called Norman, even though this is more complex, and might take a while to figure out how all the controls work, I wanted to use this because it gives me more control over the rig, making my animations more clearer.

This will be my main reference video I will use to create my tennis animation, because of the time limit being 6-10 seconds I will just do a tennis surf, with the character bouncing the ball preparing to surf at the beginning.

Reference Videos;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azrFG8AbDAw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuWou4BISPA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXvS2oTh79c&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPKvJGBiEg4

Animation Week 8

This week I decided to go back to my walk cycle and improve on it, creating a unique walk with a bit of character, so I did a bit of research and I stumbled upon a funny walk Captain Jack Sparrow does in the Pirates of the Caribbean film, he waves his arms and hands around and uses his toes like he is tiptoeing, his walk is a little slower than an average walk cycle too so this walk was quite difficult to get right, so looking carefully at the reference video I set up the key poses however timing it was difficult and looking at the final video for this I just feel something isn't right, it is not as "jack sparrowy" as I would have wanted.

Animation Week 7

This weeks task was to improve on what we had already done, so I chose to improve my jumping animation from last week, my idea was to create the sequence the TV show "total wipeout" where the player jumps onto some large red balls, and they usually fail and fall off, this allows me to add a bit of character to the bouncy balls and the character himself. I firstly set up the key poses and worked from there, I used the jumping technique from my previous animation as well with an added run up at the start and a cartoony style fall through the air to the end.

Animation Week 6

This week the task was to create a jump sequence, I was advised to do a jump on the spot however I felt I wanted to push myself so I create a jump from one box to another, a forward jump, I wanted it to look like the character was jumping from a house roof to another house roof like in a chase scene. I set up the key poses, however I still need to modify it a little so make it a smoother animation, it doesn't seem fluent enough yet.

I feel the key poses are good, maybe a run up at the start would be better, however I wanted it to be simple and I can always improve after. I am actually quite happy with the work I've done here and it allows me to improve in a few weeks.

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.