Animation Week 11

This week I continued with the final project, the tennis animation.

Firstly I set up the key poses for the first part of the animation which is the character bouncing the ball a few times before hitting it. This is not complete however, I noticed the hand movements in this are not realistic, the character bouncing the ball with the palm of his hand like its a basketball, when really he needs to hold it for a short while then drop it to bounce back up and again... the hand also needs to grip the ball, so these points are what I will be working on before the deadline.

I then continued to set up the key poses and create a block-out animation, some parts are robotic-like which need smoothing out, I kept looking back at the video reference to try and identify the pose was correct on the correct frame or it wouldn't look right at all. 

One thing I did notice however was the eye contact stays in one place, this is something I need to change so he keeps his eye on the ball at all times. I also used the parenting tool for the character holding the tennis racket so whenever his hand moves his racket will as well which was very helpful because Nadal is holding it throughout the video.

There are loads of points to improve on, such as how the body turns when he is anticipating to hit it, on the block-out his body doesn't rotate enough, also the fact that he doesn't jump high enough when hitting it is something I need to look at too. 

Animation Week 10

This sessions I looked into lip syncing, the process where you animate a characters body & facial expression to a sound file, such as a line from a film you try and match you mouth movements to the sentence said.

Here is the timeline in Maya, the sound file is in there and each frame has its own specific sound, it is hard to match each frame to each letter so you have to make a good guess and combine possible facial expressions for words because not everyone speaks clearly.

But this process comes after creating the posing and body movements, the facial expressions and mouth movements is one of the final processes when creating animations professionally.

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.