I Wish I Had a Tail

Another week has passed!

I am confident in saying it was a challenging but very satisfying 7 days as well, despite being extremely sick and literally bed ridden for my saterday. This week was in the same line of focus as last week and involved diving deeper into overlapping action and really getting that flexibility, as well as getting the most out of my animation using the graph editor (which I briefly explained in one of my previous posts)

This week I got to work with Tailor, which is basically a ball with squirrel tail attached. He is very annoyi.....uhum..uu.. Cute!

As I'm starting to fiddle and getting into the details of controlling more indivual parts of a character/object, I start to realize how much the subtlety of every ease in/out, squash/stretch, timing/placement impacts upon the final result.

As a short synopsis: Tailor heads to a acorn that has fallen from a tree, only to be excited and lured away by another as it falls from another behind him: P

Just for the sake of interest here is a look at all the curves that are behind the animation. Each curve represents the amount of translation or rotation (in a certain axis) occuring over time. Each curve also corresponding to a particular part that I  manipulate.

In this particular case you can actually see the cascading curves representing the delayed overlap of the different segments of the tail rotating in the x-axis (highlighted in red).
How Cool!

Breaking Things Up

Greetings Friends!

Last weeks assignment marked my 6th week at Animation Mentor (wow halfway through Class 1 already) Time flies when you're having fun and even faster if you're working hard, so I think I'm definitely going at light speed over here; )

The goal for this assignment was getting to grips with the concept of overlapping action, which is basically the idea that everything does'nt just start or stop moving all at the same time (unless it is of course entirely mechanical). Different parts break up in terms of movement, by way of drag and objects exhibiting inertia. This translates into limbs swinging and arcing in a wave type effect. Applying to things such as  a piece of clothing,hair,tails etc.

And so I started swinging around with the pendulum, as you can see. I started out with the idea of a figure 8 motion, and then thought it would be cool to have him move down. I feel its always better if there appears to be some sort of intent or place something wants to go, even in these small exercises. In keeping with this thought and after I had the right timing and spacing I decided to add a second pendulum and have it be a game of tag!

Lets see how I went

Devastated Stu

As you could possibly guess we got a pose for week 5 as well!
The emotion we're communicating this time is devastation. The things I tried to keep in mind for this pose were thoughts of being broken down, hurt, thrown aside, discarded or even abused in some way. All very depressing, but very powerful and definitely very inspiring. Here are some doodles I got down quickly before I really dove into it

Admittedly no.4 doesn't appear to be the standout, but I knew I could really push some things and get out of it what I intended. And rather selfishly I also felt it had the most me in it haha

You could almost imagine someone saying to him "Stu your head is freaking huge, you must hate yourself..?!"

Jokes aside, I tried to really make him unable to support himself anymore (hence the railing) as if the life is being sucked or stolen from him for some big reason. His right leg dragging, almost like it's dead and getting him real low for that sense of desparation. Composition wise, both the railing and his shadow draws the eye right back to Stu with his head in hand. This was intentional; )

A Little Stretched

I was a little Squashed and Stretched last week, what with having my birthday and a range of celebrating times. It was all special and unforgettable, but I was still an eager beaver and turned out to be rather ambitious in what I wanted this week!

We had to animate a ball going through an obstacle course of our choosing (or making), this week incorporating squash and stretch as the ball builds and releases energy. It was a lot of fun to play with, but also proved difficult as working in the graph editor (where you basically change different curves on a graph to determine how certain values change from any given frame to another) didn't give me the resultsI wanted.

I resorted to doing frame by frame animating for alot of it to try and get the spacing correct. I really enjoyed giving the ball more a mind of it's this time round and working out the timing of the paddle giving it a whack. In hindsight I would do something simpler, but I would not give up the learning experience I had last week. I did gain alot of insight, and it does not look too terrible.
Boing.boing..boing....

Some More Bouncing

For week 4 there was no pose (oh no!) but we did get to dive deeper into the world of weight,density and physics by animating two balls with different weights falling and coming to rest within the same scene.

What I decided on was a really heavy ball slowly rolling and dropping with a thud over one ledge and then another to really sell the drop. Versus a bouncy ball dropping down and bouncing its way around. I decided to make the two balls the same size, which really helped me make sure that the different properties of the balls came through.
Here we go, let's drop 'em!!

What I will keep an eye on is just how the ball loses it's energy depending on what happens, and importantly; how that effects it's speed and trajectorty.

Bouncing Ball

My first video assignment is none other than the bouncing ball. It's basically a ball bouncing across the screen with the consistency of a soccer/basketball (how exciting right), but as I'm learning all the animation ingredients going into these basic excercises apply directly to pretty much any shot. So I'm starting to exercises my instinct for easing in and out of motion, timing, spacing, arcs and so forth. Here is the planning that I did

And here is the resulting animation: )

Can always be better of course and I think at the end of March I will be having a revisionfest and splicing it all together so all my clips are better than ever!

Lots of Things to Look At!

Hey Guys,

Haven't found the gap in the last few weeks to make a post since I've been rather busy and I kept postponing,also had my birthday last tuesday and made some great memories during the week. But I have not forgotten you! so let us play a little catchup and see where I'm at.

So week 3 we started jumping into themed poses and got to hopping with our first bouncing ball. Appropriately enough the theme for the pose was excitement woo. Here are a few of the sketches I jotted down for it.

Was definetely interesting trying to convey an emotion without facial expression, and I think I was definetely challenged again by Stu's massive head as far as translating the drawn poses to CG is concerned, ecspecially getting the silhouette and negative space correct. Lets see how my jumping for joy no.7 went!

I was very pleased with the outcome as was Bryan in seeing how I'm getting more comfortable pushing my poses and getting cleaner flow and arcs with the spine,arms and legs. He also pointed out it would make a fantastic urgent run if the right arm was brought down and back. Maybe for my future run cycle, could be very fun!