Class 1 - Week 8

The last week was all about vanilla walks. The assignment was to animate Ballie in stepped mode. We had to animate a walk cycle without any personality.

In addition to that we had to come up with a physical strength pose with our Stu-character.

Luckily I hadn't have to change much on the pose and the blocking so I went straight over to the new assignment. This week we have to finish our walk cycle and do a concerned pose with Stu.

Ok than, here are the last week assignments and the revision of the tailor assignment

Class 1 - Week 7

Lat week we had to animate Tailor. Its a ball with a tail like a squirrel. I knew that this assignment was gonna be tough but I didn't thought it would become so difficult. I started animating the body of Tailor and worked on the timing. After the animation of the body was done I tried to animate the tail. 

My first attempt was to animate it the way like I did on the pendulum. It was a horrible result. I tried a few different method’s like the pose to pose were I animated the whole tail in once. Than I tried to animate joint after joint. Nothing seemed to worked. For three days I started over and over again. 

On the forth day something happened :) The overlapping of the tail seemed to work and Tailor had a fluent motion of the tail. I worked on the tail tip and added more small overlaps. The result can be seen below, I hope you like it.

Class 1 - Week 5

Boy, this weekly assignments getting tougher and tougher :)

This week we have to do some overlapping action with the pendulum. Its really hard to get the timing right for the overlaps, so I’m still tweaking it.

To let the continuity of the blog doesn’t suffer from my work I'll upload my work from last week. I haven't changed the work to the comments my mentor gave me. I think I'll do that on the weekend.

Anyway. Here is the animation and the pose from last week.

And while I'm typing this blog post, here is an work progress of the pendulum assignment from this week.
I really have a hard time figuring out the amount and speed of overlapping of each chain joint. Hope you like it.

Progress on Week 5

It's unbelievable how much fun it is to animate a bouncing ball. This week its get even better, a bouncing ball and an obstacle course. 

I started my planning on this assignment by making a screen shot from all 3 obstacle courses and opened them in Photoshop. I drew some bouncing possibilities right onto the image and tried to think about the timing of each bounce. After I had the path I added the balls or circles into the image and thought about the spacing. As this week is all about squash and stretch, I also added some drawings for that into my planning. 

After a while I came up with this on.

 

I knew already that it was going to be tough to get this animation into 120 frames.

I blocked the key poses in Maya and added some breakdowns. 

I worked on the timing and spacing and after tweaking here and there I was quite happy with the result. I started to add the rotation to the ball so its always line up with the path its traveling. 

Now came the fun part :)

I added some squashes and stretches over the animation and it was such a gigantic different.

The animation is still work in progress, but here is what I've got so far.

It's time for some squash & stretch

Before I get started with this weeks assignment I want to talk a bit about last week.

The task was to compare two bouncing balls with different weights. I chose a beach ball and a heavy canon ball. I planed my shot, began to animate and in no time I was 30 frames over the frame limit.

So were to get 30 frames? I moved the my keys so frame 17 became my new frame 1. I had still the problem with my frames.

I thought of solutions to edit my animation in a way that I could stay in the frame limit but couldn't come up with something.

And again, this awesome AM community helped my figure out a way. Thy gave me some tipps and than I added a little platform were the beach ball could drop off. Such an simple idea.

So here is my animation for week 4.

This week is all about squash and stretch. We have to animate a ball bouncing around an obstacle course. Again we only have 120 frames to get everything done. This will shrink the possibilities but not the quality :)

Furthermore we have to do a new Stu pose. This time Stu should communicate "devastation".

This pose is going to be a really hard one for me. Every time I think about a pose I only come up with something that had been done hundreds of times before. 

Later I'll make a brainstorming and see what I get.

As always, thanks for reading and I will post some progress of mine later this week.

Happy animating :)

Class 1 - Week 3

Time is flying by so fast. Week 3 is already over and I got my eCritique for my work.

I was surprised that Tim (my mentor) didn't really had something to comment on my bouncing ball. Only the ending of the animation could be a bit longer and smoother. So I just moved the Keys further apart and done. Revision finished! :)

So after Tim watched my animation he got over to my Stu pose. And surprise, surprise, nothing to change for me. WOHOO =)

 During the week I changed a lot on the pose and got a lot of comments on it so this is totally the product of comments and refining. In the end I was really glad that I switched over to the pose with the 2 characters.

Again, here are my revisions.

Yesterday was also a Q&A with Shawn Kelly. He is one of the founders of AnimationMentor. It was really cool to see how enthusiastic and excited he gets when he talks about animation. I'm so looking forward to the day when I meet all my AM-fellas at the graduation :)

This will totally be a blast.

Progress on week 3

This week we got tow assignments. The first one is a bouncing ball witch the weight of a soccerball or basketball with a limit of 100 frames. This is not as easy as it sounds.
I began my planing for the shot and after it looked good for me, I went over to Maya.
I started witch my key poses of the ball. After that I worked on the timing and spacing of the arcs. The problem is to get a smooth ending of the animation within the frame limit. For my work it meant to cut of frames from the beginning and extend the ending.

So this is my progress so far

To get more practice for the timing and spacing I worked on another bouncing ball exercise.

When I have time before the next weeks assignment starts I will try to animate a few other bouncing ball clips
- short update, just another bouncing ball test - 

The second assignment for this week is to pose Stu in a way witch communicates excitement. I sketched some poses and shortly realized that nearly all were full of cliché elements. 

I picked one pose for the beginning and started to pose it in 3D. It looked kind of good to me. It has a good line of action, a good silhouette and no twinning. 

The next day a AM-Buddy send me a mail with a link to a pose with was nearly the same one as I did. So I thought: back to the drawing board!

I thought about moments when people get excited and what kind of people could communicate this the best way possible. After a few moments I thought of a child jumping in front of her dad who has a birthday present behind his back.
I started to sketch the pose and posed both characters in 3D.

It wasn't as good as i imagined it so I went along with some more possibilities of a child and her dad to get excited. The final thought I had was, that the girl hasn't seen her dad for quit a while and keep running like crazy in his arms. This is the progress on this pose. I hope I can push it even more to get it perfect :)

Hope you like it