Spline Editing Part One

Hello everyone!

This has been a long time since I last updated this blog.

At animation mentor I went over with a few of the principles of animation.

So in this last exercise we were given this character called tailor (a ball with a tail :P) and had to make it do a least of thee bounces.

My bounce as inspired by the Super Mario triple jump.

So here is the result!

Well and here is the planning that I have made for this animation.

Planning actually helps a lot ;P

Overlapping Action

I have been told that overlapping action is one of the hardest things to get right in animation. And it is true this was not something so straight forward as the bouncing balls that I have made so far, but practice makes it perfect right? (Lets hope for my sake).

So in this attempt I animated just the first joint of the pendulum, making it like a clock, then I created a offset of that same motion to the following pendulums, this animation was mainly made in the graph editor.

Well, here is the planning I made for my pendulum and here it reveals one of the situations were I can still improve. Reduce the pendulum speed more in the ends to create a greater speed contrast.

Anticipation and Squash and Stretch

For me Squash & Stretch must be one of the most fun things to animate so far. Well as long as you have the timing and spacing animated just right :P. So this week we were given an obstacle course to throw our bouncing ball in. Once I made sure that all the arcs were spot on and the timing was acceptable I started adding the squash and stretch, It kinda felt like adding a new layer on top of that I already made that got my animation looking so much more interesting.

Okay and here is the planing, as you guys can see here there are the error that were transported to the animation. The most pertinent one being the overly gradual squash and stretch.

And of course, we had another pose to show off some emotion, this time devastation.

This pose was based on the second pose from bottom right, I rotated it 3/4 and added a bit of more curvature to the spine, and of course the hand on the head. I personally find the hand a bit of a cliche, but devastation is such a hard emotion to read only from body language that is probably a good thing to be a bit cheesy.