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.

Introduction to Timing and Spacing

Hello everyone

After my animation was submitted under the analytical eye of my mentor, I remade my bouncing ball with his advice in mind.

I evened out the arcs of the ball and worked a bit on the timing making giving a more sudden landing on to the ball. I still find the first arc to need some improvement and the ball probably still holds itself in the air for too long on the second arc. I might remake this one of these days.

This week's assignment was to create a heavy and a light ball bounce in the same scene. I used a ping pong versus a bowling ball. I did some thumb-nailing to plan this project but I based it heavily on life footage.

It was interesting to notice that although people reacted quite well to the ping-pong ball everyone felt that the bowling ball was too bouncy even though I was quite faithful to the live footage. I concluded that animating seems to be combining what is real with what feels right and at the same time I have to correspond to peoples expectations.

Here are my thumbnails, The more I make them the more useful they seem to become. Both of these projects are by far not perfect. I received positive and sharp criticism back from them. The bowling ball fall needs a bit of a tweak when it is falling down. Also I was told how to have the right frames in the right place to improve the ease in and out. I guess I am trusting on Maya graph editor too much.

My second AM assignment

Well this is part of last week's assignment. Here are a set of sketches of poses to express excitement. The next step would be use the AM Maya character and pose him according to one of the drawings. This was the result.

Oh yes, and lets not forget, my very first official exercise of a bouncing ball!

Exiting :)

Well that's it for last week's work. Today by 8pm (GMT time) I'll be presented with a couple of new challenges.

Speak to you guys soon!

My first post

Hello Everyone

Today is a beautiful Sunday morning in lovely Bournemouth in the UK. I woke up in a good mood, went downstairs and made myself a big bowl of cheerios. While chewing them I was going over my head about all the stuff I set myself to do during this week. Doing this blog came to my mind. I have been wanting to create a blog since I joined animation mentor so I could post some of my work and see what feedback I can get.

So I guess the next thing will be posting some material right.