Week 6- Assignment #5

For the first part of week 6 we had the chance to revise our pendulum assignment. I took my mentor's notes and added more of a wave shape at the extreme of the movement since it was going to fast, and had it fall into the original curved pose right as it's hitting the hard stop. He still gave me some minor tweaks I could make so hopefully by the end of term progress reel I'll have it looking just right!

For our main assignment this week we had to animate the character Tailor to show anticipation, squash and stretch, and overlap with the tail. This assignment was a little more exciting and also more difficult because now it's a character with a personality, and the ball moves at its own will with its own thoughts as opposed to just the bouncing ball that was acted upon by outside forces. I thought this would be a good opportunity to get a piece for my demo reel, so I was a little more ambitious with it, and that didn't really turn out to be the best thing for me.

My mentor said he really liked that some of us were thinking about a story line to go along with it because we'll need that later on, but he decided he really needed to be on us this week about simply the task at hand. He gave me some good advice and said to just concentrate on the front character for the revision, as the one behind him gets a little distracting, and now I'll put all my energy into trying to perfect one character.

Week 5- Assignment #4 Part 2

The other part of our week 5 assignment was animating a pendulum to concentrate on drag and overlapping acting. Some people were going crazy with their assignments and making their pendulums do all sorts of things, including interacting with other objects. That would be cool, but I really wanted to make sure I nailed the purpose of the assignment so I just did something basic. Our mentor told us that if we did extra stuff in our assignments then the main principal and purpose ought to be amazing, otherwise we just wasted time making it look fancy and we missed the point. So first we had to plan it out, and I just drew in some main keys and wrote down some notes and rules of thumb.

We could have approached this assignment in a couple of different ways, but what really helped me get the wave principal down was using the grease pencil tool in Maya to actually draw in the S shapes and curves below the block and moved my pendulum to fit those shapes. I was essentially doing this

This really helped get the correct overlap feeling to my pendulum and my mentor commented on it. I think the grease pencil is a really handy tool that I'll continue to use in overlap. Here's how my pendulum turned out

Week 5- Assignment #4 Part 1

This week we had the chance to revise our light/heavy ball assignment based off of our mentor's critique. Overall he liked my assignment and the changes I made, but he did say I went a little too far with the spacing on the ping pong ball. Now it looks a little strobey, but hopefully I'll get to revise it again for the end of term!

We also got another pose assignment- this week we had to convey "devastation". I thought this one would be really easy and that I could just pull from my own experiences and look at images of people getting really bad news. It was, however, pretty difficult- not only because it was hard to find poses that you didn't already see a million times, but also because people tend to roll up and close themselves off like shielding themselves when they're devastated and this made it hard to think of good silhouette and also his giant head kept getting in the way. I even took my own reference photos with my camera timer but I really needed a model! (You don't want see those pictures...) So I drew everything I could think of and then tried a few in 3D.

I ended up changing the pose that I picked once I had it in Maya until I felt like it was more interesting and had a better silhouette.

One thing my mentor said was he likes to stay away from fists with devastation because once we've reached that point, we've given up, we're passed the anger and aggravation. I thought that was a good point. He said maybe that arm can be across his body like he's comforting himself. He also said that there was probably too much strength in his right leg and when we're devastation we don't have any strength left. Here was his suggestion

And here's my final render. I still feel like I couldn't quite get his hand right. Maybe I'm crazy or maybe I can still go back and fix it if I get some time.

Real devastation...

Week 4- Assignment #3

For week 4, the first part of our assignment was to revise our bouncing ball based on the notes we received from our mentor. Here's how my revision turned out...

This was tough to get right because I had to key the rotation in a certain way to allow for the stretch and squash to happen when I wanted and for them to happen along the path of action (the arcs the ball makes). Mike gave me some more notes on the revision so hopefully I can make it perfect for the end of term progress reel!

Our main assignment for this week was to plan out and animate two balls of different weights. I decided to do a bowling ball and a ping pong ball because I like the contrast of movement. I found a couple reference videos online to get a feel for how each one moves. I tried to take the timing from the reference video to mark where I thought the keyframes should go. Here's what my planning looked like...

I crossed out the numbers and wrote in new ones after I had been animating in Maya because once I got in there I realized it didn't feel right and needed to be retimed. Basically the ping pong ball bounces more and higher, and the bowling ball bounces way less and comes to a settle a lot faster. Here's what my animation looked like..

The lighter ball ended up being a lot harder to execute than I thought it would. Mike ended up really liking my bowling ball and just suggested that I either ease way more slowly into the stop at the end or have it slightly overshoot and roll back a little bit to feel natural. For my light ball, he said the spacing made it seem more like a tennis ball, and to push the bounces further and give them more hang time to make it feel more airy. I realized looking back that it really did look like a tennis ball and that's what I couldn't really put my finger on when I was animating. We'll see what he says about my revision next week!