This week in animation 101we began to start work on the pendulum movement in Maya, which according to Joe and Johnny would be of help when using the movement in stop motion. This was also the chance for me to learn somethings about the tilting in anticipation and follow through as I was having difficulty in that particular animation and the night before I had created an anticipation and followthrough animation using sliding motion to see if that would count. Johnny showed this work and it seemed to fulfil the criteria and that the tilting movement was more advanced in animation 102 which would be covered later in the year.
We were shown some animation work in maya that involved the use of cubes in A-B motions moving across the grid this to me seemed to be the building blocks of walking and this was something to consider having a go at for independent study. We then proceeded to the subject of the session which was doing the pendulum movement in maya and the key to this was pivot points which would be found when selecting the cube, when doing the pendulum we would be learning how to separate the pivot point from the cube and place it in the centre of the grid. Having attempted the pendulum movement in maya in preparation for this task I knew where this was going and that on a mac computer the "D" key was the insert key which detaches the pivot point from the key and by holding this and the track pad we could then move it to the centre of the grid and pressed "x" to snap it into place.
The key to creating a pendulum movement is simulating the idea of a string within the animation and unconscious movement which was used by Victorians and even magicians use it and is considered an interesting path for animators to take. We would be attempting a similar method in stop motion and one method that could help us was plotting the movements on a sheet of paper and move the cube along those dots or use a rule and pencil to mark a pivot point which was something that I tried on mu first stop motion attempt. In learning the pendulum I discovered that Maya has its own version of onion skinning much like stop motion pro V8 and this was called ghosted key frames which was located in the tool bar visualise, ghost selected key frames.
We were shown some animation work in maya that involved the use of cubes in A-B motions moving across the grid this to me seemed to be the building blocks of walking and this was something to consider having a go at for independent study. We then proceeded to the subject of the session which was doing the pendulum movement in maya and the key to this was pivot points which would be found when selecting the cube, when doing the pendulum we would be learning how to separate the pivot point from the cube and place it in the centre of the grid. Having attempted the pendulum movement in maya in preparation for this task I knew where this was going and that on a mac computer the "D" key was the insert key which detaches the pivot point from the key and by holding this and the track pad we could then move it to the centre of the grid and pressed "x" to snap it into place.
The key to creating a pendulum movement is simulating the idea of a string within the animation and unconscious movement which was used by Victorians and even magicians use it and is considered an interesting path for animators to take. We would be attempting a similar method in stop motion and one method that could help us was plotting the movements on a sheet of paper and move the cube along those dots or use a rule and pencil to mark a pivot point which was something that I tried on mu first stop motion attempt. In learning the pendulum I discovered that Maya has its own version of onion skinning much like stop motion pro V8 and this was called ghosted key frames which was located in the tool bar visualise, ghost selected key frames.
This was something that I didn't know about demonstrating that we are on this course to learn new things that we never thought would be possible to even consider in this field of work. To help smooth out the animation we looked at the graph editor which for me was one of the more difficult aspects of the maya animation software, but we were reminded that having a go at this and maya was crucial information to help us in producing our stop motion work as this was considered one of the elements in translating what we learn in Maya into stop motion or vice versa. In the graph editor the lines in the piece were slightly curved and to smooth it out we needed to slightly straighten the lines in the editor to give a rather smooth finish in the animation as shown below.
Before
After
One of the key elements was that when doing the pendulum movement the pendulum had to lose power as it swung to its stopping point which was at -12 on the grid. We then took a moment after there break to review our work produced from last week and that by now we should've finished our A-B animations,slow in slow out, and the anticipation and movement, I wasn't sure that I had produced the slow in and slow out so I decided to work on this after todays session. I demonstrated my attempts at anticipation and movement along with the pendulum in stop motion and Joe suggested that for a first attempt it wasn't bad but I had to consider the speed of the tilting in anticipation and movement and suggested perhaps doing two shots per frame in this animation. The Pendulum in maya had a similar review, and James suggested adjusting the graph editor to make it slightly smoother and swing better to make it look like a loss of power in the swing.
In terms of doing the pendulum in stop motion the camera had to be placed at a high enough angle to see the cube and swing from above or perhaps the use of armatures/rigging to create the swing. The best camera position that Joe suggested was that of 45 degrees down on the frames. To aid in some areas of the animations we could record ourselves rehearsing the animation in terms of anticipation and followthrough.
Upon lessons end I wanted to book some equipment to begin using the stop motion methods, however there didn't seem to be any available at the time so I decided to use the time to wait for another available booking by doing some intro to creative play work and printing off the bar sheets to aid me in my animations as it was like a script that we could draw out to calculate the movements in the animations. The advice that we were given this week was to keep feeding the blog and not let anything that we learned slip away from our minds and communicate it into said blogs so that when the tutors review it they can see that we've considered these attributes.
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