For Animation 101 this week we reviewed our work on the pendulum animations that we did over the last week and even showed of the first attempts as the block interaction exercise that was to be given to us today in week 6. Before showing our work we were reminded of a few tips and advice that could help us in stop motion and the idea would be to do the exercise in Maya first then we would have a blue print for the stop-motion version of the exercise, and may even produce sufficient results in our outcomes. During this lecture we were informed that stop frame animation was an important element of the course because we needed to understand movement and get more experienced in the event we struggled in Maya. This was also good in terms of employment as the clients would judge us based on our experience, and said experience would help us because if we kept up doing what we do in Maya when we look back on our work come week 10 and it would provide the opportunity to home our skills on refining them.
The bottom line was the more we animate the more we can reflect and improve. The crucial thing was that we couldn't fall behind because if we missed even one deadline it would mean disaster both on the course and in employment. We had different animations to approach which we would look at later in the course and in the present day. These skills are the following;
The bottom line was the more we animate the more we can reflect and improve. The crucial thing was that we couldn't fall behind because if we missed even one deadline it would mean disaster both on the course and in employment. We had different animations to approach which we would look at later in the course and in the present day. These skills are the following;
- Stop frame: Physical animation
- Toon Boom: drawing the frames
We were advised to play with the different principles of animation because the more we do the more we learn. We then looked at the brief as a reminder and to learn more of what to submit at the end of the course and I was rather curious about one thing and that was the three rendered Maya animations we had to hand in whether they were completely different animations showing our skills or what we've done so far. Joe confirmed that it was a selection of three of our best pieces over the course, the key to passing the module was to aim for the best outcome that we could and the time we had to ourselves would be the time that we need to experiment and play around to be creative see what we could do with it. We were then reminded about the meet the puppets event at Sale Waterside where we could meet famous puppet creators even people like Sam Holland who apparently was one of the team members behind the reboot of one of my old favourite tv shows Danger Mouse.
We then reviewed our pendulum movements in stop motion and Maya and some people were quite close to doing the movement, and when looking at my work I showed them the pendulum in both stop motion and Maya the Maya needed work in terms of timing and velocity and in my stop motion Joe noted that there was a jump within the swing which looking back I noticed myself, and there was still some work that needed doing in the maya version. I decided to show the group a Maya animation that I whipped up over the weekend which was an attempt at a tennis like motion as looking back on the brief it mentioned one of our outcomes was a waving tennis movement, however due to having troubles with the return throw it had to be changed to a simple throw and catch movement. Upon showing it Joe did like that I tried this action and James the resident technician suggested that I should attempt adding rotation in the cubes kicking the ball to make it look realistic and to work on the speed of the ball being thrown.
This feed back was what I needed in these animations to give me a steer to improve and give me guidance. I saw that the block interactions that people did seemed to look like a story being told such as Holly's looked like a cube being snuck up on like jaws the shark in my view whilst Adams was more of a cube being bullied by more cubes. Some stop motions showed that they used rigging but didn't remove them yet as they needed to be put through After Effects. However, it was in this moment that I remembered a feature in Stop motion pro that could remove the rigging without the use of After effects. During the break I took the time to research this and though Joe said it depended on what version we used but I remembered it was the version we used in the stop motion rooms that had this very feature and thankfully on youtube I'd found the tutorial on how to use this feature and took notes on what to do when doing the stop motion later in the afternoon.
I also took the time to ask James about how I could improve upon my throw and catch animation and he showed me a useful trick when it came to rotating the cube to show it kicking the sphere across the grid. Which was to execute the rotation whilst having it set to a function called auto key, and he suggested that when I reached the next frame I could rotate the cube then swipe it forward creating a strong rotation which was very helpful. In terms of doing the key selected James told me that in this instance the Y&X keys in translate don't do anything but when doing this type of animation it was a good idea to do each key selected frame one by one not at the same time the same would go for the objects within the animation. In terms of the graph editor the lines in it had to be sharp at certain key frames to give a smooth animation, which could be of use to me and it was a good idea to ask an expert regarding this method.
Our next task in Maya and stop motion was block interaction but for those who were further ahead in the animation it was the ball bouncing exercise. In the block interaction this was actually the opportunity to show our story telling skills. Within these animations there had to be a story behind them and planning the story was one of the keys to help us think about our framing in stop motion and plan how the characters are going to interact and that within these stories we are not limited to sliding the cube along we could use rigs to generate jumping movements and this instantly gave me the idea for my own block interaction piece. The story that we wrote in stop mo had to be used in Maya as well.
For the ball bouncing activity the key to it was thinking about the physics behind the bouncing and the weight of the ball. The ball itself could either be a bowling ball, a bouncing ball or a balloon, to aid us in this matter we could watch a reference video of the ball bouncing to give us an idea of framing and positioning of the ball when its bouncing and catch its pace. This I felt could be a difficult task in stop motion and clearly I needed to try and ask how I could do this in stop motion and do it in Maya to get the idea of positioning in the bouncing. However we needed to be careful when using the reference video and that everything that we did was based on the brief and have the video placed on a Vimeo Account or our blogs so that we are aware what we're meant to hand in for final submission.
Reflecting back on this lesson it was clear that I had a lot to consider for my stop motion exercises in the pendulum and in Maya, but I also had some good advice given to me about the program too which could aid me in more of my ambitious animation ideas. I also felt that I had a chance to try storyboarding in this course and had more information on the brief and what we are meant to submit. However I feel that I should possibly ask more questions on doing the bouncing ball exercise within the stop motion to give more insight but perhaps the tactic of using maya as a blue print may help along those lines.
In conclusion this lesson was very helpful in improving my animations and given tips regarding refining them into something more developed for a final submission.
Bouncing ball: Maya & 2D: 9th November 2017
Having completed my stopmotion work I decided to try doing a ball bouncing animation using Maya and 2D animation I would be referencing from a youtube reference video of a rubber ball bouncing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY3TrpiUOqE
I decided to start with Maya as I realised it would be the most difficult, and after studying the video I counted about 14 bounces within the video and so I would repeat that in Maya, and with new knowledge of inserting keyframes I set to work. I inserted a ball polygon into the centre of the grid then using the selection tool I selected the sphere and lifted it up high above the grid then placed in the 25fps hold in the keyframes. This would be a simple up and down motion and it would slow down as it would hit the ground. I made the bounces about 25fps intervals long, but made sure I didn't penetrate the grid as the ball hit the ground.
Every bounce I made sure I counted the bounces and made sure they were trying to slow down at the right moment. However I wasn't sure this would be a good animation, however this was only a first try and hopefully the feedback would help me to improve on my ball bouncing animation in Maya. Once finished this was saved as a play blast file for showing to my work to the group then I moved onto my 2D version.
2D:
For my first 2D animation I decided to refer back to one of my old ball bounce attempts when I downloaded 2D animation software in Clip Studio Paint whilst I was in college (as shown below)
First ball bounce attempt made 18/11/16 for portfolio in college.
For my second attempt I would be using clip studio to see if I could still master using the animation element of the software. Much like the first I used a blue ball but there was a problem the version of clip studio that I was using was limited to 25fps which wouldn't contain the whole animation. So this would have to be done in sections then compiled in iMovie like some slideshows that I made many years back. I did each bounce in sections as I added the key frames via the insert keyframe option, in the software however this was very time consuming. This was an indication that my future animations in 2D would have to be done in Adobe Animate as that was the program to be used and why I downloaded it to my mac but this was a learning curve for me to learn from. Once the frames were completed they were then brought together in iMovie and then rendered together as a playable file for the group to see at showing our first attempts at ball bouncing. However there was one thing that I forgot to add and that was the 25fps hold frame at the start of the animation but there wasn't time to correct this.
Looking back its clear that I had a lot to learn from the experience of ball bouncing and hopefully the feedback that I got from these pieces would help me in improving my understanding of ball bouncing and so I saved the maya file to my pen drive in the event that Johnny wanted to look at it.
Our next task in Maya and stop motion was block interaction but for those who were further ahead in the animation it was the ball bouncing exercise. In the block interaction this was actually the opportunity to show our story telling skills. Within these animations there had to be a story behind them and planning the story was one of the keys to help us think about our framing in stop motion and plan how the characters are going to interact and that within these stories we are not limited to sliding the cube along we could use rigs to generate jumping movements and this instantly gave me the idea for my own block interaction piece. The story that we wrote in stop mo had to be used in Maya as well.
For the ball bouncing activity the key to it was thinking about the physics behind the bouncing and the weight of the ball. The ball itself could either be a bowling ball, a bouncing ball or a balloon, to aid us in this matter we could watch a reference video of the ball bouncing to give us an idea of framing and positioning of the ball when its bouncing and catch its pace. This I felt could be a difficult task in stop motion and clearly I needed to try and ask how I could do this in stop motion and do it in Maya to get the idea of positioning in the bouncing. However we needed to be careful when using the reference video and that everything that we did was based on the brief and have the video placed on a Vimeo Account or our blogs so that we are aware what we're meant to hand in for final submission.
Reflecting back on this lesson it was clear that I had a lot to consider for my stop motion exercises in the pendulum and in Maya, but I also had some good advice given to me about the program too which could aid me in more of my ambitious animation ideas. I also felt that I had a chance to try storyboarding in this course and had more information on the brief and what we are meant to submit. However I feel that I should possibly ask more questions on doing the bouncing ball exercise within the stop motion to give more insight but perhaps the tactic of using maya as a blue print may help along those lines.
In conclusion this lesson was very helpful in improving my animations and given tips regarding refining them into something more developed for a final submission.
Bouncing ball: Maya & 2D: 9th November 2017
Having completed my stopmotion work I decided to try doing a ball bouncing animation using Maya and 2D animation I would be referencing from a youtube reference video of a rubber ball bouncing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY3TrpiUOqE
I decided to start with Maya as I realised it would be the most difficult, and after studying the video I counted about 14 bounces within the video and so I would repeat that in Maya, and with new knowledge of inserting keyframes I set to work. I inserted a ball polygon into the centre of the grid then using the selection tool I selected the sphere and lifted it up high above the grid then placed in the 25fps hold in the keyframes. This would be a simple up and down motion and it would slow down as it would hit the ground. I made the bounces about 25fps intervals long, but made sure I didn't penetrate the grid as the ball hit the ground.
Every bounce I made sure I counted the bounces and made sure they were trying to slow down at the right moment. However I wasn't sure this would be a good animation, however this was only a first try and hopefully the feedback would help me to improve on my ball bouncing animation in Maya. Once finished this was saved as a play blast file for showing to my work to the group then I moved onto my 2D version.
For my first 2D animation I decided to refer back to one of my old ball bounce attempts when I downloaded 2D animation software in Clip Studio Paint whilst I was in college (as shown below)
For my second attempt I would be using clip studio to see if I could still master using the animation element of the software. Much like the first I used a blue ball but there was a problem the version of clip studio that I was using was limited to 25fps which wouldn't contain the whole animation. So this would have to be done in sections then compiled in iMovie like some slideshows that I made many years back. I did each bounce in sections as I added the key frames via the insert keyframe option, in the software however this was very time consuming. This was an indication that my future animations in 2D would have to be done in Adobe Animate as that was the program to be used and why I downloaded it to my mac but this was a learning curve for me to learn from. Once the frames were completed they were then brought together in iMovie and then rendered together as a playable file for the group to see at showing our first attempts at ball bouncing. However there was one thing that I forgot to add and that was the 25fps hold frame at the start of the animation but there wasn't time to correct this.
Comments
Post a Comment