Week eight of the Animation 101 module had begun, and Johnny informed us that at this point we would be the midway point of the module and was very exciting as he put it so that we could look at how many of the principles of animation that we've looked at so far. We were told that in animation when applying for a job in the industry we would be given a test and the test would be a bouncing ball much like professional chefs do in hiring new cooks, whilst this sounded strange it did make sense. Today though we began reviewing our work on the bouncing ball animations in Maya, Stopmotion and 2D even recapping on things we were taught last session when we reviewed. We were told that we could select whatever software we wanted in the test and see how fast we could do it.
We looked at a theory that Johnny had posted on our Facebook group about the bouncing ball problem, that was meant to gain feedback and critic from the group. For those of us in the group that were further ahead with the exercises Johnny mentioned an ambitious exercise where it involved using a pendulum and the bouncing balls which I noticed sounded a lot like a mixed media exercise much like how I tried a mixed media piece with the pendulum and A-B in creating a throwing and catching motion many weeks ago. We moved on to discuss the theories of a bouncing ball and recapping about the Parabola which was the name of arcs within a bouncing ball bounce and we would be getting techniques on this and what we initially thought was a time-lapse or long exposure photographs it was something called Stroboscopic Long Exposure.
We were shown the diagram of this and it showed the journey of the ball such as the speed increasing and decreasing as it bounces, which meant the ball was changing direction and in order for that to happen it needed to change forces and as johnny mentioned the energy from the first bounce is fading away and gravity was beginning to take shape, and the top arc was the area of speed decreasing in the bounce. This was rather fasinating and so I studied it for later in the event that I do a stop motion animation in the Ball bouncing exercise. In terms of the ball bouncing energy is transferred in the ball and it creates a squashing and stretching effect on the ball which is shown in the bouncing as it contacts the ground. In terms of the animation process if we were doing 2D apposed to 3D animation this would mean we needed to do more foraging and when doing this we needed to consider the forces within the bouncing of the ball.
In the lesson we took a look at a video that Johnny said could be of help to us and this involved the use of gelatine to absorb the energy of the balls falling to the surface and it was also shown to us as an example of what we could possibly do to present our work in submitting it by combining several of our animations together into a short film presentation in a left to right motion. We moved to the subject of how students find it very difficult when lecturers in the lesson point out the flaws in our work but this was only natural as Johnny explained that we strive to get better and see the flaws in the work but they don't mean to invalidate the work but to simply give us feedback for us to get the process refined and gain a better understanding of it. Johnny then mentioned that the challenges get greater the more as we progress but we needed to learn to push further in our work go further than we could possibly go, hence the working outside the box element. When looking at work we receive feedback and the better you get the more feedback you get, hence the reason for revering our work in these sessions.
We were then shown an example of work done by a third year student which was a bouncing ball exercise in Maya and this had gotten my full attention. One element that I picked up on was the way the ball was bouncing and moving something that I have never been able to understand or do in Maya when I was working on my bouncing ball animation refinement last night. What we also noticed was how the ball seemed to squash and stretch in the animation and as Adam observed that some of the settings in the bounce were incorrect and Johnny asked us a question whether it was wrong on purpose this had gotten me a bit confused but this was a refinement matter and it shows a certain amount of understanding in this animation process.
One thing that I wanted to know was how to colour the cubes so that if I introduced a base shape to the grid I knew how to better define the shapes but Johnny told me this was very advanced for us and that it was like a deep rabbit hole and how that if we did something too advanced later in the module it would be like a deep hole we couldn't get out of I couldn't understand it but it made sense. In terms of advanced we were then told about something called straight ahead animation and that we would at some point if using Toon Boom we would need to work with rigged characters much like armetures that we would be using later in stop motion. In terms of Maya much like other animation processes it was considered a good idea to do keyframes prior to the animation process hence the use of the bar sheets and storyboards in the process and this would then automatically add tweens in the process unlike Maya which does that straight away.
This then brought us to a video about a process we would be covering in semester 2 of the course which was pose to pose animation a process used in 2D animation. The principle of this was to adopt key storytelling poses and draw in the key frames in each scene then add the areas in between the movements making smooth animation. In elements like this Joe stated that it was a good idea to use the bar sheets and storyboards to block out the poses then work on the animation. There was another process that we could use and that was the dope sheets which was something more advanced for us and it looked overly complicated when this was presented to us in my opinion but this was something we would be introduced to and gain more knowledge with time.
Back to the matter of the bouncing ball animation we looked at what tool would help us and this was the graph editor the area that came down to pure maths and the graph editor which Johnny had told us repeatedly was very similar to the vector lines within Adobe Illustrator and that two of the main elements in a bounce was the build up and slowdown motion. This as Johnny put it was a skimming effect in rounded graph lines in the editor and that we needed to consider that point in the process. We were then introduced to the motion trail in maya which was much like the graph editor and it made me wonder how this was possible and Johnny told us that we could find the motion trail in animation editors section of the software. In this module Johnny told us that we were not expected to try every single thing shown to us today as we were advised that not all of these techniques were for some of us in the group and that we were to find methods that worked for us in this animation software or any other type of software.
During and after break James was going round looking at some of our animations and so I decided to use this moment to ask him questions about tilting and bouncing balls within Maya as I couldn't create these elements within the animation. One of these issues was the tilting of the cube because I found that when I attempted to do a tilting motion before the tilted cube stays that way for the remaining frames and in terms of the bouncing ball I couldn't understand the angled bounces. Thankfully James was able to give me advice on this matter and in terms of the bouncing ball he showed me what I could approach and that was to work on in translate X as the ball touched the ground and move the ball along in another keyframe both start and finish, then in the graph editor this would create a waved line in translate Z which was the keyframe to use.
This would also help when the top of the translate y graph lines had been made into more rounded frames to ease out the bouncing which was advised to me by Joe last week.
I continued to work and refine the ball bouncing idea and had finally managed to handle the placing of the key frames for the ending effect. However there was yet another problem and that was the ball was bouncing in the wrong direction and I tried to place in a replacement keyframe into the animation but when raising the editor line it had the same effect but then I had a notion to flip the line around and it placed the ball bouncing in the correct direction to the bouncing and it seemed to replicate the pace of a basket ball from looking back at the reference videos that I studied: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvgJ7mVxeg0
We looked at a theory that Johnny had posted on our Facebook group about the bouncing ball problem, that was meant to gain feedback and critic from the group. For those of us in the group that were further ahead with the exercises Johnny mentioned an ambitious exercise where it involved using a pendulum and the bouncing balls which I noticed sounded a lot like a mixed media exercise much like how I tried a mixed media piece with the pendulum and A-B in creating a throwing and catching motion many weeks ago. We moved on to discuss the theories of a bouncing ball and recapping about the Parabola which was the name of arcs within a bouncing ball bounce and we would be getting techniques on this and what we initially thought was a time-lapse or long exposure photographs it was something called Stroboscopic Long Exposure.
We were shown the diagram of this and it showed the journey of the ball such as the speed increasing and decreasing as it bounces, which meant the ball was changing direction and in order for that to happen it needed to change forces and as johnny mentioned the energy from the first bounce is fading away and gravity was beginning to take shape, and the top arc was the area of speed decreasing in the bounce. This was rather fasinating and so I studied it for later in the event that I do a stop motion animation in the Ball bouncing exercise. In terms of the ball bouncing energy is transferred in the ball and it creates a squashing and stretching effect on the ball which is shown in the bouncing as it contacts the ground. In terms of the animation process if we were doing 2D apposed to 3D animation this would mean we needed to do more foraging and when doing this we needed to consider the forces within the bouncing of the ball.
In the lesson we took a look at a video that Johnny said could be of help to us and this involved the use of gelatine to absorb the energy of the balls falling to the surface and it was also shown to us as an example of what we could possibly do to present our work in submitting it by combining several of our animations together into a short film presentation in a left to right motion. We moved to the subject of how students find it very difficult when lecturers in the lesson point out the flaws in our work but this was only natural as Johnny explained that we strive to get better and see the flaws in the work but they don't mean to invalidate the work but to simply give us feedback for us to get the process refined and gain a better understanding of it. Johnny then mentioned that the challenges get greater the more as we progress but we needed to learn to push further in our work go further than we could possibly go, hence the working outside the box element. When looking at work we receive feedback and the better you get the more feedback you get, hence the reason for revering our work in these sessions.
We were then shown an example of work done by a third year student which was a bouncing ball exercise in Maya and this had gotten my full attention. One element that I picked up on was the way the ball was bouncing and moving something that I have never been able to understand or do in Maya when I was working on my bouncing ball animation refinement last night. What we also noticed was how the ball seemed to squash and stretch in the animation and as Adam observed that some of the settings in the bounce were incorrect and Johnny asked us a question whether it was wrong on purpose this had gotten me a bit confused but this was a refinement matter and it shows a certain amount of understanding in this animation process.
One thing that I wanted to know was how to colour the cubes so that if I introduced a base shape to the grid I knew how to better define the shapes but Johnny told me this was very advanced for us and that it was like a deep rabbit hole and how that if we did something too advanced later in the module it would be like a deep hole we couldn't get out of I couldn't understand it but it made sense. In terms of advanced we were then told about something called straight ahead animation and that we would at some point if using Toon Boom we would need to work with rigged characters much like armetures that we would be using later in stop motion. In terms of Maya much like other animation processes it was considered a good idea to do keyframes prior to the animation process hence the use of the bar sheets and storyboards in the process and this would then automatically add tweens in the process unlike Maya which does that straight away.
This then brought us to a video about a process we would be covering in semester 2 of the course which was pose to pose animation a process used in 2D animation. The principle of this was to adopt key storytelling poses and draw in the key frames in each scene then add the areas in between the movements making smooth animation. In elements like this Joe stated that it was a good idea to use the bar sheets and storyboards to block out the poses then work on the animation. There was another process that we could use and that was the dope sheets which was something more advanced for us and it looked overly complicated when this was presented to us in my opinion but this was something we would be introduced to and gain more knowledge with time.
Back to the matter of the bouncing ball animation we looked at what tool would help us and this was the graph editor the area that came down to pure maths and the graph editor which Johnny had told us repeatedly was very similar to the vector lines within Adobe Illustrator and that two of the main elements in a bounce was the build up and slowdown motion. This as Johnny put it was a skimming effect in rounded graph lines in the editor and that we needed to consider that point in the process. We were then introduced to the motion trail in maya which was much like the graph editor and it made me wonder how this was possible and Johnny told us that we could find the motion trail in animation editors section of the software. In this module Johnny told us that we were not expected to try every single thing shown to us today as we were advised that not all of these techniques were for some of us in the group and that we were to find methods that worked for us in this animation software or any other type of software.
During and after break James was going round looking at some of our animations and so I decided to use this moment to ask him questions about tilting and bouncing balls within Maya as I couldn't create these elements within the animation. One of these issues was the tilting of the cube because I found that when I attempted to do a tilting motion before the tilted cube stays that way for the remaining frames and in terms of the bouncing ball I couldn't understand the angled bounces. Thankfully James was able to give me advice on this matter and in terms of the bouncing ball he showed me what I could approach and that was to work on in translate X as the ball touched the ground and move the ball along in another keyframe both start and finish, then in the graph editor this would create a waved line in translate Z which was the keyframe to use.
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| Graph editor |
Given James advice I decided to try this method, as much as I understood, however I couldn't seem to get the keyframes right or make the ball move, this had gotten me more confused but James advised that I should refer back to the graph editor if confused and this same thing applied to tilting the cube. In this matter I informed James of my difficulty in this exercise despite my attempts at trying to capture a tilting cube in my block interaction exercise, and how the tilted cube is the same within the remaining key frames from the start of the animation. James then revealed the cause of it as it was only one key frame in the graph editor in that particular area and that two were needed in order to accomplish the tilting motion and not have a tilted cube in the beginning frames. I started to try the exercise but I couldn't seem to grasp the concept of the idea and I was beginning to wonder what I was doing wrong and then I looked at the graph editor and it was because there needed to be a frame introduced in the beginning frames then in the area where the cube would tilt back down again.
I tried this in a separate file of Maya to test the idea and this did work however I placed the keyframes too close to each other and it was rather quick but this was just an attempt that I would later approach at home and refine it.
Here are my tilting attempts:
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| Graph editor for tilting. |
bouncing ball animation:
Looking back at these animations I was glad that I asked James about this matter and that its helped me to understand more about using Maya in these areas of animation for the course I may continue to explore this matter in further animations using Maya, but I may attend workshop sessions when they start up again in the next semester. Joe and Johnny then brought about our attention as I was booking stopmotion cameras they told us that whilst we maybe tense and stressed with the deadline getting ever closer we were reminded to have confidence in ourselves and that we needed to apply our core theories to our work in core software that we would be using and that in this module we were on the right path in terms of our work which eased any pressing concerns that I was having at the time.
We were even told that when submitting our work we could do a trick in importing files into Maya to make them into one animation principle and even using what we've learned so far and go back on some of our animations to see if we could re attempt the exercise. We could even integrate obsticals within the bouncing ball exercise to have fun with the idea of the ball bouncing off walls which was as Johnny put it " like a bouncing ball bouncing all over the place. In each of our exercises we needed to blog our exercises in our uni blogs and this was a requirement of the brief and that if we fulfilled the aspects of the brief we would receive full marks and our personal goal was to go beyond the forty percent mark. However Johnny advised that whilst we are committed to our studies we needed the Christmas holidays to ourselves to recover even if we wanted to do our work whilst some of us just needed some time before we could work another exercise.
Looking back at this session I would think that I learned a lot from this session and that I felt I've asked the right questions to gain further insight into refining my animations in Maya in terms of bouncing balls and the tilting cubes for future projects or exercises in the course. I could tell that from this point some of the exercises would begin to become more ambitious and mixed media in terms of techniques. However whilst I felt a bit worried I decided to persist none the less since there would be benefits and knowing the knowledge that I was on the right course with the module work in the course.
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