Anticipation and Follow through Final Version, and course review: 10/1/18:

Following the advice given to me by Joe this morning, I decided to finalise and render my Anticipation and followthrough animation so that I would be able to submit it as a final submission for my module. The issue that I was facing from my past work was that the cube edge kept penetrating the floor of the animation and I couldn't have this as a final submission, until I refined it as I wanted to make a good first impression on my first university hand in. Whilst the module results wouldn't count towards a final grade I still wanted to solve this problem. I therefore created a new document and decided to test the advice idea.

To begin, I placed in a simple cube into maya and began to make a tilting motion. Joe had advised that I lifted the cube as I tilted it so that it wouldn't penetrate the floor, so I decided to try it. In between each tilting frame I lifted the cube up slightly as it tilted and playing it back it seemed to work very well. So I decided to apply this to my new animation piece, I started like my previous attempts with a simple A-B sliding motion across the floor and moved the cube back as it moved forward and backwards nearing its end point. The next phase would be the most difficult and that was the tilting motion. The key was making sure the frames would be a short distance apart from the moving cube frames, and I did forget to move to the next frame as I key selected rotate Z and translate Y key channels.

 I was able to undo this action and insert new keyframes. Once the frames were inserted I decided to do a test play of the animation, before I did though I needed to check how the render would look and that it didn't have a shadow under the cube as it was lifted off the ground. From the rendering tool bar I selected a sun direction tool from the grid and placed it in a left hand side position on the animation then clicking the clap board icon I had a test render and it didn't show a shadow under the cube which meant that the piece worked.

Clap board test render

Rendering tool bar

Test render

I then noticed that the cube looked slightly tilted and before I played the animation I corrected this and when I played it it ran smoothly and it confirmed that I finally had an anticipation and followthrough piece that I could submit for the module. I was most relieved with the final product that the advice and process that I went through to create this final product it was very pleasing to my eyes. I then rendered this maya animation and then uploaded it to my Youtube account for submission.

Looking back on the work that I've produced on this course I would think that whilst my first animations in Maya and stop motion were simple and some required refinement it was a learning curve for us on the module so that in the future we would know what we did wrong or what we could improve upon. This would be something we would come to learn in the Animation 102 module that we would be doing at the start of the next semester where we would be tackling the hardest element of animation and thats a simple walk cycle in Maya, 2D and Stopmotion.

My favourite and most challenging Maya and stop motion activities would be the ball weights and block interaction pieces. The block interaction was a chance for some creative story telling in the animation and the chance for the use of story boards in our animation pieces. However the thing that I had to improve upon was the speed of the animation and possibly not use close up shots as it would cause issues in the positioning of the frames. In terms of the ball bouncing exercise the difficult aspect to capture would be the number of bounces and the height that the ball would drop from in the air and to the ground. This was something that I found to be the most difficult in this section of the course brief. However once I realised I needed to time the bounces and translate them to a bar sheet I was able to get a better grasp on some of my animations in ball weights, and the importance of these elements.

The point of these animations in my view was to test us and try to get us out of our normal comfort zones, which was the overall point of the course. Whilst its been trying at times I have enjoyed the tasks on this module and in doing so I've learned how to use Maya and even do some self learning in my home tasks in terms of rendering and ball bounce referencing. If I could do this module again I would possibly watch the reference video first map out a bar sheet or storyboard then perform the animation in Maya or stopmotion. In conclusion I've enjoyed this module and look forward to facing the upcoming challenges of the walk cycle in Animation 102 this year.