Class work
This week we are going to be animating a ball with a tail, referencing squirrel footage for the moment. We aren’t going to be focusing too much on how the body moves, as we are mainly practicing the anticipation movement before the jump, and the follow through of the tail in regards to the body.
George also mentioned it’s better to exaggerate and overshoot these kinds of movements and then scale it back depending on feedback, since when working in a study animation supervisors don’t want to have to keep telling you to increase movements bit by bit by bit. It’s a better workflow to overshoot (within reason of course), and it saves time on feedback since whoever is critiquing can say something like “scale that back by about half” rather than having to guess how much it needs increasing.
The animation for next week should be blocked so we can practice working pose to pose and blocking out anim. The week after will be splining and clean up.
Pendulum Feedback
I uploaded both my pendulum plan and animation to syncsketch.
Feedback from George:
- Bottom joint should trail back slightly more
- Bottom joint shouldn’t go higher after stopping than while moving (I originally thought this might give the feeling of the base stopping suddenly some weight, but I can see now it feels wrong)
- The movement of the second from the bottom joint just before it stops swinging back and forth should be reduced slightly
- End of animation could do with being extended to give more time for the bottom joints to finish moving. Feels a bit too quick on the last few back and forth swings