Category: Animation

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

This week George showed us a cool gif that explains and shows examples of the 12 Principles of Animation:

• Squash and Stretch
• Timing and Motion
• Anticipation
• Staging
• Follow-Through and Overlapping Action
• Straight Ahead and Pose-to-Pose Action
• Slow In and Out
• Arcs
• Exaggeration
• Secondary Action
• Solid Drawing
• Appeal

George mentioned to think of the solid drawing more as solid posing when it comes to 3D Animation.

We also watched a video about using spheres in more complex shots to break down motion arcs, and how tracking over existing shots with high visual appeal with spheres can show how simple it can be to create such appeal. The breakdown of the shot from ‘Brave’ was my favourite, as when viewing the shot alone it was easy for me to get overwhelmed when thinking about how the animator managed to create such satisfying movement in the characters, and while the overlay of the spheres doesn’t discount the animator’s talent it does make it seem much more achievable with practice and understanding.

George advised we do some post sketching, focusing on anticipation, lines of action, and clear silhouettes. I went to the V&A museum to sketch some of the statues, and also used the Bodies in Motion site to sketch some still frames of interesting poses. I sometimes focused only on the silhouette, sometimes only drew a stick figure representation, and sometimes sketched out the full or nearly the full pose. I also tried to draw over some with lines of action so I can translate this understanding of them into my 3D animations.

For the practical work, we animated a pendulum shot today, with extra focus on learning the ‘Follow-Through and Overlapping Action principle.

We also got feedback on our bouncing ball animation from last week.

My bouncing ball animation:

My feedback:

• Have more of an arc on the entrance drop of the ball
• Have the stretch come in a little later and make it more extreme
• On the later bounces, track how low the ball is and make sure its height at the frame before impact is getting lower each time
• Drop off the squash and stretches sooner
• Have more rotation on the last few bounces and as it rolls
• Add a few more frames to the end to give it time to come to a halt

For this lecture, we were introduced to the brief and George demonstrated how to do a bouncing ball animation in Maya.

We were shown a good YouTube channel, 3D Animation Internships, which shows shot progressions from various big 3D Animated films.

For Maya, we were first shown how to set up a new project:

File > Set Project…

Then George showed us how to change preferences and the best preferences to use:

Windows > Settings/Preferences > Preferences

Once we had set up the new project and our preferences, we then downloaded a ball rig from Behance and referenced it into Maya. George then drew out how to time out the bouncing ball, explaining how the motion and energy of the ball drops off steadily until it comes to a stop. He also explained how the ball will be at its slowest at the top of its arc, and fastest at the bottom, and drew the timing of these frames accordingly. As a class we followed along with George as he animated the ball in Maya using the drawn out timing as reference, first blocking out the ball at its lowest and highest points, then the arc of the movement, then the speed. Finally, we added in some squash and stretch. He also explained how even realism animation has squash and stretch, just not the change of volume that stylised animation has, such as crouching before a jump and then stretching out during the jump.

George also explained that rotation order when animating is important to avoid gimble lock, which can cause animations to bug out and not work as wanted. When using the rotation tool while animating in Maya, the rotation order should be x>y>z. This can sometimes differ between different software.

Before the next session, we need to make a SyncSketch account (for feedback sessions), finish the ball shot, and upload it to Syncsketch. We should only playblast our shots for these feedback sessions instead of rendering, which we should do for the final submission.

We were also told to buy a copy of ‘The Animator’s Survival Kit’ which I already own from my previous studies.