🐚
Week 01 - Week 10
Qistina Nuralya Maria Binti Azly / 0354180
Advanced Animation / Bachelors of Design (Honours) in Creative Media / Taylor's University
FUNDAMENTALS OF ANIMATION
Table of contents
1. MODULE INFORMATION BOOKLET (MIB)
2. LECTURES
Week 1 - Week 2 - Week 3 - Week 4 - Week 5 - Week 6 - Week 8 - Week 9
3. FUNDAMENTALS
3.1 Bouncing Balls
3.2 Sack of Flour
3.3 Walk cycle
3.4 Throwing ball
3.5 Moving objects
3.6 Lifting object
3.7 Facial Expression
5. REFLECTION
1. MODULE INFORMATION BOOKLET (MIB)
There is no Module Information Booklet for this module; however, we have four separate Projects:
1. Fundamentals of Animation - Practicing and understanding 3D animation starting with the fundamentals.
2. Project 1: Pre-Production - Choosing an 15-30 second existing clip from a movie or any media and to plan out the animation via storyboards, animatic and block outs.
3. Project 2: Production - Continuing animation progress from Project 1. Ensuring the flow of animation is believable.
4. Project 3: Post-Production - Final refinements of animation. Compose and editing shots of finished animation with possible sound effects or voice overs to be an entertaining end result.
2. LECTURES
Week 1
I came 30 minutes late to class today and unfortunately missed the brief about the first couple of projects. But I still got the gist of it despite missing the core parts. I was somewhat relieved but also a bit bummed to hear that we were still going to use base Maya instead of 3DS Max since while I did have experience with Maya from a previous module, I was still not confident with my skills. I am still looking forward to this module though since I can start honing my 3D animation skills!
Week 2
We were given a demo of creating a bouncing ball animation as an introduction to Maya since some students used Blender for their previous 3D Modelling classes and some were only about to do the 3D Modelling class this semester! Which I thought was crazy but moving on; after given the basics of the ball rig, we were tasked to do four types of ball bounces.
Week 3
Mr. Kanaan showed us a quick demo for a sack of flour animation that we'd be doing as the next exercise and told us that we should plan out our scene first with a short storyboard first before we did any animation so that we aren't just jumping the shark without a plan and end up making a very "out of place" animation.
Week 4
This week, went further into our sack of flour animation.
Feedback:
- Animation feels fun.
- Timing feels off a bit.
- Slow down some actions and hold for a bit to give more of an impact.
- Could possible change the 2D character to be a 3D one to make it look cleaner.
Week 5
This week's class was held online. I happened to have prepared a rough storyboard for my Project 1 so I got feedback for it. After that, we started on our walk cycles with the help of Mr Kanaan's demonstration; we started with the leg animations first then only the rest of the body followed suit. The demonstration was only of a default walk cycle though so we were tasked to do a walk cycle that had a bit of personality.
Feedback:
- Storyboard is alright
- Add background details to give depth.
- Be wary of how many character's you are planning on animating.
Week 6
We learned more about Maya's animation UI. Mr. Kanaan showed us the animation layer where we could add any additional details to our animation in a separate layer where it wont affect the original animation layer. I applied this to my walk animation after a quick feedback session.
Feedback:
- Motion of the walk cycle feels a bit stiff/odd
- Try reenact the "sneaking" walk and base it off of that.
Week 7
We learnt about constraints and how it can help when a character wants to hold an object or even lift one.
Week 8
This week's class was held online, Mr. Kanaan showed the technical parts of rigging whereby he talked about bones and demonstrated it in Maya. We also got a demonstration of a model throwing a ball using constraints.
Week 9
We learnt about the basics of rigging and also more on constraints and locators. Early in the semester, I was aiming to rig my own character but alas, because of time crunch, I'm choosing to focus more on animation.
Week 10
This week's class was held online, where it was mainly a feedback session for our Project 1. Near the end of class, I asked for feedback for my facial animation and got a greenlight from sir.
3. FUNDAMENTALS
3.1 Bouncing Balls
This exercise was quite easy to do, the only thing that held me back was the technical aspects of the ball rig that confused me a bit but got the hang of it after a while. I decided to do an animation of a BASKETBALL, BOWLING BALL and BEACH BALL.
I referenced many YouTube videos for the 3 different ball types and went to work with it. I had the animation frames to be less than 50 so it was very quick.
3.2 Sack of Flour
For my sack of flour animation, I planned on making it sneak around a corner and getting startled by a security guard and running away.
Whilst animating, the controls for the feet of the sack of flour was suddenly gone and I just had to deal with it the rest of the animation..
Lastly, I played around with the graph editor.
3.3 Walk Cycle
I started by playing around with the body rig like I did with the Sack of Flour.
I started by playing around with the body rig like I did with the Sack of Flour. It was a bit hard to get the feet placement correct without it looking like the model was sliding. But after showing my progress, I got feedback.
Feedback:
- Motion of the walk cycle feels a bit stiff/unnatural.
- Try reenact the "sneaking" walk and base it off of that.
With that, I reworked my animation with an animation layer to adjust some key poses.
3.4 Throwing Ball
I struggled a bit with the throwing ball animation as I was only getting to know how constraints work. It took multiple frustrating moments of fighting the locator and parent for them to work properly. To fight the frustrations, I planned out a funny scene where the main guy would be throwing a ball at a different guy that results in the second guy falling flat.
3.5 Moving Object
This one isn't the normal "moving objects" interaction but moreso, an accidental push of an object that causes other objects to move as well. I tried to use constraints here but it ended up looking very janky. So, I mainly did normal keyframing.
3.6 Lifting Object
A bit more practice with my constraints, I liked what I did for this animation as I added a silly fall to it which added more personality and made me feel more excited and fun to animate it.
Video 3.6.1 Lifting Animation.
3.7 Jump Animation
I wanted to try make an epic jump and practice my constraints more. I tried my best to make it look as smooth of a jump as possible but still found my timing to be less than what I wanted.
▲ back to top ▲
3.8 Facial Animation
For facial animation, I mainly just had fun playing around with the facial rig of the model I chose for my Project 1.
Video 3.8.1 Facial Expression Animation.
4. FINAL
Bouncing Balls
Sack of Flour
Walk Cycle
Throwing Ball
Moving Objects
Lifting Object
Jump Animation
Facial Animation
5. REFLECTION
This project was a nice warm-up for what's to come in the coming projects. I found that the most problem I had was with timing and also just overall technical skills.
For example, in sack of Flour, I found myself limiting the amount of frames despite having a longer animation in mind and led to the whole animation feeling more quicker than I'd like. There through feedback, I realised it's good to have clear blockouts to figure out the timing of an action or a shot.
As for technical skills, I had problems with using the constraints function in Maya which left me frustrated and almost give up. But after getting a bit used to it I started to see my animations looking slightly more cleaner but that lack of skill is still shown in the final exercise unfortunately. However despite complaining, I still look forward to utilising constraint more fluently as I go through my Major Projects in the future!
Overall, I've learned a lot of mental and technical skills from this project and
🐚
Comments
Post a Comment