In this report I’m going to be talking about the various activities and briefs that I’ve carrying out and the development, research and studying that has gone into making the best possible movement, spacing and timing whilst also establishing a narrative and giving life to the model that I animated over the past 4 months. I’m also going to talk about the struggles that I've had whilst completing the 6 animation projects in this brief to the standard that I've wanted.
This semester in Animation 102 was an introduction to character movement using the new buckid rig in the Maya software creating 3D Animations and the ball-and-socket armature in stop-motion technique in order to improve on my abilities by using the skills and techniques I learnt from last semester in Animation 101 on a larger scale. The briefs were introducing me to technical character movement in different animation techniques.
The first exercise that was briefed to me was a simple stand up sit down exercise, using the ball-and-socket armature or bucked rig. Straight after I was given and learned the character rig, I positioned buckid in a natural stand from the T pose given to get started for the exercise.
This semester in Animation 102 was an introduction to character movement using the new buckid rig in the Maya software creating 3D Animations and the ball-and-socket armature in stop-motion technique in order to improve on my abilities by using the skills and techniques I learnt from last semester in Animation 101 on a larger scale. The briefs were introducing me to technical character movement in different animation techniques.
The first exercise that was briefed to me was a simple stand up sit down exercise, using the ball-and-socket armature or bucked rig. Straight after I was given and learned the character rig, I positioned buckid in a natural stand from the T pose given to get started for the exercise.
So I put the rig into its first position for it to looking at something up in the air for the air show exercise.
As I was starting to animate buckid rig, it kept crashing the Maya software making it hard to do any work, then Jamie said he would fix it. So I abandoned animating the rig as this was very annoying. So next week I gathered some reference videos for standing up and sitting down from a chair. Then to test myself I wanted to do standing up and sitting down from the floor and studying the movements carefully.
Then I took the reference videos into the stop-motion studio to try and replicate them but over exaggerate the movements. I got a better understanding of what I wanted to do with the armature by having the videos to show me what movements to do with each limb. As I was animating the standing up and sitting down, I looked at the reference videos to the T. Looking at it second by second, frame by frame to see the movement to replicate.
So after completing the task of standing up and sitting down from a chair, I started the test from the floor using the reference material video even though Joe and Johny said that making that animation/movement would be very hard but I achieved it.
But if I could do these animations again the things I would change are not making the movements so symmetrical, have the armatures on a ¾ turn not straight on, be more careful of slipping (feet), and make sure the movements aren’t mechanical.
In Maya we used the Buckid rig that has proportions of a human. To gain a grasp on how to use Maya and the rig we were given the task to put the Buckid in various emotion poses. I felt that this task was very helpful as it gave me the chance to familiarise myself with the software whilst also getting some practise in terms of techniques and have a little fun.
Moving on from poses I then went onto animating emotion to emotion task I chose the emotions Excited to Melancholy and Comfortable to Irritated. Initially I had a lot of difficulty with the task as I needed to understand how to portray emotion with just body language as the armatures have no facial expressions. First I went into the stop-motion studio with the armature using onion skinning which was an extremely useful tool for the armature as it made things easier to space out the movements to make it smooth. After creating the movements, I played the animation to see whether I was making the correct body moves which in this case I wanted to portray the best way of showing the emotions correctly.
Moving on from poses I then went onto animating emotion to emotion task I chose the emotions Excited to Melancholy and Comfortable to Irritated. Initially I had a lot of difficulty with the task as I needed to understand how to portray emotion with just body language as the armatures have no facial expressions. First I went into the stop-motion studio with the armature using onion skinning which was an extremely useful tool for the armature as it made things easier to space out the movements to make it smooth. After creating the movements, I played the animation to see whether I was making the correct body moves which in this case I wanted to portray the best way of showing the emotions correctly.
