2011/12/26

AM - Class 1 / Week 11 - Lecture

Week seven lecture was a continuation from week seven about Graph Editor spline editing in Maya.
It was hosted by Victor Navone, one of the best animators at Pixar, he has some great tutorials on his Blog, Check it out.

AM - Class 1 / Week 10 - Lecture

In week 10 lecture, Carlos talked about Walks with personality.
Walks are important because they define who the character is, it could tell us about the personality and physicality of a character, as well as size, attitude, & mood.

If you are animating a personality walk, the first thing to do is to get the key posses right, then play with timing & spacing
and the inbetweens...  and the possibilities are endless..

Its always a good Idea to film yourself for reference.

2011/12/12

AM - Class 1 / Week 9 - Lecture

This lecture was about : Exaggeration.

Animation is all about exaggeration, if we copy real performance as is while animating a character it will look very plane,
therefore.. we need to exaggerate to make it more interesting, so exaggeration in animation is taking reality and push it further, so it will not look boring.

Exaggeration could be in : poses, time, ideas, and personality.

- exaggerate timing by giving more time or less time to certain poses.
- exaggerate the essence of an idea you're trying to convey.
- exaggerate emotion & wight..  for example, happy character feels lighter, sad character is heavier.
- exaggerate a very carefully chosen moments or actions in a shot.

So.. in brief words, exaggeration helps to sell the idea, if you over do it you will confuse the audience, if you under do it
you will bore them.

Here is a list of some animated movies with cool characters to analyze :

Character of Dopey - "Snow White and the 7 dwarfs".    Character of Ichabod Crane -"Legend of Sleepy Hollow"  
Character of Slue Foot Sue - "Pecos Bill"    Character of MacBadger - "Wind and the Willows"  
Character of Sir Giles - "The reluctant Dragon"    Character of Sheriff of Nottingham - "Robin Hood"  
Character of Baloo - "Jungle Book"    Character of Hopper - "A Bug's Life"    Character of Woody - "Toy Story 2"

Thanks for reading.. 

2011/12/06

AM - Class 1 / Week 8 - Lecture

This lecture was an introduction to animating vanilla walks.

Vanilla standard plane walk is one of the hardest things to animate, well.. at least for me!!
If I want to animate a personality walk I could make so many critical mistakes in the body, hands, & legs rotations, and
hide behind the fact that this is A personality walk, BUT.. when animating a vanilla walk I need to get all the body mechanics perfect otherwise it will look wrong.

This week at AM we focused on getting the rules and mechanics of a plane walk right, then we can exaggerate and push it farther latter on.

So, here are some important facts about walks which I learned the hard way :

- Walks are a controlled fall, with each step we take we are actually falling forward, then the leg in the back will move fast to the front to catch up and prevents us from falling.
- While walking, the body is moving forward evenly, NO ease in or outs.
- Careful observation on how the wight of the body shifts between the legs will lead to a proper animated walk cycle.
- It takes some energy from the hips to lift the back foot off the ground.
- Knees are always progressing forward.
- For a good walk cycle, you will need at least 150 to 200 frames to loop, so it will not look repetitive.

There are number of key posses that every biped character walk should have, I created a frame to demonstrate the key poses :



Once you merge these frames together (after removing frame 0) it should show up something like this :




Then of curse you'll need to fill up the inbetween and work on there spacing.

Hope that was helpful!! Till next time : )