Here are my poses for the sentence "Overjoyed"
In these 3 slides I wanted to show someone who won the lottery or something like that.
He first gets really surprised about what he sees, then he curls together to let out the scream/loud "yeah!" sound of his life, just before he jumps into the "success" cliche pose.
The only one I am not so sure about is the third and final picture. I keep comming back to the question "Is it powerfull enough?"
Thats it for now. Time to work some more on the "Ball with tail" project.
Hello again.
For the last few hours i have been posing the first choice.
Here are my results:
I am really pleased with the results, and hope for some positive feedback.
I may have to exaggerate the last shot a little more.
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for the next one.
As i said in my previous post, I struggled to find my own way of drawing my poses.
Here you can see the evolution of my work. Warning! Some of them are really bad!
So yes, this is why I am so happy to have found a way to draw fast and somewhat okay.
The second pose I chose was the "Overjoyed" one.
At first I had this idea about a child getting a big present for Christmas, and just ripping it apart!
But I had some problems setting this up in my head.
I then read this story about this dude winning the lottery, so I wanted to make one to illustrate a person experiencing this.
Here are the sketches to illustrate what I want to do with this one;
One other thing worth mentioning is that I finally found a way to draw my character easy and simple.
Yay! That makes me a very happy animator!
Hello and welcome back.
So I have chosen the first pose for this task, and it is "Waiting to start"
The first thing that popped into my mind when hearing that sentence was a person going to run 100m in at a track field.
Here are the sketches I have done to illustrate what I want:
As you can see, I had some troubles nailing the third and final pose. But I am kinda leaning towards the comedic "Flee" pose.
Our next assignment is to create a series of 3 still poses from 2 of the choices below.
1. Waiting to start
2. Late for
3. What's inside
4. Troubled
5. Er .. Excuse me
6. Overjoyed
After I have selected the two I want, I need to sketch out the rough poses. This way it will be easier to do the final pose in 3Ds Max.
I will be using a rig called Dee Rigg created by Manuel Sierra.
This rigg was changed a bit by Remi Vaage, former MA student at Teesside, he fixed up how it looked and gave it more appeal.
Next update will go into detail about what of the choices I picked, and hopefully some sketches.
Here is my first WIP from the assignment i started over with. This is 2 days work.
Instead of doing pose to pose, I decided it would be better to animate it in "layers". First i Animated where I wanted it to move, then the bounces, then the tail. Then Squash and stretch in the end.
I still need to time it a little better. But this is a good start.
I also need to add some more pauses so I can show that the ballthingy thinks.
But for now, I need to move on to the next assignment.
Here are some of my sketches I drew on my smart phone. I am using "Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile" to make them.
I am in no way any good at this, but I will keep practising to get better. These sketches illustrate different walks I saw on the street.
It is so difficult to get the pose down before the person has moved on or I have forgotten it.
So today I showed my half finished animation to our teacher Penny and a fellow student. I was hoping for some pointers on how to give my animation more personality. But instead got a bunch of negative feedback on the stuff I had done so far.
I got really bummed out about that, and not because I got negative feedback, but when you are only getting negative feedback, and not constructive criticism to counterbalance that with it kinda gets me frustrated.
So I went home to get some sleep instead, since I unfortunately only got about 2 hours sleep last night.
After coming back to school at about 6 PM and working on it for a few more hours, I ended up deleting my whole animation in frustration. I could not solve my problem in those hours, and my frustration just grew and grew.
So now 12 hours before we have to show our finished animation, I have nothing.
Not sure about what to do now. Do I pull a all nighter? Or do I let it go, complete my next assignment. And then go back to this when I have time?
Here I am almost done with my block. I used stepped keys to stop 3ds Max from creating the "drawings" in between the frames. But somehow it would not work on the squash and stretch part.
If you compare this to the simple storyboard, you can easily see how it will turn out in the end.
Storyboards are so vital to all the work we are doing!
As Penny, our teacher, mentioned in a class : "Planning is half the work"
Here it is:
Next post will be when I finish this, hopefully. I still need to get it "approved" on Wednesday.
So I made a quick sketch of how I want the "Ball with tail" to do.
I then drew it again in Photoshop, since I dont have access to a scanner where I am located right now. It is fairly crude, but hopefully it will work.
In the assessment it is specified that the ball has to bounce on top of a box, and then down again in addition to give it personality. I know alot of my classmates have these complex ideas for how to solve this, but I for one will keep it fairly simple....I think.
So here is the pre-made "ball with a tail" rigg I will be using for our next assigment.
I really wanted to make one myself, but since there is so little time to do this, I found out that it would be wise to skip it.
This rig is found on this page : RigsArena
It does not say who made it, but it was posted by Umar Muzammil. So all props to him.
next update will contain my plans on what to do with my animation, as well as an explanation of what kind of assignment this will be.
So when we recived this task, our teacher posted this amazing youtube tutorial from Keith Lango. These changed how I see overlapping when animating.
Here is the tutorials:
For the animators out there, I really recommend seeing all three. For the non animating people, the first part pretty much sums up overlapping and followtrough.
These are the animation principles I used when animating this piece:
-Timing
-Overlapping
-Followtrough
-Ease in & out
When animating a pendulum, you will be suprised by how automatic the animating will go. Once you have placed the first pendulum swing, and decided on if it is a heavy or light ball at the end. The rest will kinda fall into place naturally.
That is it for now, but the next assignement we got will combine the bouncing ball and pendulum animations into "Ball with Tail" task. Here we will also try to give the animation some personality.
Since I am now "done" with my bouncing ball animation. I thought it would be a good time to write how I did this task.
I was mostly using The Animators Survival Kit tutorials, when animating the bounces.
Things you should remember while animating a bouncing ball is:
-Timing
- Ease out & Ease in
-Squash & Stretch
-Arcs (this will sort of come together by itself when animating, but Ill put it here anyway)
After reading up on these animation principles, I shot a reference video:
And added a Frames Ticker to it, this way I could easely see how many frames each bounce takes.
I am especially pleased with the first ball in the shot, it is almost 2D in the way it bounces across the screen.
You then go on to pose the ball in the extreme positions in the animation and adding frames. After you are pleased with how the bounces look, you then go on to time the bounces, and by doing this right you add weight and motion to it.
I did have some problems with my timing, and that made it look "floaty". But after some feedback from my classmates and Penny. It turned out good after this.
After you are done with that it is time for the Ease In & out part. This is where you define the bounces as bounces and not something randomly moving trought the screen.
Remember ease in and out on top of the bounce, and fast in and out at the ground where it makes contact.
When all of this is done, you can add squash and stretch to the balls that needs it. I did not add that to my golf ball, since it is so riggid and firm. But I added a tiny bit of squash and strech on my rubber ball.
So these are the two versions of my animation I will probably turn in at end of this module.
I may have to pick them back up again, based on feedback from class and teachers. But I have a good feeling.
Thank you for watching and reading so far. Keep comming back and you will hopefully not be disapointed.
So I think I am finished with this animation too. I will hopefully get some feedback on wednsday from my class.
I will also be making a seperat blogg entry explaning the various animation principles used to animate both the pendulum and the bouncing balls.
In the meantime here is my video:
So some of you may wonder where I get my help from when animating the Bouncing Balls and Pendulum. I am using the book The Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams. It has some great illustrations in it showing how a ball bounces for example. Check it out, I highly recommend it!
Hello again.
So I think I am almost done with the pendulum task. I just need some more feedback on my timing at Thuesday, then I'll do the finishing touches before this blogg is being marked.
This is the final presentation slides for tomorrow. I am supposed to do a short presentation about the animation principle Appeal, covering about 10 min.
All images where found using Image search from Google.
Hopefully I will keep my nerves under controll, and not get instant alzheimers like last years final presentation in SPB.
So here is my first draft for my bouncing balls assignments. I will show this one to the class tomorrow and I hope to get some great feedback.
Things I had troubles with:
- Timing
- Ease in Ease out
Surprisingly I had troubles with this assignment, even thou I've done it before. But the great thing is that this assignment teaches you both of these things.
This is my first draft of the pendelum task. I will hopefully get some feedback on thuesday.
I have done this task before, but it's been about 3 years since. So it feels good to start at the basics again.
It is a relative easy task, but it teaches you so much when it comes to overlapping and ease in and out.
Now to shoot my reference footage for my Bouncing Balls assignment.
Cya later.
We got our first assignments today too. Until tomorrow we have to draw a bunch of poses on about 6 pages of paper, this type of assignment is actually one of the things I struggle with the most. I've been sitting outside the library drawing some poses, but because of uncontrollable shacking caused by the cold weather today, Kristian and me moved it to Starbucks instead. I will be posting both some pictures of poses I took, and the drawings I did on this site another time.
The next assignment we got was to hold a 10 minute presentation on one of the animation principles. I got the principle "Appeal". This is actually going to be fun. And I am really looking forward to try this out.
Finally we also got our first animation tasks, to animate a pendulum and to animate 2 different kinds of balls bouncing .
Hooooray! And welcome to my blogg. This is where I will be posting my work throughout the year, as well as interesting films I find on the internet. I am really really looking forward to specialise into character animation this year at Teeside Uni. And hopefully you, the reader, will find this blogg fun and rewarding to read. Stay tuned for further updates.
