Wednesday, November 30, 2011

WEEK 13: Animation Direction 1 - Game Cycles -- Jumps!

EVH can do it, so can you

Next cycle -- Jumps!
We'll take a look at some different styles of jumping, leaping, hopping, bounding characters and study live action for inspiration. Jumping characters exhibit principles of animation we haven't spent that much time on in our walks and runs: secondary and overlapping action, and anticipation.

Showing the effort characters take to move their own weight is paramount to creating believable animation of any style.

It's one thing to make the up and down motion read as 'heavy' and affected by gravity. It's quite another to master the mechanics of looping overlapping/secondary action with the character's arms, legs, and in some cases .. tails!

If ever the devil were in any details.. it's animating secondary on a looping action!

Your jump cycles should be usable for avoiding ground pitfalls or traveling forward.
The mechanics of the body in the jump should work well before tackling the secondary action
The secondary needs to loop smoothly as well as connect to the run.
This cycle should work from every angle, especially side view.

Monday, November 28, 2011

WEEK 13: Texturing & Shading 1: Skies

All about skies today -- typical approaches include sky boxes and domes. We'll mostly focus on domes and create one by converting a tiling panorama to a usable map.

Skies are so interesting and contribute so much to atmosphere. I'd like to get beyond simply applying a photo you found on the internet like a sticker -- we'll get into painting skies, clouds, including graphic treatments.


WEEK 13: Character Acting 1 -- Acting for Cinematics 3: Dialogues, group scenes


We'll continue working on our long shots and get ready to dive into dialogue and multi-character scenes. We'll spend a little longer on these so you have ample time to prepare them with a partner for our final class.


Here's the link to the tracks for this week:
http://soundcloud.com/taranimator/sets/dialogue-scenes/
Here's the link to the scripts again:
Click here to download all the script excerpts to study or print.


Assignment 7:  Dialogues
Assigned: November 30th
Due: December 14th
% of Final Grade: 20%
Please keep file sizes under 2MB
Filenames:
tdonovan_longshot.avi

Description:
With a partner or 2, choose one of the dialogues and deliver a compelling performance to the voice track. Record it on video using a camera or webcam.  Make sure the audio and video sync well, it's in focus, well-lit and well composed.