WEEK 13: Rigging Part 3

We'll review the leg -- you should be able to rig it from scratch in about 15 min, including setting up CTRL objects for the Heel, Tip, Toe, Ball, Ankle

Keep practicing this until you have it down in 15 min
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Let's get into skinning, starting with some notes about constraints.

Next: painting weights.

Practice skinning and be very comfortable with it by next week.
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*Note - this method is quickly becoming obselete -- nowadays it’s increasingly common to use influence objects to add corrective blend shapes to the geo instead of skinning and painting weights
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New topic: SPLINE IK

Homework Challenge -- Create an IK/FK blend behaviour (without using the Maya automatic blending) using a 3-joint chain (looks like an arm with a bend in the elbow)


Your Final Exam will be posted on MONDAY, April 18, due FRIDAY, April 22nd.

Thanks for being such a great class! 
Enjoy your break!

WEEK 13: Pitch Critique & Walk Cycle basics

Pitch critique --
We'll have a look at everyone's ideas and suggest ways to simplify or enhance the scenes.

nothing is as weird as reality

Importing video to Flash: there's more than one way to do this. I've found image sequences work best.  Use QT, Premiere or another program to create an image sequence and load it into Flash.  We'll practice this in class.


Next .. Walk Cycles:
The walk cycle is a tricky but basic part of every animation curriculum.  You're going to learn the nuts-and-bolts of bipedal locomotion, and try to apply them to your character. (There's also walk cycle info in the posts for DESN 2022.)

We'll get a start on our walk cycles in class and also have a look at some beautiful 2D reference from some of the masters of animation who really pushed the medium to the limit.

Pencil Test Depot
http://www.penciltestdepot.com/

Living Lines Library
http://livlily.blogspot.com/

Walk Cycle Depot
http://walk-cycle-depot.blogspot.com/


Homework: 
Continue to work on your final project and finish up the walk cycle for your character.  Don't use tweening or symbols -- draw all the frames (at 12 fps) and see what tricks you can use to keep things consistent. If your character is not bipedal, come up with a creative way to show locomotion, demonstrating gravity's effects as a traditional walk would.

WEEK 12: Rigging, Part 2

Continuing with Rigging the Luxo,

We'll parent the Geo to the rig & test everthing to make sure it's all working. 

Next step: Renaming using a standard protocol
A few housekeeping tasks and your Luxo is done.
Get the rig all ready for animation being sure to lock and hide non-keyable channels and set up display layers.
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On to our next challenge -- The Leg

A leg is a lot like an upside-down Luxo.
How do we create the correct behaviour in the leg so moving the hip doesn’t move the foot?
We need the foot to be able to move in many ways - ball roll, toe roll, ankle rotation, etc..
Once this is set up, we'll add CTRL objects. This can be trickier than you might expect

Homework -- come back next week with
A fully rigged foot
Add another attribute to Luxo
If you are finding this all really easy, add a challenge by adding a look-at control or other fancy control.

WEEK 12: Character Design Critique, Planning the Final Project

We'll have a look at everyone's final designs and make some suggestions. 

It's time for your final assignment!

Your mission is to create a little world of Flash-animated characters in a live-action environment.  You have a lot of creative freedom with this assignment. You can work by yourself or as a small group. 
It can be linework or colour, it can be serious, cartoony, depressing, or rude. This is a chance to let your creativity shine. Your character needs to be able to move around and ideally walk around.

We'll do some brainstorming in class so you can get started. For inspiration we'll be looking at a brilliantly whacko piece of Flash animation from the video "Animals
 by Minilogue.  Anything goes in Flash -- have some fun with it.

Final Assignment:
Due April 22nd:
In small groups or individually, create and animate a walking character on top of a locked live action background plate.

Homework:
Due April 8th
Create a pitch for your idea.  Your pitch should include a description of your scenario, as well as drawings to show how your work will all fit with your live action plate.

If you don't have an original idea, you can use one of these:

• Busking for bugs
• Everybody in the salad
• 5" UFO
• Leaps tall buildings in a single bound
• Other uses for the toilet
• Badly disguised
• Things on my foot
• Urban Emissions

WEEK 11: Rigging Low Poly Models, Part 1

This is the first of 4 classes on low-poly rigging.You have a guest instructor:

Phil Bonner, CG supervisor, TD, animator, modeller, rigger, etc. -- and an amazing teacher.
pbonner@georgebrown.ca  philfix.com 

• If you're stuck, remember -- there are resources all around you -- your classmates, Google,  Digital Tutors, email  Phil your questions, etc.  

• If you're advanced, just ask and a challenge will be granted to you.  Also consider helping bring others up to speed so we can get into some more advanced concepts quicker.

Rigging of a different feather

We'll compare the differences in the 3 main levels of rigs: bare bones, decent, and triple-A (and beyond!).
The focus for all levels of production rigs should be SPEED -- rigs must be fast. One key is reducing details like unecessary automation (or at least allowing it to be switched off.)

We'll start with a basic Luxo lamp rig -- review for some and a simple intro for others.

By the end of this class you should be familiar with joint placement, setting up IK, and adding CTRL objects properly so all controls are at "0", ready for animation. We'll learn some tricks for aligning CTRL objects, learn how to avoid some common mistakes, and work on getting faster at simple set-ups like this.

Ideally, you should be comfortable rigging this simple Luxo in under 5 minutes.
To get there, you should practice a dozen or so to be sure you've got it down.


HOMEWORK :

• be able to rig the Luxo in under 15 minutes with IK and CTRLs
• try to figure out how to add a pole vector to orient the butt.  
• come up with a list of new behaviours you could add to this rig

Next week we'll tidy up the naming conventions and skin the rig to the geo before moving on.

WEEK 11: 2D Animation Using Flash, Intro to Character Design

This week we're really getting into the nitty-gritty of frame-by-frame animation techniques using Flash.

For inspiration, we'll be looking at some work created using this method. We'll discuss the animation principles most applicable to creating 2D animation: exaggeration, solid drawing, and appeal. We'll start some simple animation cycles using the bouncing ball and our trusted flour sack.

Simplicity is a necessity with this labour-intensive medium. We'll have a look at one of the most popular examples of hand-drawn Flash animation -- Simon's cat.  The creator, Simon Tofield, created his first Flash cartoon to teach himself Flash. 

We'll also start thinking about the final assignment for the year -- a 2D/live action integration project.

We'll discuss character design techniques -- finding a style using at all kinds of media including what's in your fridge..

Bring your tablets! Be ready to draw...

Homework:  Design a character for the final project. Have a printout of it ready to hang on the wall.
Three words of advice:

1. Keep. 
2. It. 
3. Simple!

If you're stuck check out these simple characters for inspiration:
Powerpuff Girls
Kirby
"Mr Men" and "Little Miss"
Super Meat Boy
Zero
Rex the Runt
Erky Perky
Ilo Milo
Patapon
Picachu
Moomin
Totoro, Soot (and other Ghibli/Miyazaki cartoons)
Stick Figures
Pikmin
Bone
Mole sisters
Sandra Boynton
Pocoyo
Breadwig.com
Teen Girl Squad (Homestarrunner)

WEEK 10: Blending Animation

We're going to 'blend' our cycles together using the simplest tools in Maya.  Blending between different actions may involve adding extra details between cycles.  For example, a walk to a run requires a tricky middle action where the character gathers energy to move more quickly. 

Homework, due Mon March 28:
Blend 3 game cycles (eg, walk-run-jump, or idle-crouch-walk).

We'll also look at automatic retargeting systems such as the ones used here by Havok:

WEEK 10: Intro to 2D Animation Techniques

3D is an orderly world of objects that never change volume, graph editors that keep track of the motion, and automatically-generated inbetweens. It's time to leave the cozy, predictable world of 3D and embrace the friendly chaos of 2D animation.

2D animation, also called traditional or hand-drawn animation, is drawn frame-by-frame with pencil & paper or digital drawing tools.  You will have to put all your knowledge of timing and spacing to good use by planning and imagining how you want the final result to look while striving to keep volumes consistent.

"Robot Elephant" - hero of "(notes on) biology". Also my hero.

We'll start with a simple bouncing ball flip-book excercise.  Try as many different weights and styles as you can using the knowledge you gained from your 3D bouncing balls. If this is really easy for you, branch out to something more complex. Flip-books are one of the few things in this world that are FAST, CHEAP, and GOOD -- see how insanely fun these can be to create watching this awesome flipbook tribute film:
"(notes on) biology"


 We'll move on to the world-famous half-filled Flour Sack.  We'll study some tricks for drawing 3-dimensionally and test our skills by creating drawings of the flour sack in 4 distinct moods.  Bring these next time: 

• Sad
• Confident 
• Wasted
• Shocked/bamboozled

Reminder: Please BRING YOUR TABLETS to all classes for the rest of the term.

CASO invites you to hear Rango's TD Doug Sutton, on Thursday, March 31st: Reserve your seat today!

 Thursday, March 31st, 12 pm - 1:30 pm 

at the Scotiabank Theatre at John & Richmond. 

$10 including a brown-bag lunch

(you get the GBC deep-discount - regular price: $40!).  

"Rango: A Lizard's Journey of Self Discovery and a 

VFX Company's Journey into Feature Animation" 

presented by Doug Sutton, Rango's Technical Director.

Doug Sutton's other credits include Star Wars I, II, III and the Transformers movies.

If you haven't yet seen Rango I urge you not to miss this extravaganza of eye-popping visual effects and superbly detailed character animation.  It's ILM's first animated feature.

Everyone is welcome but CASO would like to know how many to expect.

PLEASE SIGN UP HERE:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dHd2ZWpxZHUtNWVLdUwxLVh4VjdYX0E6MA

WEEK 9: Review of Exam & Assignment Outcomes

Grades a little lower than you were expecting? Me too.

As second year students in the Animation stream, it's rather important that you have a strong grasp of all the basic concepts we've been exploring so far -- the principles of animation as well as the use of Maya tools like file referencing, setting up cycles, offsetting overlapping action using the graph editor, etc.

We're just about to wrap up our animation lessons for the term and head into the technical twilight zone of rigging.  And I want you to be animation-savvy riggers!

So... I'm giving you another chance to solidify key concepts and  pull up your marks a little bit if you need it.
 
This new assingment should be a bit of review. You'll probably find much easier and faster than the first one now that  you know the tools. Please go back over the blog for the key concepts, and look to Digital Tutors for more support if you need it. Always feel free to ask me questions.

Homework due Monday, March 21st: