Week 5: Crouching Cycles (Hidden .. Squirrels?)

More cycles! Moah! ha! ha!

Now you'll need to apply your subtle overlapping action skills to a crouching idle.

Homework:

* Crouch cycle  -- idle in a crouch position. This cycle will eventually have to transition back to a regular standing idle
* Due next class

Week 5: Action analysis -- working from live action reference

After a few weeks of studying mechanics, we're digging deeper into action analysis using live action reference.

The next level of applying the Principles of Animation is the most elusive: adding personality to our characters. Staging, solid posing and appeal will come into play even more in this last 3D animation assignment for this course.

We'll be taking a couple of weeks to find, analyze and animate a short live action clip of your choice or creation.

Homework: 

• Find a live action clip no longer than 10 seconds. Download it using 'Save Vid' or another downloading tool (see sidebar links).  Analyze it frame by frame looking for keys, breakdowns, arcs, timing, and any other noteworthy details that make the clip interesting to you.  Take notes on paper or draw over stills.
• Begin animating the clip using the Luxo, the Ball, and any other primitives you need to sell this piece. 
• Zero marks are given for modeling, lighting, or texturing. This is entirely an animation assignment. 
• Start posting your work-in-progress.

Surly's New Rig -- File Referencing Updates

We have an updated rig for Surly with knee controls (pole vectors) -- located on the foot controls.

Click here to download the new Surly Rig

This is a great next chapter in the wooly world of File Referencing.

Without file referencing, every time a rig is updated, you would have to restart your animation using the new rig.  With a referenced rig, you can usually just replace your reference and keep on trucking...

But what happens when you open your animation file and something has changed that breaks your animation?


This is about to happen to YOU!! :oD

Week 4: Jumps! Digging into Secondary Action

Cycle of the week:  Jumps!

Click to view the incredible video of a fox hunting through snow

We'll take a look at some different styles of jumping, leaping, hopping, bounding characters and study live action for inspiration, and analyze the way secondary and overlapping action works.

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 .. tail!

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

Week 4: Luxo Jump, continued

  "Secret of Nimh" by Don Bluth, master of secondary action

We've covered a lot of the Principles of Animation so far, but there's still a lot to cover in terms of secondary & overlapping action.  The Luxo character has only its head and base to drag and settle, so it's important to use them well to show gravity's effects.

Creating Image Planes From Video Reference

Thanks to both my classes for shooting some fantastic video reference in class!!

Click here to see one of you as a lamp.

It's relatively easy to bring this footage into your animation files. You can easily follow the frame-by-frame reference, ie, rotoscope, but you'll quickly see that with just a little exaggeration you can make your animation even better, heavier, and snappier than the live action footage.

While I've worked on many projects that used live action reference, this was my first experiment animating directly over live action footage in my viewport. I spent about 5 minutes on this test & I simply could not believe how easy and quick it was to get the keys down & tweak it to bring out the emphasis I wanted.

So from now on, I'll be expecting even GREATER animation from all of you, hehe..

Check out the video to see how I turned one of you into a lamp...

Here are the instructions on how to view an image sequence in your viewport:

Week 3: Running with Squirrels

Click here to view a Run Cycle by Michael Sabalvaro

You may be relieved to note that animating a RUN cycle is much easier than animating a WALK cycle.
That's because one of the key difficulties is removed -- ground contact.  Just like a bouncing ball, however, the running character must show the effects of gravity through your control of spacing and timing.

Duplicating Balls in 3dsMax

If you'd like to have more than one ball in your Max scene, it's relatively easy. 

First, I recommend you FREEZE the GEO on the ball first so you don't get double transformations if you start moving the ctrls while the geo is selected.  Make sure you have NO transformation, squash, or translations on your ball before you copy it, or the new ball will inherit all that information..

Week 3: Luxo Jr - the short that launched Pixar

Click here to watch "Luxo Jr" from 1986

The Luxo lamp is for 3D what the famous flour sack has been for generations of 2D animators -- a tool for perfecting & demonstrating a mastery of the 12 Principles of Animation. As you watch this famous short, bear in mind the primitive tools the artists were working with at the time.  This is a remarkable first film for what was then a fledgling industry, which has grown into the multi-faceted world of CG movies, shorts, and games we know today.

Balls... continued: Adjusting timing in 3dsMax

Click to view avi of ball before timing adjustment

I've had a few questions about the bouncing ball so here are some details that may help you.

The timing of the ball is dependent on two things: the number of frames per bounce, and the spacing of the ball's position on each frame.

The weight of the ball is conveyed by how fast and how high it bounces, as well as how quickly it seems to rebound off the floor.