Week 8 - Arcs

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For this animation, we had to animate a robot and demonstrate arc movements. For this, I decided to give this a bit of a storyline. Here the robot headers a ball twice and loses it on the final hit. Arcs are demonstrated here by the forward swinging motion of the robots body. The base of the robot I animated in a way that it shows weight and that as the robot jumps forward, its base swings with the jump. This in effect gives the entire robot a 'swinging' action which is similar to how a golf swing would be. First the hit would build up momentum and then the shot would be taken. For this I did the same. The robot gets ready to jump and them jumps and whilst doing so, it brings its whole body forward whilst creating the 'drag' effect on its base. The ball was added to give make it a bit different from other animations and is just for show even though it is part of the short storyline.

One thing to note was that at the end of the animation when the robot puts its head down, the neck breaks off and flips backwards. This was not to do with me as this was out of my control. If it was, then it may be because I rotated the head too far and caused the neck spring to flip out but otherwise, there were no other issues. I enjoyed animating this as I found it challenging to do and I am happy with the final production.

One element I could improve on was the render. My choice of colours for the scene wasent the best but still is suitable since the main aspect I am trying to show is the animation and not the scene quality or render, although it would have been nicer and more appealing, its something I can later work on to improve.

Week 7 - Secondary Action

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For this task, we were given a model to animate. The short animation must show use of secondary action. this is different from follow through and overlapping since secondary actions are things that result from a primary action.

For my animation, I wanted to aim for something a bit more. I thought of a brief storyline in my head and followed that, making changes where appropiate. I used secondary action on my parts of the clip. For example, the dogs walking cycle was presented by the bobbing action it does. Its secondary actions were its ears, head and tail. Another example would be the ball. After the dog hits the ball, it bounces off the doghouse and comes backwards it. This is also a secondary action since my primary action was the dog hitting the ball and the secondary action was the ball moving/coming back.

I also wanted to give the animation a minor humourisitic feel to it as well. The main issue I had with animating this would be the ball. I had to chose to either use dynamics for the ball or to keyframe. I modelled the ball in Cinema 4D and imported it into Maya and gave it the appropiate textures. After testing the simulation, I saw a lot of issues. The ball was constantly jittering and woundnt stay in place or stay still at all. So I decided that I would have more control if I were to animate this.

Animating this takes away the realism aspect but gives me more control. The second difficult thing was probably the camera. I had to make sure that the camera movement was smooth and didnt have any sharp panning angles or dollys. But aside from those 2 difficulties, I still believe I could have done better with this animation.

Week 6 - Follow Through and Overlapping Action Hammer

For this animation, we were given the task to animate a hammer. The purpose of this was to sucessfully demonstrate overlapping actions/follow through.  Follow through actions are actions that come after the primary action. These are not secondary actions but instead follow through. The difference between the 2 is that follow through actions were not caused by a primary action but instead is caused by something that is not controlled. In this case, the hammer was swinging left and right and was causing the antenne to wiggle as the hammer hit the ground.

I was going to attempt the multi hammer animation but I couldnt get all the hammers into one scene. Copy and pasting them over wouldnt work and even though I had adjusted the timeline so there was a delay, the bend deformer on the antenne was weirding out and it was bending too far everytime I delayed the animation so I thought it'd be best if I just did 1 for now.

Week 5 - Anticipation - Small Large Ball

For this animation, we were given the task of comparing the anticipation between 2 balls. One with a large 'build up' of anticipation and one with a small 'build up'. Anticipation is very important as its name is what it does, it creates anticipation for the viewer. It also illustrates the idea that something is about to happen. For example, here is a clip of how anticipation works with characters:

As we can see from this video clip, for the man to jump he must build up that kinetic energy first and then leap. The stages of build up is anticipation as we can clearly see his actions to what will lead to his next action which would be the jump. Another example would be this:

 

In this clip, the anticipation builds up by him bringing his arms back and then leaping into the water. The anticipation here again would be his arms and the slight lean backwards to suggest that he is going to leap forward.