Emotional Poses

The newest tak this week in introduction to animation is to provide between 4-8 poses that represent the characters different emotions. These are to be supported by sketches.

I decided to show a 'Bored' pose first as i believed this has a strong line element to it. I went for the obvious pose that bored poses are often constructed in with the element of the hand on the face and slightly droppy eyelids. As well as this i positioned the other hand down by the side flacid to show that the character is currently inactive due to the bored pose.

Screen:

For my next pose i decided to depict an Angry emotional state. I achieved this by making the character look tense and uneasy. This included clenching the farthest fist as well as making the character point to give a direction of anger to the pose.

Screen:

My next pose that i have created in maya for this task is 'Confused'. I made this by making the character bend forward almost in a hearing of disbelief. I also moved his eyebrows up to show confusion.

Screen:

My first walk cycle

Using all of that i have learnt so far, its time to try a walk cycle using the same figure as seen below. I did this by creating the reference poses that was given to us on udo. These poses are aimed to break down a walk cycle and consist of contact, up, down poses etc. These were animated around 3-4 frames in between. I also made sure that the biped on the first frame was the same as on the last frame to create a smooth effect between cycles. Below is my attempt so far. Tweaking still needs to be done.

Max for Maya

We downloaded a rig today called 'max for Maya' which is a basic human rig which we used in class to get used to using 'controllers' to animate specific bones in the mesh's body. Below is a screenshot of a pose i created using the controllers on the biped.

'Ghosting' the bouncing ball

This post focuses on the uselful aspects of 'Ghosting' an animated object. This is when every frame in the objects animation can be seen through wireframe to show the movement of the object between each frame. This was useful for the task of animating these balls because it allowed me to view each frame and make adjustments accordingly. For example, if i wanted the ball's movement to be fast then i would want the balls key frame movement to be very clode to each other to show that less time has passed between each frame. This is the oposite for if i wanted the balls to have slow movement.
 Below is a screen shot capturing the tennis ball being 'Ghosting' from a side view perspective.

Graph Editor

For the making of the ball animation we touched on a key part of making movement look more realistic and well timed through the use of the 'Graph Editor'. The graph editor allowed me to choose the spacing between keyframes in terms of speed, as well as allowing me to choose how rigid or curved the movement would become. This came in extremely useful for me as without it the ball animation that i created looked like it was 'floating' above the floor when it bounced. Through the use of the graph editor i made the bouncing keyframes rigid to make it appear as if the ball had actually 'hit' the floor during its bounce cycle. Below is a screenshot of the graph editor. The top points are more curved to show fluity whereas the low points are rigid for the reason described earlier.

Finished animations

After the research that i did in my group and externally through youtube i went onto maya and created the ball bounce animations.



This was as interesting experience for me as i have attempted to animate human rigs before and yet although they weren't brilliant, i found the ball animations harder in a sense of timing and trying to make the balls bouncing motion look fluid and natural. This appeared to be quite difficult even once applying the 'curve' function in the animation graph editor, and performing various tweaks during the animations.


Below are my finished animation AVI's.


Bouncy Ball animation

Tennis Ball animation

External research

Before going into the animation stage i decided to do a bit of research on youtube to look at various ball animation tests to see how they compare to the ones that we recorded ourselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoR2k3B0ifk - As covered in the introduction to animation module, i looked up the importance and steps involved in the ball animation test. Its importance in animation in known to be quite significance in simplifying and understanding the aspects of animation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6I3JI4vJv0 - This is another example of a reference shot for a ball animation, this time using a ping pong ball. Notice the difference between their reference video and the ones that we shot. the surface that the ball is being bounced off of and the material and air capacity of the ball.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcbXBdIvefc&feature=fvwp&NR=1 - I thought i would also include this video link in my blog as this features the disney character 'wall-e' interacting with a lot of bouncy balls for a promo for the movie before its release. i thought this was interesting to add as its relevance to what we are doing and also to see animated balls being done proffesionaly and on such a big scale.