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.