Session 8 - Classwork reflection

After seeing everyone’s animations, it was clear to me that a lot of the animations all showed character, but lacked in the technical aspect. I believe that using the storyboards as a basis for our short animation helped improve the storyline and gave defiantly gave the piece more exaggeration and more liveliness.

For the second half of the class, we looked at using motion capture data and seeing how we could import motion capture data and manipulate this as a very brief teaser towards our second semester as we would be doing motion capture then. I also received some feedback on my main animation which I would later work on.

Session 7 - Walk Cycle

Click the image to view the animation.

GIF loop

For my walk cycle, I decided to use a different rig as I could be more expressive using a character that has different body proportions. I used the UltimateBeefyRig which can be found here: https://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/51300/download_page

I first decided to find a good reference that I could use so I managed to find a YouTube that specialises in creating video references for animators. The video I used is shown below:

Once I had everything set, I decided to key out the major 4 poses. I also made sure that I exaggerated some parts in order to express the movement. Since the character is quite big, the movement should be slightly slower compared to a thinner model/being. 

Each pose would be 1 keyframe long meaning there would be 4 poses in 4 frames. Once the key poses were done, I then set the timescale to 24 fps and to 24 frames. This ensured an even number of frames that was easily adjacent with the number of key poses I had created. 

 

After this, I then spaced out the key-frames using the graph editor. Here I started to adjust the timing of each action. Shortly after this, I moved onto the final part of adjusting the curves to better suit the animation. This mean including things like slow in and slow out, ease in and ease out, moving key-frames behind or ahead of each other to create follow-through actions and secondary actions.

Session 6 - Good Examples of Body Acting

Body acting plays a vital role in effectively communicating with viewers. Body postures can help show/exaggerate a certain type of emotion/feeling without having to verbally speak their action(s).

As shown in the GIF above, we can see Scrat (the name of the character) displaying at least 4 identifiable poses from when he is sniffing the ground to when he slams the acorn into the ground. From each of these poses we can tell what Scrat is thinking and what he plans to do next.

STAGE 1: From this pose, we can tell that he is curious. He has his acorn tucked in away from what’s ahead. This action suggest he is trying to protect his acorn from what he is looking head. This is also exaggerated by his nose which is similar to the actions of what a dog would be doing by sniffing/smelling what is ahead of him, in order to gain a better understanding of what it is.

STAGE 2: From this pose, we can tell that after he realised it was safe for him to bring out his acorn (which he does do in this pose), the shows a face of excitement by opening his mouth and opening his eyes wide open. 
 

 

STAGE 3: From this pose, we can now clearly see that his body language is very expressive. It’s also clear to see what his next action is just by his current pose. This consists of 2 elements. The first being his body posture, his body is elongated upwards, stretched out and his arms are up high. From this, we can tell that he is ‘charging up’ for something. The second elements is told by his eyes. His eyes show us what he is planning to do with all this energy that he has built up. And from this alone, we can safely conclude that Scrat is planning to use the acorn and smash it into the ground.

STAGE 4: Finally, we can see that his last action is that he slams him acorn into the ground, as concluded from stage 3. We can tell by his facial expression that he is happy and pleased by the result of his actions from stage 1. On a side note, we can see that exaggeration is greatly applied here. If we look at his lower body, we can see that he is significantly high of the ground and by using what we know from stage 3, it goes to show how much power Scrat had in that initial build up.