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Week 8 :

Posing II : Moving Holds
This week we reviewed how to add moving hold and keep alives to your poses in order to give your character life. John Lasseter gave a speech at Siggraph where he talks about adding moving holds. Check it.

http://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/animation/character_animation/principles/lasseter_s94.htm#moving%20holds

We also covered the steps to creating a proper walk cycle. Be sure you demonstrate the four basic poses when creating your walk cycle. Keep your walk cycle to 24 frames per step for your homework. In class, we practiced with 12 frames, but I'm afraid this will be too fast for any portfolio review. Let's slow things down.

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HOMEWORK:

1) Add moving holds to your poses created the previous week. A playblast is fine.

2) Create a walk cycle 24 frames per step. Your character will take two steps totally 48 frames each.

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Week 7 :

Posing:
This week we reviewed how to pose an established character rig. The goal in animating charactes is to achieve emotion. The primary way of doing this is to establish a clear pose. Use the blue guy rig found in the link below:

http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/character_rigs/Basic-Guy-4284.html


Remember to pose from the center of his body out. Start from his spine and legs, then do the head and arms. Don't do the fingers and face until you are happy with the general pose. Most important, use reference, find a pose from a movie you like and see if we can guess which movie it is.

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HOMEWORK:

1) Pose basic guy rig in 8 poses. Hold each pose for 24 frames, with 10 frames between each pose. Submit a single maya file, we will add to these in class.

Basic guy was created by Tim Oberlander.

Have fun.

Some examples of the assignment:

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Week 6 :

Animated Flour Sac:
This week we reviewed the animation process of animator Keith Lango, we watched the animation process of the "The Waterhorse", viewed "The Parthenon", learned about Reverse Curves to make your animations interesting, overlapping action and secondary motion.

To demonstrate what you have learned thus far, animate a flour sac jumping a chasm, be sure to include overlapping action, secondary motion, good realistic timing like spring to the take off, a fast decent, anticipation and recoil.

Our animations are getting more complex, so each week, you will be displaying more.

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HOMEWORK:

1) Animate the flour sac rig jumping over a chasm demonstrating the principles of animation. The chasm can be big or small. You must show, overlapping action, secondary motion, anticipation, reverse curves, as well as bouncing ball principles such as ease in / ease out, realistic take off, landing and recoil.


2) In a separate Maya file, animate the flour displaying two distinct emotions. Pick two of the five listed: Sad, happy, angry, surprised and proud.

Scoring (Each component is worth 2 points for a total score of 12):

• Demonstrate realistic movement, timing and speed.
• Demonstrate sqash and stretch.
• Demonstrate overlapping action and follow through.
• Demonstrate anticipation.
• Demonstrate reverse curves for interesting animation.
  
• Resolution gate and current frame counter.
• A separate maya file of the flour sace displaying two emotions.
  
  
  

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Week 5 :

Animated Drink Box:
This week we reviewed our animated logos. They look great, some better than others, some more complete than others. Do your best in order to make something for you portfolio. We will be looking at all of your projects in this manner.

We also started animating character rigs. The simplest is the drink box, that has simple controls for squash and stretch, tilt and rotations for his waist and body.This week, you will try to give this character some feeling.

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HOMEWORK:

1) Animate the drink box jumping over a chasm demonstrating the principles of animation. The chasm can be big or small.


2) Animate the drink displaying a single emotion. Some emotions included: sad, happy, anger, fear or surprise.

Scoring (Each component is worth 2 points for a total score of 10):

• Demonstrate realistic movement, timing and speed.
• Demonstrate sqash and stretch.
• Clarity (be sure its clear).
  
• Resolution gate and current frame counter.
• Displaying an emotion playblast.
  
  

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Week 4 :

Animated Logos:
This week we blocked in our animated logos. We loked at a lot of simple logos that you could use as an example. We covered how to animate lights, lightning, fire (this was cool because it actually gave you guys some ideas). This week, you turned in a storyboard of your logo animation, a rough playblast blockin of this logo, and your 3D Real Trajectory car from last week. Submit these to the corresponding folders on the Teacher Data Drive.

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HOMEWORK:

1) Finish animating your logo animation. This comprises 20 percent of your final grade.

Scoring (Each component is worth 20 points for a total score of 100):

• Realistic camera and light movement.
• It must be fully rendered.
• Clear camera presentation and lighting (be sure its clear).
  
• Smooth animation (demonstration of animation principles)
• Deadline

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Week 3 :

Reastic Trajectories and Movement:
This week we looked at some of the physics in a car out of control. Be sure to add contrast of speed, diminishing intertia, and pay attention to what the camera/viewer sees. Moving the camera adds a lot to an animation's believability.

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HOMEWORK:

1) Animate a car out of control, gaining control and animate the camera moving, to show that its being affected by the car. Submit a clear sized working playblast:

Scoring (Each component is worth 2 points for a total score of 10):

• Make your car fishtail 3 times (minimum).
• Realistic trajectories (fast and slow), also diminishing intertia in the turns.
• Animated camera movement.
• Clear presentation (work to the camera).
• Working playblast (Current frame rate, resolution gate, and correct size).

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2) Create a storyboard of your logo animation:

Scoring (Each component is worth 2 points for a total score of 10):

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Week 2 :

Week 1: Animating Weight
This week was a review of the keyframe animating process. This time however, you are using those tools to create the illusion of weight. This is something the computer cannot do effectively.

HOMEWORK:
Animate two bouncing balls with differing weight. One is a small rubber ball, and the other a heavy bowling ball.

For full points you must:
Demonstrate differing weights in two objects.
Demonstrate timing (fast vs. slow).
Demonstrate ease in and ease out (gravity and diminishing intertia)
Working Playblast
Current Framerate
Resolution Gate

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Week 1 :

Week 1: Animate a ball bounce
Welcome to 3D Animation. I look forward to being your instructor. Demonstrate squash and stretch, ease in and ease out, realistic movement. This week, we start off nice and slow, by familiazing ourselves with the work area and key animation principles.

Your first assignment is the bouncing ball. Below is an example of it along with a few character pieces I've done on my own.


Assignment 9 : Demo Reel from randolfd on Vimeo.

Topics of the Day:
• Discussion: Current State of the Industry
• Animation Examples.
• Animation Preferences (realtime 24fps).
• Proper Keyframing.
• Graph Editor (Smoothing and V tangents)
• When you animate, animate translation first before rotation or scale.
• Looping
• Stepped vs. Tangeants.
• Editing Keyframes.
• Copying and Selecting Keyframes
• Basic Lighting (at least 3 lights).
• Playblasts.
• Current Frame Count
• Animation Time Slider and Hotkeys
• Resolution Gate

HOMEWORK:
Animate a looping bouncing ball to famialize yourself with keyframing while at the same time demonstrating smooth realistic movement, squash and stretch to demonstrate weight and material, ease in and ease out, and timing (speed). Next week, be sure you have your animated Maya file. Concentrate on realistic movement in your ball bounce, and be sure to incorporate lighting so that your ball is clear (no dark shadows), and that you have a shadow. We will render the animation and turn in into an animation in After Effects next week next week.

Size: 320 x 240
Frames: 24