Week 4 Animation Mentor - Basic Foundation

Hello Blog readers!

So this particular week was quite interesting, we had to animate another bouncing ball, but this time we are doing two! Where one has to look heavier then the other. So as a challenge for myself I thought I would add a collision, and made it so that the heavier ball will collide with the lighter ball, you will see this in the animation. It was definitely tricky for sure, and I was having a hard time getting the timing of the beach ball (Which is my lighter ball). You see the tricky thing I was going for, was that the lighter ball is going to be larger then the heavier ball, so I had to really make sure that is portrayed well in the animation.

Also this week we got a different mentor, a substitute, but he was just as good :). I learnt lots from him in terms of planning, where he felt they were more like guidelines to be fixed when you are actually animating, I am still having a hard time figuring out frames in the sense of time in seconds, but I think I will pick it up as I do more animation :).

Anyways thank you again for visiting, and will be posting again next week.

Week 3 Animation Mentor - Basic foundations

Hi there,

Ok so again last week was really week 3 :), I keep forgetting to post on the correct week, but anyways this particular week was our first animation assignment! Wohooo! Of course its nothing fancy but just a normal bouncing ball, but its definitely not easy getting it right, but it was lots of fun, and learned lots about timing.

I think the biggest lesson I learnt from week 3, was not to depend too much on the computer to work out the timing for you, I think in the past I dependanted too much on the computer to work out my breakdowns and inbetweens, and I think that's what made my animation very robotic in areas. Another important lesson was "Planning", I think this was something I never did in the past, and is something I am definitely going to adopt, it just seems to have outlined my animation a lot better, and I feel I can animate faster once I have everything put down on paper, and roughing out the timings.

We also had to do some "excitement" poses, I really tried my best to avoid doing the cliche jumping for joy kind of pose, and didn't quite hit the mark, so the mentor told me to do a revision, which I did and I also did some extra poses just to put some practise in :). Please have look at the pictures and my bouncing ball.

Cheers and see ya next time,
Meng.

Week Two of Animation Mentor

So it was really week two of Animation Mentor last week, but it was a interesting start! I went out and looked at some people, and studied their movements, it was really interesting how people move and the types of habits that people get into it seems. The most fascinating thing I noticed was how people twist and torque their bodies in very irregular ways to stand in a comfortable position when they are standing in line waiting for something or simply just idling, but to them this was just a normal stance that people took.

So I have attached the drawings I did of people, I am still not good at it as some of the drawings are very plain, and the last pose that I chose to hand in for my assignment, demonstrates this crazy twist that people do.