Oktober Animation Test Day 4

Hey Everyone!

Welcome back the last post and the last day for the Oktober animation test! I will basically go over what I did on the last day of the test, which involves animating the lip sync and adding in the polishing touches to the animation, to add that cherry on top of a already delicious animated cake :).

The last day of the test, I pretty much had everything in place, the animation should feels good with overlaps, offsets and the timing were spot on to my liking. The one thing that I haven't done yet is the lip sync, and it is something I always felt that you can't really block out, and the reason for that is because the dialogue itself is not blocked out, so you can't really get that sense of timing with the lip movement through blocking, and it would just look really weird. You can potentially block out the lip sync, but I think you would need to block out the poses on every second frame to really get a hold of timing in my opinion. Before even starting to pose the lips, I would listen to the dialogue out a few times, sometimes even take video references of my lips to get some new fresh ideas on how to pose the lips. I would then write out the words on paper, and I would write down the words in a phonetic sense based on the dialogue, with the words written down I would then note the areas where the mouth would open or close, there is more to it then that of course, I just don't want to go into details on that, at a later post maybe :P. I would basically pose the lip position in spline, and as I pose the lips I will also put in the eye brown positions. The thing I love about lip syncing is that the timing for the mouth is already in place for you, and you really only need to position the lips in interesting and convincing ways :). The tongue is something I don't really concern too much, and it really depends on how close your character will be to the shot, the closer the shot is to the character's face, the more time you will need to spend on the tongue. Blinking is probably the easiest thing to add to any character, the trick with it, is that you have to make sure that there is at least three frame hold when the eyes close, this will make it fast enough to be a blink and long enough for the audience to feel the blink, anything faster will start feeling really awkward. When animating the face and the eye browns you don't want it to be too animated, you want to have more holds in between poses, then have poses for every word, if you video yourself saying a dialogue, you will notice that you don't tend to change your eye brown position a lot, there maybe subtle and quick changes, but never large movements.

With the lip sync all in place and the animation looking "oh!" so fine~, I moved onto polishing the animation, at this stage you should be happy with the overall animation, as a matter of fact you can pretty much start rendering it out. The thing that I think a lot of starting animators don't quite understand, (especially me when I was told about polishing) is that polishing is just about adding the small little touches to the animation, there should be no changes at all to the core animation. Polishing is all about, adding the little compression in fingers, the little staggers and shakes that happen in a angry person's hand, the squishes in the cheeks as a person touches their face, the follow through that can happen with a character's jaw, subtle small things that makes audience feel that softness in the animation. Polishing to me is like that last little scrape off a already prefect sculpture, and that scrape is the difference between perfection and godlike. So don't panic about polishing, if anything it should be pretty mindless fun :).

So that was pretty much the four day test, I could go into a lot more details on what I did on those four days, but what I really wanted to give everyone was a general idea of what could be done in four days time. The one thing to come out of this is the importance of planning, I don't think I would have managed to get the animation done, if I didn't spend the time in planning, throughout the four days I wasn't really stressing out about the time, and I wasn't panicking or struggling with the body mechanics, and I think that is all due to good planning on day one. I really had a lot fun doing the test, and I was happy with my outcome, I am of course disappointed that Oktober didn't invite me into their internship for "Aliens Vs Monsters", but I guess they had their reasons ( Might have been the tie and vest in the interview that threw them off).

I hope these posts has been kinda helpful, again what I am writing in these post, are not from a professional background, they are more from experience, things that I have come across during my animation study, and my study of life itself. So I hope you enjoy the end results, it could still do with a lot more work of course :).

Cheers,
Meng the Hobbit

Oktober Animation Test Day 3

Hey Everyone!

Welcome back to my blog, and today we will be continuing on with day three of the animation test, in this section I will be talking about what I did in the "Splinning" stage of the animation, the kind of routines that I get into whenever I head into this stage, and explaining the pitfalls that may happen during the course of animating at this stage.

I find that there is a lot of animators who hear the word "Spline" and they would panic and freak out! Or they would shake their head in dismay, and I wouldn't blame them, it is probably the most frustrating stage of animation, especially for animators like me starting out and still working out the kinks in body mechanics, but I do find that if you had a really good plan that lead towards good amount of blocking and inbetweens, coming to this stage of animation work won't be too bad.

The thing that scares a lot of animators about this stage of animation, is that all the timing efforts they put into blocking, getting it right, making it snappy, goes down the drain. That's why I mentioned in the last post to not put too much effort into getting the timing precise in blocking, the "Spline" stage is where you will really feel the timing. So with everything in 'Spline' the animation will be all smoothed out, and you will see all your timing off, don't panic! What I do at the start, is fix the timing, start moving all the key poses closer to each other if you need them to move from one pose to the next a little faster or if you want poses to take longer move them apart a bit more, if there is a key pose you know you want to hit at a particular frame, just create a hold from the last pose a little longer before hitting that pose. Play with the timing and get it right before even thinking about getting the arcs and overlap into the animation.

After getting all that timing correct and sorted, comes the arcs. This is very important to get a hold of, it took me a long time to understand the importance of movements working in a circle, and the very first thing you want to smooth out is the character's core movement. The character's core movement is the body itself, if you study enough motion in life you will notice that everything moves in a circular fashion, even the body, though it maybe the world's most subtle movement. The core is important to get right first because it effects everything else, from the head, arms and legs.When I first learned about that I thought "Wow! That solves all my issues!", so I started to make everything move in a circular fashion for example even when I want the body to move straight up and down I would try to add a circular movement for it, which was good, but I did it too much! I exaggerated the circular movement, and the animation ended up looking really choppy, because the core would be circling in large movements in the smallest frames. So what I am trying to say here is, yes! Put arcs and circles in, but know when to exaggerate and when to use it subtly.

As I am putting in the arcs and getting the core right, I will also be refining the timing between poses, working out the ease in, and ease outs, and changing the spacing between poses as I go. Spacing was again another one of the many animation principle that is easy to learn, but very hard to understand, I am only now just starting to understand spacing believe it or not. The trick with spacing is that you have to understand that it works in conjunction with the number of frames you are working with, for example you can still make a movement feel slow within a small number of frames, by making the spacing between each pose closer, and at the same time I can still make very fast movement with a large number of frames by making the spacing between each pose further apart. So I would play with the arcs and the spacing between poses until I get to what I want from pose to pose, it's very important to remember to get the animation to the way you like, don't let the computer do it and accept it because the computer knows best, the computer doesn't know what's best and what you will end up with is evenly spaced poses, and that leads to very boring smooth animation.

Once all the smoothing is done, this is where I will start offsetting things, making the hand come out of pose later or earlier, always in the back of my mind that the body leads the way in every movement. Majority of your offsetting can be done during your the blocking stage which can save you a bunch of time here, but I will try to explain how to do that in a future post :). The offsetting I would be doing here is just making things land at different times by either two or at most four frames, anymore then that can start looking strange, you just have to play around with it until it feels right to you. At this stage, there is really no turning back, if you are still making decisions on changing the poses, then you are better off scrapping everything and starting again, believe it or not that will actually save you more time, then trying to fiddle around with what you have and frustrating yourself out. There will be times of course when the directory changes the shot, or has a new idea for the shot, and you will need to change it, the best advice I have heard and have tried, is to do what I have been told is "Surgery Animation", I will again explain that at another time :).

With the smoothing, arcs and offsetting all done, I can really start seeing the animation come to life, the character really feels he has weight, personality and the timing is to my liking. The next stage will be adding in the lip sync probably my favorite part of animating (but seems to be hated but most animators) is polishing! So stay tuned and join me for my final post on the test, and I will also upload the outcome of my four day test.

Cheers,
Meng The Hobbit.

Oktober Animation Test Day 2

Hi Everyone,

Welcome back to my four day animation test overview, so in the last post I was basically talking about what I did in the first day of my animation, and the time I spend on planning, which is the MOST important thing :), if you are interested please go back to my previous post for details, there maybe some interesting information there.

Before I get started I forgot to mention in my last post that the animation piece was actually for a 12 second dialogue that was given to me by Oktober beforehand, and before I started even planning I have been listening to it almost everyday until in was in my blood system, by the time I finish my animation test, that 12 second line is now embedded into my memory banks forever! OK so onto day two!

The second day in my animation test I started to work on blocking, now blocking is really where the guts of the animation start to happen, for me it is also a great time to play around with the timing, I do however feel you don't really get the timing until you start splining (smoothing out the animation), but it's always important to put down the timing as early as possible, even if they are rough. When I am blocking at the start, I don't worry about what frame the key poses are to be at, at this point I am just more concerned about getting the poses right, and making sure the character is well balanced from all angles, I usually set each key pose about 10 frames apart for the time. Another thing to note, is to make sure your poses are clear for your camera shot, this is something I forgot to mention at the planning, but make sure you have your camera shot sorted before blocking anything out. If your planning was successful, you wouldn't need to think about the poses while blocking and it saves a heap of time, of course the initial planned poses will not be set in stone, little adjustments will occur as the translation from your 2D drawings to a 3D model can be different.

Once all the key poses are set, I start moving the key poses in the time frame to get a rough sense of timing, making sure to playblast as often as possible, especially working with a low end computer, or working with a really heavy scene, but if you have a meaty computer that breathes fire, or a really light scene, working without playblasting can save a bit of time, as long as you make a playblast at the end to be sure. Now it is up to you whether you want to put the 'inbetweens' as you are plotting in the key poses, or after you added in the key poses, all I know is that I always end up putting in more 'inbetweens' when I am animating a more complex scene, and less so when it's a more subtle scene, the more 'inbetweens' you add, the more you will get a sense of the flow in the animation and you gain more control over the movement, because of the luxury with computers filling in the gaps between poses, we tend to let the computer do the work, and that is a big 'no no' with 3D animation, as taught by my mentors, you are animating the character not the computer :).

So at this stage you really want to lock down the poses, if suddenly you had a great idea or the directory wants you to change something, this is the best time to change things, you can change things at a later stage, and mind you it will happen from time to time, it's going to be like climbing up a steep mountain of sharp knives, painful and the end result will not be what you hoped for, that's why it's so important to show the work to your director once you have things blocked out, and it's the best time to get criticism from people at this stage too. The next step after this is smoothing, probably the most dreaded thing for most animators, but if you blocked well and had a good plan to begin with, you will find that it can actually go "Smoothly".

So stick around for my next post as I talk about what I did in the smoothing at day 3 of my animation test.

Cheers,
Meng the Hobbit.

Oktober Animation Test Day 1

Hello Everyone!

So as promised yesterday, I would start basically recording down what I did for the four day animation test for Oktober, a lot of this stuff you guys and gals probably already know if you are experienced animator, and most of it is just common sense I guess, but I hope it can enlighten you a little bit or it's pleasing to read :).

Planning, that is where it's at, I spend the whole first half of the day planning, not animating, not even touching Maya. I can't stress how important the planning phase of a animation piece is, the more time you spend on the planning the less time you will be spending trying to get the movement right or the mechanics correct, and it always amazes me how fast I seem to animate when I have a good plan. Of course there will be times when there is just no time for planning especially if you are in a deadline or crunch time for a animation studio sweating to get the last few shots in, but it's always good to do a little bit before hand, even if it's a quick sketch or two. So what I did was take my camera with me to the office where I am currently working (Because they have huge open spaces in the boardroom, and I just shove tables to one side :P), take as much video references as I need. I think it always a good idea to do some video references, even if you have a rough idea of what your character is going to do, not only will you feel the movement and understand the weight and balance of the animation, you yourself will start doing these very natural secondary actions without thinking, and it's those little things that can break cliche poses and movements.

After spending a good amount of time recording myself,  and making a fool of myself (Luckily it was a Saturday, where no one was around), I would go back to my laptop, and start studying the video references. As I watch through the reference, I will start picking out key poses and draw them down on my sketchpad, I will usually end up with a few key poses that relate to the overall animation piece. Now here is the bit that I think you don't pick up when you are learning to animate, and it's the most obvious thing in the world, once you have the key poses down, stop and start thinking about how the character will go from one pose to the next, seriously! I mean act it out if you have to, start thinking about where the foot will land, how will the arm swing across to the next pose, and this is the best time to experiment with things, experiment with inbetweens, and start thinking "Oh! What if I have the hand here how will that flow through", start drawing in the inbetweens and experiment!

Once I had the planning down and at this stage I will have pretty much my key poses and inbetweens, dictating the overall movement from pose to pose, I will also have frame numbers in for each pose to pose, it helps by giving me an idea of the timing for each movement. When I first started, it was really confusing for me how animators understood what the number of frames meant, and I am only now starting to figure it out, what I understand now is the following:

• 1 frame, yeah you don't really want to have anything moving at 1 frame.
• 2-3 frames is really fricken fast, snappy speeds.
• 4-5 frames is actually close to being normal speed in most cases.
• 5-10 frames is actually really slow

Again these are just rough estimates to give me an idea of the speed in the movement.

So with the planning sorted, I was ready to start animating and I will leave the details for that on the next post :). Before I leave you guys, I do have one more thing to pass on, I think this is also a very important thing to understand, once you guys get into the industry (With more luck then me :)). When you are given your shot to animate, remember to look at how much time they will give you and plan your time accordingly, it won't always go to plan of course, set time stages in between the time you have, this way you will learn to finish what you need to do and not get carried away in certain stages of your animation, again this is why its important to plan your animation first. The most important thing of all is to animate within the given time, if you have one day to animate a shot, you don't want to start letting your imagination go wild, and think up of crazy things the character will be doing, the times set for shots are always appropriate, if the director gives you a day to do one shot, chances are it won't be a dance shot with 600 characters, it will be a character standing there with maybe a short dialogue, and if that's the case, just animate that, don't make the character start pulling of kung fu moves, so you can prove to the animation director you can animate, remember there is a difference between animating hard and animating smart, you want to be animating smart, especially with a time pressure industry like animation.

So I will leave you guys and gals with that until next time, where I will go over my blocking!

Cheers,
Meng the Hobbit.

Animation Test!

Hi Everyone,

OK OK so it's been really long since I posted something, and I was planning to post everything I have been doing at Animation Mentor, unfortunately I have let that go on the side so badly, that I can't remember all the details of the classes, only the important stuff of course ;). But I can say that I did finish the course and got my diploma! Wohooo!

Since I finished the course, I have been looking for a job in the animation field, and I applied for Oktober, which is a local New Zealand animation studio doing great stuff for Nickelodeon cartoons. I got a interview with them and they got me doing a animation test, but unfortunately I didn't get the internship :(. But that's not going to let me down, if anything it has really given me some confidence in my own work, I was just happy they liked what I could do, just that there were probably people with more talented and experienced out there. Well all the best to them and their projects, maybe some day I will get my chance :).

So what I thought I would do with the following series of post is basically talk about the animation test they got me to do. So I only had four days to animate this 12sec dialogue piece, and I didn't try to work on it for the whole four days without sleep, because what they were looking for was how well I would do in a normal day to day situation, to see what speed and level I was at.

In the next few posts on the blog I will be going through my planning stages, and video references, and finally I will post the result of my animation, so stay tune folks, there might be some interesting things to read up on :), well I hope interesting :P.

Cheers,
Meng the animated Hobbit.

(Class3) Week 6 - Advance Body Mechanics

Greetings again!

So we come to week 6 of class 3, this week I made more progression on the shot, started to smooth the animation out, I could really see the animation coming to place and I am getting the sense of the timing a lot better it seems, it's strange but I can see the timing a lot better when I start putting the animation into spline, it was always hard to work out the timing during the blocking stages. There is definitely a lot of areas that need work, I notice some kinks in places, which I hope to fix in the next few passes.

My mentor however did give me some very kewl advise, the most interesting thing I learned was getting that extra impact on the hammer when it magnetizes on the top part, he told me to add a bit of a squash and stretch on the hammer head to help emphasize the impact.

Again thank you for stopping by, and I keep posting :)

Meng The Hairless Feet Hobbit.

(Class 3) Week 5 - Advance Body Mechanics

Hello again fellow animators!

So we come to week 5 of class 3 in advance body mechanics, this week I started to block in the animation, in the complex parts of the animation I decided to add more inbetweens to get the flow of the animation and movements. It's funny how much we can see and dictate the movement when more inbetweens are put into place, it seems the more complex the movement, the more inbetweens one should add into the animation to really feel the flow, again when I am talking about inbetweens, its more like break downs :).

From here you can tell that I made some pretty dramatic changes to the animation, I had to cut this shot and take things out, cause the initial idea I had in mind took a little long :(. So instead of having him pull the hammer when it gets magnetized on the bottom, he is just going to land on his family jewels, when he attempts to pull the hammer from the top :), and roll off screen to the bottom, which should lead nicely to the third shot.

It's really hard to keep to your frame limit when you have great ideas, but I think I need to discipline myself in this area, as I am sure when working in a studio, the director is not going to let me have an extra hundred frames, unless the director is myself ;).

Again thanks for dropping by and will keep updating as we go.

Meng The Hobbit

(Class 3) Week 4 - Advance Body Mechanics

Hello Animators and Guests of course!

So its week 4! And we are onto finalizing our first shot, and planning out the second shot. I am happy that I had a interesting idea to begin with, hehe I guess spending sometime during the one week break in between really helped. So I went out to shot some reference of myself hanging on stuff, and feeling the nausea of being upside down, and what better place to do those things was at the children's playground! And yes for all you animators out there asking if I got the evils, oh yes! Indeed I got the evils, it was like they were afraid that I was taking videos of their kids, posting it on the Internet ooh, hang on! I guess I kinda am :(.

Anyways so the planning was good but I had a feeling it maybe a little long, I really wanted to emphasis the stickiness of the magnetized hammer, but I think I may have to end up cutting some things out :(.

As for my first shot, I think that went really well, the leg movements was very smooth, and I was very happy with the way it turned out, it was still a little retro scope feel to it, and I feel I could have pushed some of the moments a little bit more, but overall I was very happy :). Please have a look, and don't report me to those children's parents please, they are only there as backdrops nothing else.

Cheers,
Meng The hobbit.

(Class 3) Week 3 - Advance Body Mechanics

Hello Animators of the world! And visitors of course :),

This is week 3, and things are going really well, I think spending that time on blocking really paid off, as it seems moving to smoothing which I kinda like to call it blocking plus :), really easy, and I didn't really have to change much. My new mentor made some awesome critiques though, really getting us to push those poses into more dramatic and fun, he also went through with us the importance of curves and poses, going through some of Disney's best 2D animation and how each pose is pretty much like a painting on canvas, which really inspired me to make sure I make every key pose a pose that leads the user's eye towards the expected direction.

I definitely felt like I am heading towards a good work flow here, for me blocking plus is still keeping with the key frames, and inbetweens, but not offsetting anything, that way you can still adjust timing in places needed, or even adjust poses when the director changes his mind :). Another thing also since you have things in smooth (spline curves), you can really start seeing the timing of your animation, I know at this stage, every time I think something is fast and snappy enough, it turns out not to be even close.

Again have a look at my smoothing stage of the first shot of my AnimJam, hope its ok with my mentor :), but I know there will always be changes.

Cheers for popping over,
Meng

(Class 3) Week 2 - Advance Body Mechanics

Hey Hey Hey!

Its week 2 of class 3! So the planning is done and now its down to blocking out the first of three shots that will be connected together as a Anim Jam!

So I went ahead and started blocking and doing the things that I didn't in class 2, by putting in a lot of key frames, almost to the point of it so close to the video reference, I know its not the ideal thing to do, I with all the things I tired in last class that didn't work, and seeing how everyone was pretty much copying the video reference identically, I thought I would give it a try this time. Of course there are some parts of the animation where I will have to make it up on my own :).

My new mentor is very kewl, he is really getting us to push poses, really looking forward to his critiques. Have a look at my blocking and you will see that I put a lot more key frames that I did in the past.

Again cheers for dropping by,
Meng

(Class 3) Week 1 - Advance Body Mechanics

Hello Again my awesome Animators!

First week of advance body mechanic! New mentor and new class, I have a good feeling about this class, I know for one I really want to push my planning and blocking process, I feel that was something I lacked doing in class 2, and I really want to practise it and get it right.

Before coming to this class I spend some time on deciding what I want to do with the Anim Jam, I figured it would be fun to try it out :). I ended up coming up with an idea for a construction guy getting his hammer magnitized, I had some other ideas before hand involving various things like bouncing balls and giant metal rolling balls! Crazy!

Have a look at the planning, and you will get the idea for my Anim Jam :).

Cheers for dropping by as always,
Meng

(Class 2) Week 12 Animation Mentor - Psychology of Body Mechanic

Hello Again Awesome Animators,

So this is the last week of Class 2! Man it sure went by really quick :), I learnt so much in this class, lots of things about weight and the importance of arcs, not only in hands and feet, but everything, and how the hips is the core of the animation, and how it leads movements of other parts of the body. I have a good feeling that I will have a good head start going into class 3, and that is all because of the way our mentor has taught us to look at the hips with such importance, and strictness. I have to admit there were times where my mentor would crack the whip on us, but I think in many ways it was for the best, and I would love to have her again for acting class.

So I have ended up rendering the frames out and made my little Malaysian dance. Boy! Things look so much better when they get rendered out, I also gave Stewie a traditional Malaysian hat as well :). The animation again is not perfect, but I think for the level I am at its not too bad, its not the worst animation in the world, but I really wish I could do it again but this time with better planning and blocking this time around.

So I have updated my progress well with the new dance animation.

Again cheers for dropping by,
Meng

(Class 2) Week 11 Animation Mentor - Psychology of Body Mechanic

Hello Fellow Animators!

I apologize for not updating in a long time, and I have to admit its really hard to keep things up to date, especially when you not only have animation work to do, but also other hobbies that keep you doing as well :).

Anyways this week things are starting to make a little sense, I am still not quite hitting the mark with this animation piece it seems, I am sure I had all my hips covered and going into arcs, but my mentor still feels there is something not right, I can definitely start to see how things are becoming a lot better, its funny how the more I work at it the more it starts to be come polish, but again I think its because of my lack of planning and blocking in this shot, is where I got myself stuck here. Its probably a little too late to go back and re-block everything and start from scratch, which I would love to do, but time is not on my side so I will have to do best with what I got.

Again have a look and you see that its a lot better then the previous video, but there are definitely still areas that are not right.

Cheers for dropping by,
Meng

(Class 2) Week 10 Animation Mentor - Psychology of Body Mechanics

Hello again animators of all kinds! And also guests of honour!

OK so its week ten of class two, I am having some real difficulties in this animation, looks like I am not quite hitting the mark, and I think the biggest problem was the arcs in the hips, my mentor is telling me that I am not hitting it :(. I totally agree with my mentor, my hip arcs are just not working, and I think its a reflection of my blocking, again goes back to how important the blocking stage of animation is, I feel the more you can add in the blocking the better your animation be and less time you will have to spend on the last hundred metres to the finish lines.

Another thing I learnt from this week was the study of video references, I really wished we had this lecture at the start of the class it was really good, in that the lecturer Rick 'O'Conner gave a real detail on how to study video references, and would have been awesome to have known that earlier in the class. I think eventually you will probably just get acting choices from video references and not really rotoscope it, but in order to understand the body mechanics and how to make the breakdowns in between key poses, you really have to go through this method. Now I really wish I had more time to start over again with this animation exercise.

Cheers for dropping by, and I will keep you fellas posted :).

(Class 2) Week 9 Animation Mentor - Psychology of Body Mechanics

Hey There fellow Animators!

Week 9! Boy is this class going really quick! So after doing the things that was critique from my mentor I did my best to correct those things, its definitely getting there, and I think you can see it when you compare to the ones I did before. However because I have been constantly worrying about getting the hips right and arcs right, I totally forgot about adding the push off for the legs! And my mentor was right, it felt like Stewie is being pulled up out of the sky, because I didn't have that stretch on the leg to make it look like Stewie is pushing off.

The major thing for sure I learnt in this week is understanding not only about hip arcs, but how the hips are also controlled by the ankles of the foot, that move does start off from the hips but they are also slightly governed by the fact that its you feet that pushes it into position, kinda crazy thinking but seems to send a light bulb into my head.

So anyways I hope you guys like this version of the animation you will see that things are getting better, but obviously still needs a lot of work.

Cheers,
Meng

(Class 2) Week 8 Animation Mentor - Psychology of Body Mechanics

Hey There Fellow Animators!

So its week 8, and I thought I would really go all out on this one, I want to really improve on my last shot and really get it down this time for this assignment with the dance, the crazy thing is after getting a pretty harsh critique from my mentor last time, I feel even more motivated to try harder! I don't know why, so I really went for it this week and got my blocking reasonable quick, things are looking pretty good and I think I got all the key poses I need for the dance routine.

However when I look at how others are doing their blocking, I get the feeling that maybe I should have down more breakdowns to really tighten the animation up to the point where I can control it. Hopefully it turns out right this time around :), so here is the blocking, cheers again for dropping by on my log.

Cheers,
Meng

(Class 2) Week 7 Animation Mentor - Psychology of Body Mechanics

Hello Animators of all Kind!

Welcome to week 7 of class two, OK so I manage to finish my drunken stumble but it needed a lot more work, and I think the critique really showed where I did wrong, as a personal goal I think I did OK on it, it was definitely something a lot better then what I did 5 years ago in Media Design :).

So just to point out the flaws in the animation, I didn't have enough overlap in the spine, I guess I am having difficulty putting it down in the poses, it something I have a understanding of on paper but once I start putting it in Maya and seeing the playblast something wasn't clicking so I am hoping to do much better on the next assignment, I am sure you will pick it out in the animation :).

To finish off this week we had one last animation to do, and I chose out of the pick list to do a little dance move, I wanted to move away from doing any break dance, hip hop, so I chose to do something semi-traditional I guess, I chose to do this Malaysian dance I found on you tube, its pretty neat, and I think its at the right difficulty level. My mentor says this one is gonna be a little challenging because the body movement is not so obvious and I will need to push the poses, I think I am up for that :(, if anything I know I love to push things and maybe too much at times.

So please take a look at the reference and final drunken stumble animation, and I will see you guys on the next post :).

Cheers,
Mengster.

(Class 2) Week 6 Animation Mentor - Psychology of Body Mechanics

Hello Fellow Animators,

Ok so into week six we go! This week for me, was all about adding in more break down and turning things into spline. However I think I hit a snag this week, as I was having trouble figuring out the movement of the head, which you will see in the video :). So I tried doing something unique but it turns out it wasn't quite selling it with Dana. Basically when I have Stewie turn around to walk the other direction I have his head swing around, and because his head is so Big! It didn't look convincing or possible, and in many cases it looked like he would fall over easy.

The Second Dana mentioned was the head movement, they rotating up and down way too much, to the point where its not humanly possible, and I cam definitely see that once she mentioned it, man I wish I had eyes like that :). She mentions that the head yes should has no focus because he is drunk, but the problem was I made him too unfocused, and there should still be a hint of focus throughout the animation. So she showed us that there is actually a control switch you can turn on and off on the Stewie rig, that stops the head from rotating accordingly to the shoulder movements, kinda wish I knew about this earlier, but with mistakes we learn a lot :).

The third thing that Dana, mentioned was the way he got up from the bench, it was again not humanly possible to get up like that, it very strange when I first did it I thought it was fine, but now that Dana has mentioned it, it was so obvious! Again man I guess to see these things takes experience and understanding, again another lessons learnt, "If you can do it in the real world" chances are its not going to look convincing in the animated world no matter how cartoony.

So this week was pretty hardcore, I had a little too many mistakes that I will have to clean up for the next week. I have to say animation is not easy, and the joy of animating can be extremes! One minute the director will love where you are going, and you feel like you are on top of the world, the next minute you find out that is not there at all and you feel like your heart has been ripped out of your chest, I guess its part of it, and I think this course gets their student into that frame of mind before getting into the industry.

Cheers and see you next week,
Meng.

(Class 2) Week 5 Animation Mentor - Psychology of Body Mechanics

Hello Animators and Bloggers,

So week 5 is the beginning of a new animation, again we had to pick out from a list of things to animate, but this time around we have a new rig called Stewie, which is essentially Ballie with a body and head, no arms yet.

What I chose to do is a little bit of a challenge, and that is the drunkard stumble, according to Dana this is tricky because the character has no real control over the movement of the body, there is no real sense of direction or control, I guess that's pretty much what trying to walk while you are drunk is pretty much like :).

So I made a video reference of my self, and did some rough thumbnails out to animate what I want. This time I am taking bits and pieces from different takes, I really want to try doing that instead of directly taking it off on take, I think this is something I will be doing in the future if I was to be animating something I know I can't do in real life ( which is leaping over buildings and levitating, but I still try every now and the ;) ). Also I am trying to keep my thumbnails to story telling poses, I have a feeling thats what thumbnails are meant to be, and they should be done quickly, I personally think that adding breaks down only really make sense when you are blocking in Maya, but drawing them out first may make sense too.

So have a look and see me do silly things yet once again, I think someone at the park thought I was crazy, as if I am not already :).

Cheers,
Meng

(Class 2) Week 4 Animation Mentor - Psychology of Body Mechanics

Hello Animators of all kinds :),

So this is the last week for my first animation of Class 2, I think I got it smoothed out pretty well, but definitely learnt some important things along the way. I think the biggest thing was getting that timing down at the start, I had to re-adjust some of the timing, especially in the run phase, and I think my end results still had some timing flaws :(, my mentor felt the end part is like ballie jumped into water. But you learn from mistakes as everyone says, and for my next assignment, really going to try and nail the timing, I can see now why animators always say timing is the hardest thing to conquer, and its funny how things always need be faster then they are slower.

Here is my final finish work of the first assignment for Class 2. I have to admit I am definitely learning a lot about body mechanics in this class, I am still tyring to get my head around some things, however I get the feeling this is something that we learn more through experience and just doing a lot of animation with a lot of mistakes :P.

Cheers,
Meng