(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

(Class 2) Week 3 Animation Mentor - Psychology of Body Mechanics

Hello again my fellow Animators and Animation fans :),

This week, we moved on to splining our animation from week 2's blocking phase, I got some awesome notes from my fellow AM students and some great notes from Dana. I think the biggest thing that I learnt from Dana, was understanding how energy works in the body and the things people do to disperse it or exhaust it in their animation. Since I am making Ballie (The character I am using to animate with), leap off the wall and land at such a high height, and I didn't compensate for all the downward force, energy when he landed, so the weight of the landing didn't feel right. At first I thought it felt OK in my blocking, but after Dana pointing it out, I could understand where she was coming from. She advised me to make the landing recovery a little bit more longer, because the body is trying to catch all that downward force and energy, and you can't do that in an instant.

So I made those changes and made ballie land with both feet eventually landing, instead of what I had before which was having ballie land on one feet and then leaping on that same feet. There was also other things mentioned in Dana's notes which was to avoid "molding" the feet together, so you have a clear silhouette every time, and audiences would not get confused with which feet is in front, this was something again I didn't take heed of in the past, and lesson well learnt.

The final thing I changed also, was the camera angle, at first I wanted a few more from behind ballie, but it turns out you can't get a good view of the push off, and Dana believes that was one of the key components in the animation, and is something you can't obscure from the audience.

So in the end this week I learnt quite a lot, its amazing how these small subtle things and do so much in just 10 seconds of animation, I will keep posting as much as I can, I know sometimes I tend to forget :P.

Cheers,
Meng

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

Hello Fellow Animators!

Ok so week two we started with our blocking, this time I was trying some new work flows that was introduced in the lectures, its definitely very interesting to see how a variety of people animate, and the most interesting was directly using splines when blocking, I can see how that can save time, and you will probably get a better sense of timing then say starting out in stepped, but I think in the mean time, because I am still learning I will keep with using the stepped method until I get a good solid hold on things.

I really understand now how 80% of the work in animation is pretty much in the blocking phase, getting the timing right and getting those key poses locked down, however I am finding that doing the breakdowns seems to be a little bit tricky, our Mentor Dana, suggested that we favour the previous key pose as a general rule of thumb, but if you wanted a ease in effect you would favour the next key pose, it all depended on what style you are going for.

Well I hope you like my blocking stage, and I think I got the timing right :), we'll see what happens once we go into spline!

Cheers,
Meng