WEEK 2 - Ball and Tail

The second exercise was a simple ball and tail animation with a focus on the principles of follow-through and over-lap. I understand that follow-through and Over-lap are crucial parts of any moving character, anything like a cape or long hair that moves after the character has done his/her key movement can be considered Follow-through...

This is a little character I created. See his cape there? If I was to go ahead and animate this guy (like I intend to one day) I would have to consider the movement of the cape. Follow-through is any movement that happens after the key movement has been done...

It doesn't have to be a cape either, Follow-through can relate to other things like a piece of rope or a characters tail perhaps...

I was doing some research on these principles and came across an excellent tutorial from Digital Tutors on Over-lap and Follow-through. It was really helpful in trying this sort of thing out in 3D...

DIGITAL TUTORS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2wJA9eX3yA

When trying out my own tests on follow-through I was given a rig from my tutor and told to play around with the tail. The rig we were given was a rig of a ball and tail and we were asked to move the ball and then have the tail follow the ball as if it were attached to the ball on a piece of string. To get an idea of how this would work I did a simple test moving the ball across the screen and the ball following it. Here is my result:

As you can see the test was merely to get a better understanding of the principle but as I was doing this I found it very difficult to adapt to the new 3D ways I was being taught. As I have mentioned before in my previous posts, I have been taught in a predominantly 2D way and this new software programe we're using is difficult for me. However this exercise has helped me get to grips with the interface better and I feel that I am picking it up much quicker than I initially expected.

Interaction with an environment

We were given an environment for our ball and tail to jump around. When given this set we were told to think of what type of character our ball is going to be. I chose my ball to have a very bouncy and energetic demeanour so that I could further practise my ball bouncing skills and also have a really interesting character to animate.

Our ball was to interact with the environment in a certain way. I decided my character, being athletic and energetic, was going to jump up the steps really enthusiastically and then reach the top, become overzealous and then fall back down the stairs. These movements and key frames were drawn out in my sketchbook initially (see above) so that I had a rough idea of how it was going to look.

Upon building the scene in Maya I came across a number of problems. Firstly, I had added a deformer to my ball and tail so as to implement some squash and stretch elements to my piece but I found the rotate tool to be somewhat of a thorn in my side with this move. For example, I was rotating my ball several times during the production of this scene but as I was doing so the pivot point moved around the rig erratically and I had some problems detecting it.

I also found making my ball and tail do a 360 degree flip incredibly difficult.

I also sped up the final film so that the movement was more quick but I feel that by doing this some of the movements are too quick and you can barely even recognise what happens at some points.

To conclude I feel that this animation needs some work... a lot of work, and I will get round to it at some point. Ultimately, I have understood the key principles and researched them throughly, however, I do understand that I still have a lot to learn about Maya but I know I am beginning to get the hang of it and this exercise really helped...

WEEK 1 - Timing and Spacing

ANIMATING A BALL BOUNCE


For our first project we did a ball bounce exercise in Maya focusing on the first key principles of Animation; Timing and Spacing.

The first thing I did was think about the type of ball I wanted to animate. I also practised what I'd been taught before by testing out timing and spacing on paper.... just drawing it out first. We were taught that there's a key difference between timing and spacing in animation and that it is crucial to get the timing right otherwise your movements will look crude. The way I understand it is that the timing is where the you decide to place your key frames, so if you have a man walking across the screen from left to right, you would just draw the two key frames on either side of the page. The spacing is the frames in-between those key frames and this is where you can get creative...

I have been studying a book called The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams and within it he  states that the timing and spacing will dominate the action of your animation. I have chosen to animate a tennis ball bouncing on a soft carpet... here is my reference video of my ball bounce:

To get a better understanding of the timing and the spacing I had to refer to this footage a lot. I was looking at the time it took for the ball to fall and hit the ground the first time and then bounce back up again. I came to the conclusion that it takes roughly 4 seconds for the ball to stop bouncing. A tennis ball is rather light but it has a nice bounce to it. This is a quick test I made in Maya influenced by what I have learnt here...

You can see that I have considered the timing and the spacing here but I have yet to fully get to grips with Maya's interface. I am finding it very difficult as I have never worked in 3D before and it is a lot of information to remember. There's still a lot of work to put into this ball bounce but I know that I understand Timing and Spacing very throughly now...

SECOND BALL BOUNCE TEST  \/\/\/

Focussing on a slightly bouncier ball for my second test...

Here is the finished version which has much better timing and spacing and I have also flattened the tangents using the Graph editor ...