AM Class 1 - Week 7

Alrighty everyone, so I'm almost 3 weeks late on this one, but the good new is that it's going to be extremely short for Week 7. Our lecture this week was all about the wonderful and extremely tedious art of spline editing. For those of you who aren't familiar with 3D animation and have no idea what spine editing is I'll try to break it down for you. This might get nutty though.

On every character there are many controls that allow me to move the character into whatever position I want. There are feet controls, hand controls, spine controls, head and neck controls, and basically controls for every joint you can think of. Normally what I do with these controls is use them to either MOVE something or ROTATE something. There are also other things I can do with some of the controls but that gets all complicated, so lets just pretend they don't exist for a second. Now, since we're dealing with 3 dimensions it means I have three axis I can MOVE things in: up-down, left-right, and forward-backward. The ROTATION is a little more complicated, but it's the same principle: three axis that I can rotate in.

Hopefully I haven't lost you yet. Ok, so every time I move or rotate any of the controls on the character and set a key on it, Maya (the program we use) saves the position of the control on each axis. Maya then creates a graph of each axis, for every control that I've keyed. So on each control I get a graph of the up and down motion, the left and right, the backward and forward, the x rotation, the y rotation, and the z rotation. That's 6 graphs for every control on the character (mind you, some controls have more options and some have less). I'm not going to lie, it's a metric shit-ton of graphs to deal with.

The cool thing is, we can look at each graph and manipulate the keys we've set on it as well as manipulate how Maya interpolates between those keys. This is an absolutely necessary step in making sure your animation isn't crappy. And that's what spline editing is: fudging the graphs.

So once again I've lied right to your faces and said that this was going to be a short post. But as fate would have it, it was long and possibly too complex to understand. A+ job Matt.

Our assignment this week was to sketch and animate a ball with a tail bouncing a minimum of 3 times. It was a pretty cool assignment, and whenever you can get something like the a tail to flow nicely it makes you feel good as an animator. Here's my stuff.