AM Class 1 - Week 9

This week we learned about exaggeration and weight. We really focussed mostly on exaggeration with a side helping of weight, so I won't be talking about weight much. On to exaggeration!

So, even you non animators out there understand what exaggeration means. It's that thing your girlfriend does when she says she told you to do something a hundred times, but really she only told you once. But in animation we use exaggeration for much more awesome purposes. We generally use exaggeration to either A) create a certain style, like being really cartoony and breaking the laws of physics, or B) making things clearer for the audience. Actually, we always do "B" and sometimes do "A" if that's what we want. That's right, we actually exaggerate to make everything easier to see and understand for the audience. Because if you animate something exactly as it's done in real life, it actually doesn't look very good. I know, it's weird. So we exaggerate poses, timing, pauses, character traits, personality, actions, and even ideas. All for the purpose of making our animation both interesting to watch, and easy to follow. We make sure you're looking right where we want you to by exaggerating what's happening on that part of the screen, or scene, or look on the character's face.

Unfortunately, we didn't really get to do any real exaggerating on our animation this week since we are just finishing up the Vanilla Walk from last week. We DID however get to practice exaggeration on our poses for this week; which was to portray concern. Honestly, it was pretty tough to come up with non cliche poses that show concern, but I think I decided on a pretty good one. I actually came up with it last minute, and chose to do it because both characters are showing different types of concern, which I thought was pretty cool.

Walking the Walk


Pose ideas.


The pose.

AM Class 1 - Week 8

Ahh, week 8. That was a sigh of relief "ahh," and not an "OH SHIT, AAAAHH!" Because I have a wonderfully short post this week, and yes, it's actually going to be super short. This week was our introduction to Walks. More specifically, the everyday, standard walk which we like to call the Vanilla Walk. There's really no attitude or character in it. It's just a normal walk. The only other thing I will say about it is that it usually consists of 5 major poses: the contact, the down pose (in which the weight shifts from the back leg to the front), the passing pose, the up pose, and the contact again.

This week all we had to do was the blocking, which is just those 5 poses. So the animation is going to look a little choppy, but it's supposed to at this point. We also had to do a pose that showed strength. I picked kind of a classic, Atlas type pose. Check it out.

Planning for the walk.


Here's the walk animation.


Here's all my strength pose ideas.


And here's the final pose.

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.

AM Class 1 - Week 2

This week was pretty cool because we got our first real assignment, and I got to find out more about how AM works.

Our lecture was on the 12 principles of animation and really just touched what each of them are without diving in too heavily. We aren't required to know how to really apply them yet (since we haven't done any animation), but we should now be familiar with them and what they're talking about. And we should be keeping them in the back of our minds. We also learned a little about using silhouettes to make sure our poses aren't cluttered, and our mentor touched on line of action.

Our assignment was to go out and sketch people wherever we wanted, then to pick a pose that we drew (and liked) and to recreate it using our character, Stu. We then posted our sketches as well as our pose for our mentor to critique. The sketches didn't have to be more than stick figures, but the goal is for them to be clear. The 3D pose itself was also supposed to be clear.

So what we do is either submit our work early in the week or post it in our public review section. Either way other students will be able to drop by during the week and give you advice on your work, and it is highly encouraged for you to do the same to other student's work. After all, the student advice is like half of what makes up AM. There are also other mentors that will come by and give you some advice if you ask for it in the forums. You can then change your submitted work with the new stuff you've been working on all week, all the way up until the deadline for the assignment.

After the deadline our mentor will then come and grade the assignments as well as give his eCritique. It's then up to us to go back and change our work according to his advice in the next week (while also working on the next assignment). Any revisions we make won't change the grade, but it's always good to go make the changes anyway so you really understand them.

So I picked a coffee shop to draw in and it probably wasn't the best place to go. There are simply too many people sitting around, not doing much. It's a great place if you want to see how different people sit or pour their coffee, but if you want exciting, dramatic poses you should probably head somewhere else. So after filling 2 pages of my sketchbook I went home to figure out which I wanted to pose. I picked 3 I liked, and to make a long story short, I ended up choosing an entirely different pose to turn in because the other one's we just kind of bleh. It was good practice though and I'm looking forward to my eCritique.

One of the original 3. I almost turned this in.



Here's actually a 4th pose I did.



And here's the one I decided to turn in.

AM Class 1 (Basic Foundations) - Week 1

The first week at AM is over and I have to say that it was an exciting week. It was pretty normal as far as first weeks go in that it was all about orientation and getting to know people.

I got assigned my mentor, Paul Allen. He's mentoring 15 other students besides me who are all in the same class (Basic Foundations). We all had our first online-live Q&A with him in which we got to meet him and say hello to each other via webcam. It was definitely a cool experience being up on cam in front of everyone and getting to meet them all face to face (so to speak). Paul seems like a really awesome guy and I look forward to getting to know him more and receiving his critiques on my work, and soaking up his vast animation knowledge.

As I said, this week was all about orientation and consisted of watching a lot of videos and exploring the website. I was actually quite impressed with how many videos there are explaining everything. They have general videos telling you how to view your lecture and assignments, ones on basic and intermediate Maya skills, videos about student's workflows, and even some student examples of things like walks and turns.

They also have a section on recommended reading, character downloads, and tool downloads. They different characters become available to download once they are required for an assignment, which means I probably won't get access to their famous Bishop rig until class 2 or 3. Maybe even class 4. As of right now the only character available is Stu, who is a simple biped with no face. I have to use him for my Week 2 assignment so hopefully I will post a picture of him then.

My assignment this week was simply to set up my school profile and upload a picture, so nothing exciting to talk about quite yet.

See you next week!