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 5

Well hello everybody. Week 5 just passed at Animation Mentor and our topic of study was Anticipation and Squash & Stretch. Our assignment was to animate a bouncing ball (yes, another bouncing ball) that goes through an obstacle course, as well as create a pose that conveys Devastation. Oh, and the bouncing ball will now have squash and stretch applied to it.

But Matt, what is Squash & Stretch? Funny you should ask, as I was just about to explain them. It's a simple enough concept to understand: things squash, and things stretch. But we're not just talking about the skin on you arm when you rest it on a table, or the muscle of your butt-cheeks when you sit down. Entire actions can be defined by squashing or stretching or both. For example, if your standing and you want to jump in the air, what do you do? You squat down (squash) and then you straighten out as you leap into the air (stretch). A bouncing ball will squash as it hits the ground, then slightly stretch out as it leaves the ground (this is often greatly exaggerated in animation to be more clear). Squash and stretch happens everywhere, even when you don't exactly notice. Even a pitcher throwing a baseball squashes up as he starts the pitch, then stretches out upon throwing the ball. I bet you never thought of that, did you? (Neither did you until they showed me).

Ok Matt, I get it, but what about Anticipation? Isn't that the feeling you get on Christmas morning right before you see all the loot you got? Yes, yes it is. But it's not quite the same in animation. Anticipation for the animator is the building up of energy in order to perform an action. Sometimes it's shown as moving backward before moving forward, or shifting your weight to the left before you step to the right. It's kind of a movement before a movement. A golfer swings back before swinging forward, a pitcher winds up before throwing a baseball (anticipation and squash), you scrunch down before you jump up. We use it because things don't look right without it, and it clarifies the primary action that's about to take place. Could you imaging a golfer just swinging the club forward? It would probably look pretty weird and it wouldn't be too effective. These are obvious examples, but anticipation happens everywhere on both small and large scales. Sometimes so minutely that you don't even really see it, it just 'feels' better than it does without it.

I could go on for a while about Anticipation and it's uses, but I think you get the picture. So on to the assignments. I unfortunately had to rush a little bit to get through these because I was travelling from Friday through Sunday, so I definitely think there will be some revisions.

Here' is my planning for my obstacle course.


Here's the animation.


Here's the planning for my pose. I chose #4 and put it at a different angle for clarity and feel.


And here's the actual pose.

AM Class 1 - Week 4

Alrighty everyone, this week's going to be a little bit shorter because, well, because I'm tired. Our lecture was on timing and spacing and what those two words really mean to animators. To be honest, they're still a little bit fuzzy in my head but it's kind of because they go hand in hand.

Timing as I understand it is how long an action takes, which seems simple enough. Spacing is how far apart your drawings are from frame to frame. So if your drawings are spaced far apart then your object is going to look like it's moving really fast across the screen. But if your drawings are spaced close together then the object is moving slowly.

It gets a little confusing because how much time you give an object to get somewhere effects the spacing of the drawings. Also, the spacing of your drawings really changes everything about the action. You could have a slow in, a slow out, acceleration out or in, an arc or straight line, etc. If either your timing or your spacing is off, it can really make the animation look weird or confusing or just wrong.

I guess those two concepts aren't too difficult after all, but you can often fiddle with either the timing or the spacing to make something look right. For instance, if we consider one bounce of a basket ball: if I change how high the ball bounces, it effects the spacing of the drawings throughout the entire bounce. Or, I could give the ball more or less time to bounce which also affects the space of the drawings throughout the bounce. Sometimes it's hard to decide which one you need to change.

Alright enough of that jazz. This week's assignment was to plan out and animate two bouncing balls. One light, and one heavy. We could also make revisions to last week's assignment.

So here's my planning. I decided to go with the top one of a beach ball and a bowling ball.



And here's the animation.



And last but not least, here's the revision of my excitement poses. The first is the old one and the second is the revised version.



I lied, this week's not any shorter.

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!