The Obstacle Course!

Sorry for the brief hiatus there. The amount of time that I have been spending on my animation has increased significantly. I'm loving it though!

I have a couple new animations to post, which I will put into separate posts for the sake of clarity.

After the studies with different weights, we were tasked with animating a ball through an obstacle course. AM provided us with a number of different courses to choose from. I have slowly but surely been learning that planning is everything. You can save so much time on the animating side if you take a little time on the planning side! I chose my obstacle course, took a screenshot of it, and started drawing. Here's a glimpse into my mind...I don't recommend staying long.

AM limits us to a number of frames on all of our assignments. This creates a whole new set of challenges, as well as mimics what we can expect to find in a studio environment. So not only do you need to find an entertaining way to get your ball through the course, but you have to do it within 120 frames, and this includes making the ball settle to a stop at the end. Remembering that our animations are 24 frames per second, that isn't much time!

My planning image shows my thoughts throughout the entire animation. I originally mapped a route that I thought would be great. I very quickly 'blocked' this route out. When I say 'block' I mean that I moved the ball roughly along the route I planned and set keyframes at any extreme points to make sure I was really describing the route well. In layman's terms, animation is simply the motion between your extreme poses. So blocking is the extreme poses with no in-between animation. For example: you would see the ball on the platform to start, then it would teleport to the top of the first jump, then to the second platform, the top of second jump, etc. This obviously looks weird as an animation, but it is incredibly useful to quickly lay down your timing, and see if your animation will 'work' (as the animation still plays back at 24 frames per second, even if there is no inbetween animation, so you can watch the ball go through the extreme poses and get a feel for the timing, and even adjust the timing by moving the extremes on the timeline) before you devote hours into actually creating it.

What I found after my blocking phase, was that my animation was about 20 frames too long. In an effort to cut it down, I nixed the initial jump and had the ball start on what used to be the second jump.

Not becoming married to your animation, and being able to adapt to the requirements and changing situations is as much a skill as actually animating. Thank goodness I planned this out first.

Without blabbing too much, here is my obstacle course animation

My critique went well and my mentor pointed out some great stuff. Mostly small issues with how slowly my ball was squashing and stretching during it's initial jump, and also how quickly the ball seemed to settle at the end (which as an attempt to come in under the frame limit). He was also concerned with the fact that the ball seemingly should have bounced when it was caught by the spinning cradle-thingy-ma-bob. My initial thought was that the spinning of the cradle would absorb the energy from the ball. Makes sense in my head, but in my application of it, it was wonky. The cradle does not gain any speed when the ball hits it, and the cradle catches the ball near the lowest point of it's fall, where it is really accelerating. These critiques force me to think even more about what I am trying to accomplish/convey. Just because it makes sense in my head, doesn't mean it's good enough. It has to make sense to someone who has no idea what I was thinking or trying to do. Heading back to the drawing board, I updated this shot and am really quite happy with it, as well as what I learned while creating it.



I always thought I was a detail oriented person. Then I started animating.

*PS: I also want to note that this is the first time that we have been able to use "Squash & Stretch". It's exactly what it sounds like. You squash and stretch the ball to really sell the idea of weight, acceleration, deceleration, etc. S&S can also breathe life and personality into your ball. I had a ton of fun with it and it was tough to reign myself in and not turn the thing into a rubber band.*