Our assignments are due on Sundays at 3pm (noon PST). I submitted my final pose (had to make two poses showing motion) at 2:59 Oo. Not from a lack of effort. I've been working as much as possible all week and simply ran out of time. I spent way too long on my Stella animation. Splining = moving your animation from the 'blocking' stage to a finished/polished stage. It refers to the interpolation between the keys, see the pictures below of the graph editor in Maya (the graph editor is a visual representation of the keys and how the animation moves between them...think of it like a graph in algebra class. Time is horizontally along the bottom and the value of the key is vertically along the side)
Changing from blocking to splines can be very unpredictable. The computer might not have the same idea that you have, and if you were not detailed enough in your blocking, you may suddenly find that now you have sliding feet, things poking through the ground, some strange hitches and really floaty movement. The whole challenge is to block as intelligently as possible, and then move to splines one piece at a time (For example, with Stella, I started with her hips, converted them and then played with the splines until I was happy with the motion, the easing in and out, etc. Since the hips affect every other part of the body, it's a logical place to start. Had I started with the legs or the torso, and then changed the hips, I'd have to go back to the other parts and fix them). It's challenging for sure, but I'm definitely getting faster at it.
So without blabbing too much, here's my final Stella Vanilla Walk (Stella Vanilla...haha)!
And the two poses I created (I am anxious to revise these, I'm not very pleased with my work here)
and finally just for kicks...this is a screenshot of the graph editor for Stella's keys Oo
And now...it's time to relax! The next FOUR weeks are going to be spent animating Sloan (which is the new dog character!) The thought of animating four legs is.....exciting? Time for a beer!
I just completed my blocking pass for Stella's first walk! We had the option of doing a vanilla type walk, or a personality walk. I feel that moving from Ballie to Stella is a huge jump and I didn't want to over-commit myself, therefore I chose to stick with a vanilla walk. Ballie had around 4 controls (with some sub-controls on the feet)...Stella has roughly 44 (with sub controls on the feet and hands)...needless to say it was intimidating to get started with her.
But using what I have learned so far from AM, I made my way through. It seems that no matter the complexity of the character, with proper planning and execution, it's all manageable. You're using the same theories and process, just on a larger scale. I approached Stella in a layered manner. Actually hiding her arms and head, dealing with only her legs and torso the start with. Got that looking right, unhid the head and animated that, and finished with the arms. Arms and a head were new territory for sure, but it was a lot of fun. I am happy with how my first attempt has come out and am really looking forward to my E-critique. Next week, it's on to splining (finishing off this animation, resulting some nice smooth motion!).
Class 2 begins tomorrow for me. Midnight class with mentor Kevin Andrus. Kevin is a Dreamworks animator who has worked on How to Train Your Dragon (I really enjoyed this movie!) and is currently working on How to Train Your Dragon 2! I spent a lot of time looking through the available mentors and chose Kevin based on the critiques he gave other students. He seemed to really have an interest in their work and he gave very thorough critiques. I received my 'welcome to Class 2' email from Kevin and I am confident that I made the right choice. I'm really looking forward to getting into it!
Our syllabus has been available for about a week now. I checked it out and was preparing for my new assignments. We were to start out with Ballie (the ball with legs) again and do some more advanced motions. Continuing in the thread of building on the previous assignment, really driving these fundamentals home. For the past few months AM has been advertising their new TRIBE set of rigs that would be coming out in Spring of '13. Well they released them yesterday and I was surprised to find that I had access to them (they limit your access based on your class and what you need to use/don't need to use). I downloaded them all and messed around. They are a ton of fun, but very overwhelming...going from Ballie's 3 controls to 20+! I figured they were just giving them all to us because they hyped them so much, but I wouldn't be using them until class 3 or 4.
Today I find a new syllabus has been released. No more ballie. He's out the door. I start right out of the gate using Stella (the female rig), then progress to Sloan (the DOG rig!) and then to Stan (the giant guy!). I am a little shaken/overwhelmed at the idea of moving from Ballie to a full bodied rig, in what seems like a very short time. I think it's akin to the feeling I had when dad took my training wheels off of my bike. AM has been smart and thoughtful to this point, and I am incredibly happy with my progress to date, so I have to believe there is strong logic behind dropping ballie from class 2 and inserting the TRIBE characters. All of the assignments (save the last one) deal with different walk cycles. I have 12 weeks of walk cycles to look forward to! I am anxious and interested to see how all of this plays out, and excited to become a stronger animator.
Sorry to leave you all hanging! Despite popular belief, I still exist. Things progressed with Animation Mentor extremely fast after my last post. I've learned a lot and come a long way. Unfortunately it did not leave me with as much time as I thought I would have to update this blog. I feel that trying to keep up with every assignment is going to be too time consuming, so I will be posting more general things from here on out. But I'm always happy to answer questions.
Today at 3pm, the AM site shut down, signalling the official end of Class 1. Earlier this afternoon I had to upload my progress reel. My new mentor in Class 2 will be able to view the progress real to get a feel for where I am at. I of course, will share this progress reel with you all. (keep reading!)
My 'eye for animation' has been improving slowly but steadily. So slowly that I hadn't even noticed. It was made apparent when looking back on my older work, and being thoroughly embarrassed. I was noticing things now so clearly that I struggled to understand just a short month ago. I would watch my bouncing ball and think 'Oh gawd, the spacing! The timing! What was I thinking!? There's no weight!". The school has done an excellent job of nurturing my skills by systematically building on each assignment with the next. I loved every minute of it! I knew it was going to take a lot of time, but even I was surprised at just how much. I told myself I would work hard, and I'd be the best that I could be. At the end of class 1, now looking back, I feel confident that I reached my goal. Not that it was free. My social life is non existent, and I don't get much sleep...but it's temporary right? Now on to Class 2!
My progress reel from Class 1:
Our last assignment was a "Walk with personality". I chose to do a zombie-style walk. This was the most difficult and time consuming assignment yet. When I finally finished it and had a day or two to myself, I put the adrenaline dump to use and modified the AM "Ballie" rig (we are provided rigs to do our assignments, and Ballie is what we used for this one), to look a little more zombie-like. It was a lot of fun, and worked well with my animation!
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.*
This week's assignment, which I just submitted (woo!) was to create an animation between 60-120 frames that showed a heavy ball, and a considerably lighter ball bouncing and then coming to a rest.
Amidst a thick veil of ball jokes, I was eventually able to create an animation that I am satisfied with. Remembering my original ball bounce, I made sure not to repeat any previous mistakes. However, I'm anxious to see my mentor's e-critique tonight. I'm anxious to find out what I've done incorrectly, or how I can improve it, as that's where the real learning happens.
Part of our assignment stressed the importance of planning. I created planning sketch of what I was going to do. Our mentor required us to email him for permission to create an animation that contained 'ball on ball' or 'balls to the wall' action, rather than just the balls bouncing alone. I was approved to go ahead with my plan to have the light ball bounce off of the heavy ball. I was happy to hear this, as I want to make each assignment as challenging for myself as possible.
Here is my planning sketch (complete with 'Steve is trying to solve a problem' doodles).
My idea was to have the bowling ball roll slowly off of a platform and come to a stop in a relatively short distance. Since the bowling ball has more mass, it would take it a little bit longer to 'build up steam'. It will also take longer to stop completely, rolling every so slightly. Like if you were to put a bowling ball on the floor and push it forward with one finger.
The other ball was one of those rubber/vinyl balls that I found in one of the aisles at Walmart. You've all seen them. One of these guys:
That ball was going to roll off a similar ramp. It would pick up speed a bit faster as it had a lot less mass. Both balls would fall at the same rate of speed, as gravity affects both of them the same no matter the weight. Air resistance comes into play very slightly with the light ball, but for the most part they are dragged down at the same speed. The rubber ball lands first, as it fell from a lesser height and rolled off first. That ball would bounce (my first go at this made it look like a basketball, it bounced much too hard and fast), and then hit the bowling ball. The bowling ball was still rolling to the right at this point, and because of it's huge mass/inertia/momentum compared to the rubber ball, it transfers quite a bit of forward motion to the rubber ball, which heads off in the opposite direction after contact.
Both balls would settle to a gradual stop. Fini!
Here is the resulting video. Glad it's done! I wonder if I'll look back on the hours spent making these balls bounce, and laugh. Let's hope so!
PS: While looking for an image of some Walmart balls, I found this on google images. You don't find an image like this and NOT share it.
Yesterday I finished revising my original basketball bounce animation, based on critiques I received from my mentor. I am an incredibly detail oriented person and a perfectionist. My girlfriend can verify this. So when I submitted my original ball bounce, I thought it was already pretty awesome. I am not so ignorant as to think it was perfect, but it was pretty darn good. I had gone over every detail! Or so I thought...
It was after my critique that I realized, learning animation, is like learning another language. I can learn all the vocab words, the theories, etc yet that does not guarantee that I will produce excellent animation. I took spanish in highschool, and I could speak it to some extent. Yet put me in front of a native spanish speaking person, and they'd laugh me out of the room. My pronunciation was horrible, my cadence was all wrong. Sure I was saying spanish words, but I wasn't speaking spanish. The same for animation! I am realizing that the key to animation is to immerse yourself in it. Not unlike immersing yourself in a foreign speaking culture in order to become fluent in the language. With animation, I am not developing my speech but I am developing my eye.
Even though I poured over my original animation, frame by frame, for hours on end, with success (I found and fixed a lot of errors I had overlooked initially), I simply was not looking for the right thing. My eye could not recognize things that were blatantly obvious to an experienced animator. My mentor pointed some of these out, which became obvious to me. This was the biggest, most important lesson I have learned so far. As much as I want and need to learn the theories and concepts of animation, I need to develop my 'eye for animation'. I need to let go of any preconceived notions that I have and learn to look at the animation in a different light. With my original ball bounce, it just didn't 'feel right'. I couldn't identify what was causing it, as I had animated everything to my satisfaction and gone over it time and time again, it was all correct...so the feeling must just be something I dreamed up in my head. I showed other people and they thought it looked great.
No more will I ignore an animation that doesn't 'feel right'. That feeling IS animation. It's the difference between good and bad animation. Sometimes, it can be the slightest change, a single frame even, that really brings the animation from 'ick' to 'yes!'.
I belated the point a bit here, but I am excited about it. It is a fundamental breakthrough in my very literal mind and a giant step towards immersing myself in my animation. See my original and updated ball bounce videos, as well as a description of the changes I made after the break!
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