Through these exercises we’ve been doing over the 7-8 weeks I’ve noticed a very clear improvement in my animation, even through my process gifs!
I found it very beneficial going over the basics again. I just finished a big film from final year and I still had to relearn how to do a basic ball bounce which was very eye opening about how important the basics truly are. A thing I struggle with is clean up so i tried to get most of the animations cleaned up to be a character and to have a consistent form as I have an issue with keeping form in early iterations of the animation. overall i’m very happy with how my animations for this module turned out and I’m looking forward to going back and finishing some of these after submission!
I have been doing walk and run cycles in my spare time for fun so I have a good grasp of this principal, though I wanted to do a bit more of a personality walk for this exercise.
WALK CYCLE
I started off with a cycle of my character Yeouch (Bonk’s sister). I liked it but it was more of a warm up, it was described as “bouncy” which isnt bad but I wanted a bit more of an advanced style.
SPENCER HUNTER WALK CYCLE
i wanted to create a walk with more personality, rather than another basic walk. I used my character Spencer (pictured below)
Mike suggested I push myself and add in a secondary body movement that would happen outside of the loop, kind of every 2 looks Spencer’s guitar bag would slip down and he would pull it up. It took me a while to get this right and I still have a bit to work on for it but when i’m polishing it more ill add it into the loop!
SPENCER WALK
SPENCER WALK ALT
I wanted to brush up on my after effects as I had just gotten my student licence back, I used a background from my final year film to add this walk into and added some effects onto Spencer!
I created a gif through after effects but every render had a pixel/ noise issue on Spencer’s arm and neck
RUN CYCLES
For the run I knew i wanted to do Spencer in a panicked run, with his backpack. I struggled with the run cycle a bit, i think i over complicated it as in class I heard that a run cycle should be on 1s. That threw me off as when I tried to do it in 1s it looked strange but I think I got the hang of it after some practice.
WARM UPS
SPENCER RUN
Here I tried to off set the run to make it look more urgent, though I didn’t like how this turned out.
without the references i struggled with the form and overall design of the sack
SACK WARM UPS
I did some small warm up animations for the sack to get the hang of the form, after that i used a video from TIKTOK of a girl diving as I liked the initial diving idea i did in said warm up!
I used this gif as a reference for the first warm up and then went on to a classic squash and stretch jump
Since I did a dive in my warm up, i was set on creating a more advanced sack animation with that theme! I used a video from TIKTOK of a trained diver which can be seen below (link)
i went through and drew what i thought were the most important frames in the movement for my keyframes, what i noticed is that the movement of the diving board adds a lot to the overall scene. without the recoil and reaction of the diving board the animation looks strange!
FLOUR SACK DIVING
I added extra frames and added the seam on the flour sack for clean up, as well as adding a more defined splash when it dives
WEIGHT PUSH ANIMATION
MY WEIGHT PUSH ANIMATION
I did a quick test of a unmoveable push using toonsquid and my ipad to get the feeling for this kind of animation, as well as work with the character acting of a defeated/ tired give up.
I then moved to krita to animate a bigger and much more defined version of this exercise. Mike pushed against the wall and showed me how in some cases, you end up closer to the wall if you’re putting your whole strength into pushing something that wont move!
i loosely referenced this video as well as mike and then with myself personally acting out the feeling of the movement
i want to add a little more of an exaggerated push at the start to make it look like the character geared up to push this wall!
CLEAN UP
i decided to use Mason as the character for this exercise, based on this illustration!
FINAL PUSH
BASKET BALL THROW
For this exercise I wanted to do a far away shot to show the whole body from the side, I didnt go in with any character in mind but I knew I wanted to add some kind of hair for a secondary action.
I used this video as a reference, watching it in slow motion and mapping out the initial movement i saw, i then went through and cleaned it up with the key poses i though were the most important. I then went in and made the character and movement more solid
I have a habit of doing things a bit too close to the “camera” so I scaled back and zoomed out so that the hoop and ball arc can be seen, which looks better in my opinion
Mike suggested that i create a loop with this animation as the ball rolls back, at this point in the process I didnt know how I’d do that but after creating a quick character and cleaning up the animation tightly, i figured out a simple step back which I think adds a bit of personality to the character !
CLEAN UP
Adding the ponytail worked really well, I have to go through a lot of clean up to get a solid pass which is why I have so many process gifs..!
For this exercise I wanted to animate my character Stacy sitting on a bean bag! I did the actions for this in person and didnt take any videos of it, but physically doing the action gave me a good idea of how she’ move
FIRST PASS
NOTES
mike told me to add another pose so I added her falling into the bean bag as it was just her sitting before
if bean bag cant take her weight she would probably slide instead of just falling
CLEAN UP
ADVANCED CLEAN UP
for this clean up I added a bit more at the start, i wanted to add some personality and have a reason for her to sit down. In this shes waiting for something and sits down to wait, but then falls in ..
2D RIGGED
For this model I couldnt figure out how to remove the auto tween between the keyframes and so it ended up being tweened and a bit animated which confused me
I tried again with a couple of different rigs but I’m still not sure how to remove the tween between frames, it makes my pose to poses harder to do! though i had looked it up and also changed the frames to stop motion they were still being tweened
over all on this it was a bit difficult to figure out but i got the hang of it through playing around, since I don’t have a lot of time this week to go in and learn for this exercise but i’ll do more on my own time!!
Going back to the back to basic ball bounce for this assignment, I noticed that I was struggling already! I had to go and really study what went into the ball bounce!
–looks like the ball is jumping rather than bouncing/ dont go too crazy with the squash and stretch
–Better but make sure to keep the form of the ball! try not to let it shift in size so much
Mike gave me a visualizer of an arc, he told me i was going to fast with my line making for it which could have been the reason I was having trouble figuring it out. He drew the blue arc in this GIF and I noticed I got the hang of it a little better.
im determinded to master this as it is a basic, but in the long run i believe itl’l improve my overall understanding of following a guide/arc line as I animate first and fix arcs after!
MOHO RIGGED BALL BOUNCES
Pink ball being a rig and the blue being a ball that is being deformed
More Advanced
Ball bounce with character acting
I changed the flow and swing of the arm in this with the help of a friend, they said the ball looked like it was being pulled to his hand rather than bouncing back
Doing a bit of a more advanced/ character included ball bounce was a lot of fun! Id like to clean this up in my own time. This exercise helped me with interaction as I had to play around with it a lot more!
