Class
This week in the morning class we looked at all the presentations and received feedback on what was good and what could be improved. During my section on Mise-en- scène I was told I could have talked a bit about composition of the shots and made it more visually clear what image I was referencing. They also said that the size of the images and small bullet points looked good.
In the afternoon class Alec discussed the plan for the rest of the semester and what the next assessments entailed. Assessment 2 involves creating two short animations using the Monty Rig, the first is exploring body mechanics and the second is looking into emotions and personality.
Assessment 3 involves creating a 15-30 second animation within a group of 4 to 5 people. We allowed to choose our groups, so I decided to work with Nicole Thompson, Tori Gray, Amber O’Hara and Curtis Girvin. After choosing our groups we watched a video that Sarah made that explained how to design a short film and the pipeline and workflow to keep us on track, this video was very helpful in explaining how to manage time and how to design a simple story.
Homework
On Saturday I met up with my group to discuss what we could do for Assessment 3; this is the Miro boards we all worked on:
We all seem to like the idea of a little ghost character roaming around an old house. We still have not decided on what he will do but we have made a small list labeled story ideas.
For homework we had to watch 3 videos and two playlists explaining how to animate in Maya. The first video explained how to set the frame rate, add key frames and had a little on how to use the dope sheet. The next video explained the graph editor, timing and how to squash and stretch in 3D. The third video showed me how to use the tangent handles in the graph editor and how Maya automatically creates an ease in and out.
After this I watched the first playlist and follow Alec’s instructions on how to animate a bouncing ball. After watching the videos, I learnt a lot about using the graph editor to change how smooth the ball moves and how to edit the easy in and out. I also learnt that changing a point on the graph editor to linear will make it a straight line instead of a curve, this helped when making the ball fall faster.
Overall, I think the animation looks smooth and the timing looks good, I am very proud of my first 3D animation.
The final playlist was about the Orange Rascal and how to move him around. The videos went over how to set key frames, how to move the rig, how to move and duplicate frames and how to make the animation smoother. I found these videos very helpful as they broke the process down into simple steps; block out the movements, add some move frames to make it smoother and tweak till happy. After watching them I realised that 3D animation is the same basic principles as 2D animation, and I feel less intimated.