Using the Monty Rig or Ultimate Walker Rig, create 2 short animations:
- One should be a study in weight of motion / body mechanics of the character – An action the involves the whole body moving – for example jumping.
- The 2nd animation should be a study in conveying emotion / personality of character – For example scared / happy.
Motion/Body Mechanics (Ballet Spin/Leap)
For my final motion/body mechanics animation, I wanted to animate a ballet dance move/leap. I wanted to do this as I’m interested in how ballet dancers move so gracefully, so I thought why not study it and use it for this assignment.
Research
- 12 principles of animation
To familiarise myself with the 12 principles of animation, I read through this website; https://www.creativebloq.com/advice/understand-the-12-principles-of-animation which was really informative and useful. I kept it open while I was working so I could reference back to it. I found myself constantly referring back to principle number 6 as it really applies to what I hope to achieve in my body mechanics animation study,
- Achieving weight in animation
To help me better understand the physics behind how a ballerina spins on her toes, I used YouTube as a reference and found this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5VgOdgptRg
I’m so glad I found this video as it was so so helpful to me when I was animating the character doing the same spin, I didn’t follow it exactly, for example, the ballerina kicking her leg out for momentum wasn’t necessary, as I wasn’t making my character spin for very long.
To animate the leap I used this video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AI5VPQK7_I this was also a very good video as I was able to study the flow of a ballerina and I was really paying attention to what they were doing with their feet/ankles as I want my animation to be as accurate as possible and the positioning of their feet is a big part of ballet.
- Thumbnails/animatic
I created this short animatic GIF to help visualise what I wanted to Create in Maya. (click image to play GIF)
Animating
For animating this, I looked back at some of the lecture tutorial videos from last semester on keyframes and movements.
Initially, I decided to use the Ultimate Walker Rig, however after a few attempts at animating with this rig, I couldn’t seem to get it right, this is as far as I got;
After a few tries with the ultimate walker rig, I had to switch to the monty rig.
As this animation would be 24fps (frames per second), I decided to use a keyframe every 4 frames. Once I moved my characters to where I wanted it to end up in each of the key frames, Maya did the rest for me and filled in the in-between frames, although I did have to adjust correct a good portion of it.
Final Animation and SyncSketch Link
https://syncsketch.com/pro/#/project/148081/reviews
Emotion/Personality Study (Jump scare)
Research
A lot of the research for this animation was the same material as I used in the previous animation such as the 12 principles of animation and the keyframe studies, but for the physics side of things, I was able to just act the movements out myself to better understand how to create them.
- Thumbnail/animatic
Here is another animatic I made to show what I wanted this animation to look like. (click image to play GIF)
Animating
Much like my research, I used the same animating techniques as I talked about in the last animation, having a key frame every 4 frames and moving the character appropriately.
Sound
For the sound I used a YouTube to WAV converter and just imported the sound through Maya.
Final Animation and SyncSketch Link
https://syncsketch.com/pro/#/project/148081/reviews