ANIMATOR/ANIMATION RESEARCH AND ANIMATION REFERENCES/INSPIRATION + THUMBNAILED ANIMATION/ANIMATION REFLECTION
Over the duration of assignment 2, I needed to conduct some artist research so I could gather inspiration and learn how they did things. I wanted to look at 3D artists and animators, since I was making 3D animations.
I wanted to look at 3D animators that worked on something that I myself thought was very cool and was super interested in – So I looked at some of the animators that worked on Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse.
The first animator that stuck out to me was Federico Abib. He’s worked on many movies I enjoyed and his Animation reel was very good! He worked as an animator/senior animator on Spider-Verse, as well as on other movies such as The BFG and the Angry Birds Movie 2.
I think his work is very expressive and full of personality, and I wanted to try and have some of that expressiveness in my own work, even thought I’ve not nearly as much experience as him and am just starting out.
https://zerply.com/luizaalaniz
I also looked at Luiza Alaniz, who also worked on Spider-Verse, and also on movies such as the Croods 2, Captain Underpants and Abominable, working as an animator on all of them. She was also an animation intern at Blue Sky Studios in 2016 to improve upon her skills.
I took inspiration from her work, and looking at professionals’ animations helped me reflect on how my movements in my animations should look. It was very cool to look at the work these people have done, especially on movies I very much enjoyed like Spider-Verse and the Captain Underpants movie. I took notes about how they used body language to express emotions without language being needed in some cases, and the weight they put behind the motions in their work.
I also looked into some articles and researched how I would get my emotion and weight behind my animations:
https://www.animationmentor.com/blog/how-to-create-believable-weight-in-animation/
https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:723103/FULLTEXT01.pdf
Then I needed to actually get some references for my animations. I looked at quite a few for my animation conveying emotion, as I couldn’t find something that had exactly what I was looking for, instead I took inspiration from a few different videos for my animation:
I’m going to take inspiration and employ multiple aspects from multiple of these videos.
The animation showcasing weight and movement was far more straight-forward when it came to reference videos. I wanted to do my walker rig jumping over a small object as I thought that would be a pretty good example of weight. So I did a few searches and ended up finding a video that did the job perfectly:
Looking at these videos I thumbnailed out rough early versions of my animation in Krita that I would replicate in Maya. These were done very quickly but allowed me to get a good look at what my animation was going to look like, faster and easier than it would be to make the same type of early animation in Maya.
Making these I was able to block out my animations, and add the key-poses and a few extra. Making these allowed me to be able to time out my animations in Maya, and know what the key-poses looked like before I even went 3D, this made the animation process a little bit easier in the long run, and especially made timing easier on me.
Having all this research done, I felt sufficiently prepared to undertake my own animations, and finally start them.
It took me quite a while to do my animations, as I’m still very rusty at animating in Maya, but I did get them done.
The first one I did was the emotion demonstration animation, and sadly it’s the one I dislike the most out of the 2. I am proud of myself for getting the animation done and I think it does showcase emotion — but the steps are wonky and don’t fit with the movement of my animation in parts, as this was more complicated to do than the little quick exercises I had done previously I struggled a lot in this one. It was very confusing in parts, especially since Maya tries to animate for you if you turn off stepped preview. That means it would look fine in stepped preview mode but then a limb would float away into the next motion as soon as I took it off. I soon realised I needed to add more frames in order to combat this though. The dope sheet was also amazingly helpful making this. In terms of what I’m proud of in this animation though, I am proud of the jump into the rig bringing it’s leg up to shield itself and the little scared shake. I think that does convey the emotion of fright and fear very well. If I had to do this task over again, I’d probably leave out all the exposition I did at the start with the glancing around, as I feel this might’ve done more harm than good – and just added unnecessary time onto the time I spent making it. Over doing this animation though, I’ve learnt so much from working in practice and doing my research into this project. I’m now more proficient in animating in Maya, and I’m more comfortable with it too. I really struggled with animation in Maya as I only really knew 2D animation software before this, and am way more confident working in 2D, so I’m very proud of the progress I’ve made.
Although the weight animation study is the shorter of the two animation. I am very very happy with how this one turned out! I think it’s very smooth and conveys the weight of the rig very well. It’s very simple since it’s just the rig jumping over a cylinder, but doing this after the emotion animation I had gotten more used to animating in Maya, and was much more comfortable and better with the program. I think it looks natural and the leg movements and little step are leaps and bounds better than my attempt in the emotion animation – though that was the best I could do at the time, this really goes to show how I got better the more I did it.