Post 10

The final task was to create an animation ispired by an olympic sport. With some practice now in animation with all the tasks before this one I felt more confident.

I started by looking at many different reference videos for the sport I chose to animate, weight lifting. There was luckily a lot of helpful resources out on the internet which helped speed up the animation progress alone.

The video below shows the animation in its final form.

Post 9

Like with the obstacle course task a couple weeks back, we have been given another optional task, which was this week a lip sync.
I thought this would be interesting to try out and sounded fun so I gave this task a go.

I chose to do a line from the 90s batman movie from the joker which was "wait till they get a load of me".
It was short and also had an oppertunity to add emotion using max's face manipulation.

I picked up this quiet quick and was able to complete the task in a short amount of time.

The video below shows the final lip sync animation.

Post 8

This week we was given a task to create a Jump animation using the same max chartacter in maya. This innioally felt very daunting as I hadnt had much practice animating anything more than a ball before this. Luckily I was able to find some helpful tutorials on the internet to help get me through this trouble and with a couple of tests to get in the swing of things, I was able to create a decent jump animation.

The video below shows the animation I created, which took me around 2-3 hours to complete.
I could have possibly done it quicker if I knew what I was doing more but because of this disadvantage it took longer than expected.
Still though I am happy with the outcome of the animation.

Post 7

With the walk cycle now complete we was given another small task to complete, nothing too hard just a fun task to help grasp the idea of silhouettes and their important's.
We was given a list of different emotions to work with and with these we had to set the max character up into a stance to suit that emotion.

The first emotion I worked on was a scared look which seemed like a pretty simple emotion to work on at first, though by making the character a silhouette it does make it harder to get across the emotion you have set the character up in.
To help with this task I searched for images of people being scared as well as videos and seeing how people truly react when shocked by something in real time.
I chose to have the hands covering the face as its most people's first reaction to protect this if in danger.
Also by leaning the body backwards gives the character a sense of discomfort and wanting to keep away from something.



The next emotion I chose to work with was happy. Like before, I researched images of happy people and peoples genuine reactions to things that make them happy. As its a silhouette I chose to go with the idea of someone hearing good news for the first time as this is when most people give off a "happy" vibe and it shows in actions.
The picture below shows the final pose I created for this emotion.
I chose to have parts of his body facing upwards or being held that way such as his head and arms to give off a sense of being on top of the world. The jumping look to his post also adds to this idea.


The third emotion I worked on was being shocked. This was one I was looking forward to working on as it seemed easy to get across even with just a sillhouete. I again researched images of this emotion and saw a range of things that would aid in making this emotion in maya.
I started by moving one hand infront of his mouth and the other away from his body to show he wants to keep away from what hes seeing.
I also made his body and head lean backwards to keep with the idea of keeping a distance from something hes seeing.




Finally I worked on a depressed emotion. Again, like with shocked emotion I didnt think this would be too hard to get across with silhouettes alone. By pulling down parts of the body like legs and back it gives the impression of not bein really in the mood to do anything, not even stand straight.

Post 6

Walk cycle animation - edit

Post 5

Week 4 we was given the task of creating a walk cycle using key frames of a walk to help set the character up.

The link bellow takes you to one of the video references I watched to help get my character moving realistically

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vq9A5FD8G5w

Post 4

A secondary task we could do if we wanted was to create an obstacle course for a ball to go through. I thought this would be a nice change from just making a ball bounce and also helps me further gain experience on animating so I created a pretty simple course and started to animate.

The picture below shows the ball going through the course.

New Post 3

Entering the second week at uni for this animation module I started by fixing up my ball animation to make it a little neater and smoother.

Looking at the pictures below shows the difference between the original and the updated versions of the ball animation and how I have been able to take away some un-needed key frames.

Post 2

In my own time at home I created a ball animation and was actually able to make it look kind of convincing. I based it on a basketball so that it would bounce a couple times but for not to long due to the weight, because of the this it was a shorter animation and better for my first time.

I am pretty happy with the outcome, and the picture of the graph above shows the bounces for my animation. Compared to the one last week you can see the difference in length and curves which actually insures in has a bouncing effect.

Post 1

For the first week of Animation, we were given a pretty simple task of animating a ball bounce, or at least to just give it a go. To help with this, we were given a number of different types of balls to record how they bounced on different surfaces, how long they bounced and how many times before they stopped. The video shows included in this post shows the reference footage we recorded to help with the animation.



With this information I went into Maya and created a basic first attempt. The picture shows the Translate Y line for the ball bounce I did, and as you can tell its quiet simple and bland. The animation isn’t actually completed because I just went to a different animation from this, I used this just as a test for the week.