This week we learned about balance. It's a really important concept that can kill an animation if it's off. They talked more about the center line again. In a previous lecture, we learned that during a walk if you can draw a line straight down from the neck to the ankle that is supporting all of the weight, then the character is in balance. In this lecture they talked about how this center line moves around depending on how much weight is on either feet. If your weight is squarely over both feet, then the center line is from the neck down to the ground between your feet. Additionally, if you want to have a character in balance, the mass of your body must be equal on either side of the center line. If you want a character to move in any direction, you must first put him off balance by putting more of his weight on one side of the center line.

When analyzing reference footage, its helpful to find out where the center line is during the whole movement and to pay attention to how much of the character's mass in on either side. This week we watched some interesting footage of a person picking up a heavy object. The center line moved in the footage, but not in a way that I had expected. What I didn't realize was that when you are carrying an object, that object's mass combines with your mass. Thus in order to maintain balance, if the object is resided on one side of the center line, then you must put more of your body mass on the opposite side in order to compensate for the additional weight. I never thought of it that way, but it makes total sense. That concept is really going to help me in the future. Man! I am learning so much this term!

We continued with our shots this week, taking them from thumbnails to blocking. My thumbnails were fairly bare, so I needed to add a number of keys and breakdowns to get the motion right in my blocking. I also had to make some changes because I only have 4 posts in my thumbnails, but there are 5 posts in the actual set. I totally blew it. I quickly glanced at the set, thought I had it memorized, and a few days later started thumbnailing. I really need to pay closer attention to the set next time. If the set was drastically different, I might have been in trouble. Its a good thing that the set is just five posts and not some complex set with tons of props. Anyway, enjoy the blocking if you can. I'll be smoothing this one out all week and finishing any neccessary revisions by the end of the following week.

Posted by Danny Southard at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This last week's lecture was jam-packed, to put it lightly. The topic was locomotion. It covered vertical motion, horizontal motion, fulcrums, center lines, weight shift and much much more! It was a real eye opener. The idea that everything pivots on fulcrums and the location of the fulcrum can change throughout a movement, was an oh-snap-thats-it moment! Then he went on to explain that there is a center line that runs vertically from top to bottom of your character and in order to stay in balance, the mass of the character must be equal on both sides. The center-line-mass idea really blew my mind. What a really informative lecture!

Now that I have finished my 180 turn shot, we are moving on to our next shot. This time we had another list of possible shots to do of which I chose to animate a character walking/jumping across the tops of four posts. The posts are a lot like telephone poles of differing diameters. This week, I had to shoot my reference and come up with some thumbnails. This assignment should be fun and challenging because we have a new character this time. His name is Stewie and he is essentially the same charcter I used in my first term still poses but without arms. Its the first time we have had the chance to animat a character with an upper body. In our last assignment of the term, starting in week 7, we get to use the same character but that time he will have arms. That will be the most challenging yet. Ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Anyway, enjoy my planning stuff.

Posted by Danny Southard at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I got a really helpful video critique from Victor on Sunday. He pointed out list of things to fix and after fixing them, the shot looks a whole lot better. Well, in my opinion it looks better. The first half doesn't bother me as much. My favorite criticism was about the last leg lift. Victor said it looked like a dog scratching itself. Ha Ha! It really did. Check out my last post and see for yourself.

Anyway, hopefully this is the last or at least the second to last revision for this shot. Frankly, I'm ready to move on. The next assignment, which I will talk about more at the end of the week, involves a full body character (minus arms) who needs to jump across a series of circular platforms (like the tops of telephone poles).

Posted by Danny Southard at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Just a quick update: This week we finished our shots, taking them from blocking all the way to the end. It was a ton of work and I can't say I'm totally satisfied with the end result. I discoved that I really didn't like the slow timing of the first half of the shot. I would have preferred that the timing was a little more varied and snappy. I realized this too late, however, because I had way to many keys and it would be incredibly difficult to try and move them around now. I guess I should have seen this during the blocking phase, where its very easy to adjust the timing.

Anyway, lecture was great this week. They talked about advanced overlapping action and anticipation. Lots of notes.

Posted by Danny Southard at 02:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Week 2 is over and I'm just waiting around for AM to put week 3's lecture up so I can get started. I'm a little worried this coming week, because I have to finish this shot. 200 frames is a lot of frames to connect and polish. It should be a crazy week. Anyway, this last week we learned about basic posing. I have always had a hard time with posing and this weeks lecture gave us some rules and guidelines to making stronger, more readible poses. There was a lot of really good info in this lecture.

This week's assignment was to take our planning thumbnails and block out the shot in Maya. It took me forever to finish. First I copied the poses from my thumbnails, then I tried to adjust them based on the rules that we learned this week. Finally I spent some time moving poses around on the timeline to see if I could improve the timing. I got a lot of good critiques from my fellow students and as a result, I ended up with many revisions. Below is the latest revision.

Tonight Victor will critique my blocking. I think it's awesome that he does the critique the same day that we turned it in. By doing that, he gives us the whole week to work on our shot. And I'm gonna need it. My previous mentor did our critiques on Tues night, so we had 2 less days to incorporate his comments and finish the shot.

Anyway, got to go. The new lecture should be up by now.

Posted by Danny Southard at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)