Well. I posted the last pass for the ball animation, and there were still some comments. The energy in a ball decelerates from every bounce, therefore, a third boune cannot bounce higher than a second bounce, unless there is some other force (like the ball wanting to jump higher-the thinking man’s ball). Since the assignment […]
So the theme for this week was devestation. A bit depressing, but still a fun theme. I went through a fair amout of sketching to get this one. noticed a lot of students with poses similar to my sketches, characters leaning foreward or on their knees. Certainly this reads. So I went for a […]
Ok. I went back and reviewed the animation. This is the cool thing about animationMentor is that there’s some physics dude in like Brazil that will review your work before you hand it over to your mentor. Everyone can leave comments with everyone else, and everyone is getting better. Anyways, I have reinvestigated the […]
So now that I am a little more familiar with things in Maya, i just want to tell you I am really glad that we have simplified things. This program is a monster, and it’s really about wrangling a monster to get it to do what you want. Earlier I spoke of the graph editor. […]
well. I turn around and two physics guys have given me a tough critique. Mainly, it seems I need to revise the second arc of the ball bounce. Something about the angle of inference is equal to the angle of reflection. If I bonce perpendicular on a platform, the energy will return back to me […]
Ugg. Spent all day today getting this obstacle animation all worked out. I just posted it in the public review setction of the site. It’s taken a lot of time to get these multiplt bounces worked out. I spent some extra work on getting the ball to nail the platform. and then spin in the […]
I’ve really been waiting for this lecture! (haha) Today I watched the AnimationMentor Lecture on Anticipation. Great stuff. Anticipation is the mechanical build up of energy and force. They also mentioned the still images of the photographer Harold Edgerton, where he takes high speed images of an apple getting shot and stuff. Cool images. […]
Today in the animation class I teach, we reviewed some bouncing ball animations in perspective. Perspective and drawing issues are usually the main problems with the animations. There are a lot of spacing and timing issues. These are the main tweaks that people are struggaling with online. I was also doing a discussion on overlapping […]
the review went well on the squishies. Everyone online liked the purple ball, even though we brokes some silly physics laws.Victor caught the double ball thing, and mentioned how crafty that was. If you look at the ball bounce, there are some bounces were it moves only one frame, well it was impossible to get […]
Today I finished and posted the animation of the bounce ball, the heavy ball, and i added a super squishy ball that defies some physics. (but it was fun.) You can view the animation here in the gallery page. We shall see how well this goes over online.I also did some sketches at the Thai […]
I will call call him squishy and he will be my squishy.
Today I worked on the revison for my excited Sut pose, as well as tweaking my bouncing ball animation. Personally, I think some of the animations I’m seeing have too much squash and stretch, and they look very jello-like. I’ve been trying to dodge […]
Today, I’ve been reviewing some of the many (250) critiques on AnimationMentor. I’ve been trying to leave comments here and there also. The amount of info there is overwhelming. With a simple ball bounce, much of this is repettitve, but this will get crazier when the projects become more involved. My critique went well. Victor […]
This evening was our live Q/A session with Victor Navone. Apparently the well of questions has dried up amongst my fellow students as I was able to crack into the que a number of times. I was wondering what Victor meant about shifting the axis tangent line when the bouncing ball was moving. This is […]
The second part of our assignment was to pose another Stu pose. This time our everyman character is excited. I did a small bunch of sketches to represent excited. On the forum at Animation Mentor there was some discussion as to how you can represent such things without a face. Certainly you can, it’s […]
Our first true animation assignment is a ball bouncing. This is a great traidional first assignment. This is also the first few assignments I have my students doing at the Art Institute. Technically, The guys at Animation Mentor havent shown anyone how to animate a ball bounce or much of anything except some basic terminology […]
My first critique with Victor went well. It looks like he went though most of us on Monday. He must have been getting bored fter doing a few of them. He said my pose was great and there wasn’t much to talk about. If anything, he would have wanted to try to push the leg […]
Today I went out and did my outdoor sketching. I went over to the Galleria to drop off a Flash portfolio there and to do some drawing. There were a small handful of people with kids looking at the fountain. I realize that much of my sketches are ‘art; based–probably too much details. I would […]
This weekend I watched our Second video lesson for Animation Mentor. Carlos is the host of this one. The video goes through the main principles of The Illusion Of Life Chapter Three. There is a breif mention of all of them, with some great little video clips. The Basic Principles are the key to every […]
Today was the first Q/A session that I had work. Some of these first attempts had been kind of buggy. I didn’t really have anything to ask Victor that he hadn’t told us already! Hearing some of his adventures at Pixar was inspiring.
Tuesday is a fun class to teach, as it’s a clas I’ve taught at the Art Institute for over 8 quarters– 2D animation principles. I start with some very basic concepts in this class, including how do we go about doing direct inbetweens to a basic bouncing ball animation for homework. Our first class drawing […]
Today, my animation brain switched back to being an instructor. The Art Institute has begun it’s Spring quarter this term, and I begin with two 4 hr classes of Character Design. This is a class I’ve taught for the last few quarters and I’m pretty comfortable with the content and where I need to get […]
Students are getting poses of our character Stu up online. Some student’s have done complete little stories with the character. I’m seeing more and more that there’s a small difference in a good pose and a better pose. Little details that make it click. In this case of stu stomping, just a little more thought […]
Even as I post this, I realize that I could probable plus this pose even more. Interesting camera angles can’t help a weak pose or weak acting.
Today was spent learning controls and moving around in Maya. It’s a great rig, from my limited view, there are some neat little controls where you can adjust and scale that will really help push the acting. for me, a lot of the weight is in the hips and shoulders. Key points here should be […]
