So this week is the first assignment that will take place over two weeks. The assignment called for a plain vanilla walk. So blocking is when you pick certain important frames and pose them out to get a good sense of timing before you smooth out the animation later.
For the pose this week we had to show physical strength. Came up with this...
Yo! So It's been crazy this last few weeks trying to get these assignments done in time for the deadline and also satisfy my demands of myself. The last couple weeks I've gone right up to the deadline. This week I really pushed myself, and even planned out my shot a week in advance.
It's a good thing I did that because having a good plan from the beginning saved my butt. I spent so much time doing and redoing the tail in this animation that I wouldn't have had time to plan and re plan the shot and timing like I have in the previous weeks. There is really no good way to put it besides saying I started animating on Monday and played with it all week long and still barely made the deadline. I stayed up till 6am Sunday got 3 hours of sleep, then woke up at 9am to get a few more hours on it before the deadline.
And after all that I still wasn't happy with it. :(
I think I realized I may never be 100% done with an animation and I might just need to learn to be ok with that. In time...
I fully expect to revisit this assignment over the next week or two. So look forward to some revisions of this popping up over the next couple weeks.
Now onto... pictures!
So last week I posted my graph editor for the pendulum and I kinda liked the progression so I'm going to try and post them every week just to see the craziness! And this is only animating most of the shot in profile. This will easily become 2 times as messy when we start going into more 3d based animations. FUN!
This week really showed me how we are slowly ramping up the complexity in the shots we are doing week to week. For example I took two pictures from Maya comparing my graph editor from my week2 bouncing ball assignment and my week 7 Zorro assignment.
Very clear to read this one! Green line is the vertical motion showing the up/down movement of the ball. Blue shows the horizontal or momentum of the ball slowly easing down over time. Finally the red line just shows the general rotation of the ball. Well that's not so bad at all! Animation is easy! ^_^
What is this I don't even....
I must say I liked the increase in difficulty and am really looking forward to my critique this week.
I decided to go with simple again this week and decided to make my pendulum just do a slight Z action. At that point it became obvious my pendulum needed to be Zorro (Duh!). Also Zorro always gets away on horse so I had to add a horse (Duh!). Finally I added a little cheesy fire effect to sort of replicate the scene in Mask of Zorro where he lights the hillside on fire in a giant Z.
Planning....
Fairly simple planning.
By the time I got to the Z idea I had gone through about 3 Ideas. The first was just to move the pendulum from left to right which was oh so boring. Second I was going to try and have him swatting at a fly, problem with that idea was.... well I'm not really sure what happened I kind of just wanted to put a bit more story or emotion into my shot. Soooooo I came up with a whole dance routine between two different pendulums dancing to some salsa music. The idea was great it had some emotion some fun and interesting ideas, however I quickly realized to get the types of motion and quality I would require from myself that this project would take at least 2 weeks to plan and execute properly. So I scrapped in favor of my simple Z.
This week really just about pushed me to my limits. I had numerous problems throughout planning and just getting enough time in the week to do my assignments.
The final product.
My planning went through many phases.
This one was far too elaborate for the frame limit I got. Ended up being around 300 frames when I started timing it. The assignment called for no more than 120 so I ended up scrapping it.
I could have potentially pulled this one off but I was having all sorts of trouble getting the correct weight and timing while on the ramp so I wanted to spend as little time on the ramp as possible.
For my pose this week I decided not to spend too much time on since 90% of my grade is the animation. Experimented with the introverted devastation as well as the overly dramatic to the slightly funny. #8 just had the top of his ice cream cone fall to the ground.... how sad :(
Final Product:
Overall this week had me stay up far far too late. But I'm very happy with my critique and grade so it was totally worth it!
