Walk Cycle - Week 4

This week we started doing walk cycles. We used the Max model from last week and over the week I had been getting used to all the controls on the model and being able to bring Max to life.

I had done a walk cycle animation back in my second year at college however I can remember that it was very rushed due to time and was aniamted alright. When I looked back on the ainmation I can easily find lots of corrections needed to be done and that I can learn from.

Coming to doing the animation with the Max rig all the tips and tricks that I learnt form college slowly came back to me. At first I started with just animating the legs and once I had all these done, I added a quick simple movement to the arms and head. I also aniamted his eyes blinking so he looked more alive. Here is a video of the animation.

Max Emotions

This week we were introduced to the Max model that we would be using for this term. Our teacher Sm set us a task to help us get used to the model and it would allow us to start fully understand the model before we start getting into the animation tasks in the coming weeks. The task was to put Max into different emotions and animate him into position. I did three different emotions. here's happy:

Then I tried Max as if he had just been surprised as if it's his birthday party.

Finally this is my personal favourite one of Max is him scared out of his mind.

Doing this task I found really helped me with getting a better understanding of Max's controls. I loved playing around with him and really over doing his actions like for the one with him scared.
I felt that after working on this task I would be ready with starting to properly aniamte Max.

Graph Editor, Ghosting and Max introduction - Week 3

In the third we went through the graph editor in Maya. It's used to help tweak your animation to make slight improvements. We tried this with the bouncing ball animation to help us get better understanding of it.

As you can see from this image the graph editor shows each time the ball bounces and lifts from the ground.

We also tried the ghosting tool. This allow us to see the ball in movement and in it's current position, however it also allows us to see where the ball had previously been and where it's going next. This can help us to make improvements by checking is the ball is in the correct position.

After we were told to download a rig from the 11 second club, the rig and model was called Max. Once I downloaded the rig I was able to play around with it and get used to all the handles attached to the model. I found it quite easy to pick and started small for example playing with the face area. Later once I was getting the hang of it I started to animate Max waving, blinking and moving him mouth. After doing these animation movements with Max I feel more confident with the software and feel more prepared starting to get him moving around and doing walk cycles.

Ball Bouncing Animation Week - 2

In our first week we started using the software Maya for animating bouncing balls. This was done to help understand the basics of the software and being able to finally animate something. We were set the task beginning to get stated with our animation and finally finish the animations off for the next lesson. I did find it hard for a while to figure out the timing of the ball and to work what key frame the ball bouces and how many key frames would it take for the ball after to reach it's full potential height. Here are two videos of my animation of the balls bouncing. One of them is based off a light football I used as reference (see video in first blog post for reference) and the second I was trying recreate a ball bouncing like a basket ball.
Here are the videos.

Bouncing Balls - Lesson 1

This week we had our very first animation lesson while at Derby University. We were first given an introduction to the animation side of the software Maya. I found this very helpful as I had used Maya for aniamtion in the past while at college. We got as far as learning about all the many effects you can create and even animating a fully rigged human body, which the animation had to last around 10 seconds. However that was a year ago and I was very greatful that Sam our teacher showed us the basics before getting a head of ourselves.

Once we had been shown the software before starting work, we had a task where we had to do a bit of research. In groups we were given balls for example footballs, tennis balls etc. Then in groups we had to count how many bounces it did, one had to time how long it took and the other video it for reference. I was given the task of videoing the bounces, which I did on my Iphone and then I edited it on I Movie and finally published on my YouTube account. Here's the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euGo8yvWl24

Once we had our results, we finally got to start animating.