Max Walk Cycle Animation - Week 7

The video above is an improved version of my animatio walk cycle. A couple of weeks ago I atempted the walk cycle for the Max rig after seeing a presentation on Udo and thought I would be able to do it. A week or so after producing my first animation walk cycle I looked at it and showed other in my class what I had done and the feed back I got from it was that it looked too robotic, he doen't have a natural movement or bouce to him.

So Sam set the class the task this week of working on the walk cycle, I felt that now would be the best time to redo the animation. I started from fresh and decided not to open up the original file and work over it. This time I took my time and always looking at my research images and the aniamtion started to look good. One major element I added was the bounce he does while walking this as soon as I added it gave the movement more realism and made it more believable.

My fist walk cycle animation took 30 minutes, this took the whole 3 hour lesson and I feel it shows. I'm really proud of this animation and when showing it to Sam, she helped me with a few tweaks with the footplacment. For example when MAx is about to place his foot down, the heel of his foot will lead and not his toes, because no one does that. also having the feet not be pointing straight forward but however having them point outwards a tiny bit, not too much but enough to give the Max more character in his stance.



Max Jump Animation - Week 6

In this lesson we had a task to animate Max jumping. Getting max to jump I would find to be a really hard task as your trying to give the impression that Max is actually forcing his body to jump and lift himself off the ground to finally land.

When starting this task for the first time I found it kinda easy to to place Max in his key poses, however when I started to play the aniamtion out it looked too fast and blocky.

                               

So what I needed to do was try and get the aniamtion to run smoothly and look belivable which at the moment it doesn't. I felt I also neede him at the start of the animation to prep himself ready for jumping, for example have him either counting down to when he is about to jump or either streching or something just before he jumps in the aniamtion. I also thought I could maybe add something to the end of the aniamtion like him stabling himself after the jump.

I wanted to first get the aniamtion to run smoother, so I used the dope sheet but I struggled adjusting. The main reason was that I didn't key all of the character on every keypoint. This would be a big reminder for me in the future to always key everything. I was also thinking that maybe I could redo the aniamtion because I felt I could possibly make it alot better than before and it would give me a bit more practice.

So I opened up a new scene and began to redo the jump animation. I started with the pre-jump part of the animation and have Max counting down his jump. When redoing the aniamtion I got a better understanding of where to place my keys for example in the first aniamation jump the key poses were around 5 - 7 keys apart, which was one of the reasons why it didn't look so smooth because I wasn't given the rig any time between the key frames to properly move to the next. However with the new one they were sometimes double that.

Another thing I didn't want his jump to be as hight as it was in the previous animation. I thought it might look better as it would look more belivable than before and might actually look like he is lifting himself of the ground. 

Here's the final aniamtion of Max jumping. I am more happier with my new aniamtion than my previous attempts. However If I could go back and change anything it would be to maybe have his count down at the start to be a bit entertaining and have something at the end like for example have him celebrate his jump.

Golf Swing and Dope Sheet - Week 5

This week we were introduced to the dope sheet tool found in Maya. When Sam our teacher first showed us the dope she said this will save ourlives when we start properly animating Max in other things. To help us get a better understanding of the dope sheet we had to animate Max preforming a golf swing. This I had a lot of fun doing as before we as group started to aniamte Max we were all stood up and pretending to swing a golf club. Having played golf quite a lot in my spare time I felt I could approach this animation with a lot of confidence.

However us having to aniamte Max preforming a golf swing and this helping us get a better understanding of the dope we were meant to at first do this animation in three key stages.

the starting poisition, then Max swinging his arms to the far right and then passing his starting point where the ball would be and continuing to swing to his left side. However I started to add other keys between these three key points because I wasn't happy with the animation. One major point I had to keep reminding myself was to key the whole character because if I didn't the dope sheet would be pretty useless to me.

Here's a snapshot of the dope sheet for my golf animation and you can see every strip is a key frame in my animation and in every strip has black boxes and these represent every part of the character Max that you can control. 

When starting to play around with the dope sheet I realised how useful it will be and how much time it can save me to help get my aniamtion looking better. I loved how easy it was to move a key frame where ever you want and this can really help you space out your keys to get the aniamtion looking smooth when it needs to be smootha nd look fast when it needs to be fast. As you can see from the screen shot above the golf animation is rather fast because Max has to gain a lot of speed bfore he hits the ball to get a decent shot.

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.