A very tough week this one! Not only was there polishing up to do on the Parkour wallflip, but also planning out a new animation for the final task of the class! Argh!
Right, so here is my final wallflip animation:
It was well received by Shaun, the main thing to sort out being the slightly too extreme spacing on the body just before Stewie lands. Hopefully I’ll get time to fix that before I have to put my progress reel together at the end of the term.
So, new task!
Being an idiot, I thought I’d go “all out” for the final task of the term. I picked something quite challenging:
Yes, I know. I. am. an. idiot. Well, I’m guessing it will be fun and painful in equal measures! Like I said, I wanted to finish the term with a bang, so what better way to do that than by near killing myself with a near impossible animation!
Here’s the Flipbook planning – there are a ton of poses!
The blocking stage next week is going to take me a very long time!
OK, I’ve been a bit slack with updates, so apologies for the rather terse nature of the next few posts! Let’s start off with the final polished version of my jumping turn animation. This is the revision based on my critique. Fortunately Shaun was pretty happy with it, so there was only one tweak that I really had to do. Here’s the finished animation:
I’m really happy with how it turned out, so I thought I’d pick something fairly challenging for the next assignment: Parkour! And we go to move onto using Stewie (with no arms), so there’s also the spine to contend with now. Here’s the video reference – I bet you can’t spot the seams ;)
The overlays were done in Kinovea, which I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned before, so I’ll link it again. It’s very useful! Using the overlays I put together my Flipbook planning. Annoyingly, I didn’t get time to do all the drawings properly, but hopefully it will give you an idea of what I was after.
And I think that’s about it for this week! Onto Week 5!
Ok new term, new classmates, same mentor, same stress! Thankfully this class, whilst more difficult in terms of the actual animation work we have to produce, isn’t quite as… intense as Class 1. Or at least I hope not. Last class we often had to do planning and the execution of an animation as well as pose sketching and recreating it on Stu! In Class 2, we get 4 weeks to produce a single piece of body mechanics animation, which tends to breakdown as follows:
Week 1 – Video reference and planning
Week 2 – Blocking out the animation
Week 3 – Move out of blocking
Week 4 – Final polish
So we won’t be producing nearly the same volume of work (but I suspect the amount of time we need to spend on it will be more if nothing else). There were quite a few different actions we could animate for this first exercise and I decided to do: ‘Jump up and turn 180 degrees in the air and land/settle’ but put my own ‘spin’ (sorry) on it, so that it wasn’t just happening on the spot. Here, check out the balletic action!
Very graceful I’m sure you’ll agree! Based off that, I decided to try my hand at using Flipbook to block out all my key poses and get a rough idea of the timing for the animation (naughty me, getting ahead of myself!). Now, bear in mind that this is pretty much the first time I’ve ever done 2D animation, combined with the fact that Flipbook can be a little temperamental when it wants to be:
Not too bad, right? Theoretically at least, I ought not to have started timing it out but it was a really useful exercise and it will certainly be of great help when it comes to doing the proper blocking in Maya next week!
These are the sketches I produced off the back of my Flipbook animation:
I annotated it with all the notes I made when studying my video reference – stuff to bear in mind as I’m animating in later weeks. And I also used the key psoes for the jump to get a rough guide of the arcs for the feet whilst in the air:
So, how was my eCritique? Wonderful! Got the all-clear from Shaun. He was very happy I’d decided to start looking at Flipbook for my planning and roughing out the timing for the animation and his main comments revolved around really taking a look at the key poses and really pushing them as far as possible to maximise contrast and visual interest. I also have to try and really make the most of the nice overlapping action I have in the legs during the jump itself.
