..he's not heavy, he's my puppet

Task 2 -

Stop Motion - Animate a plastercine character bending down, picking up a heavy object and lifting it over their head.

During lecture Number 2, there was another quick test. We created a plastercine biped who had to bend over and lift up a metal screw. It was a good opportunity to alter the way I animated through trying to correct faults that appeared in the previous task. A lot of the models made were top-heavy or had legs too thin to support the upper body - this meant that halfway through the bend to grasp the screw, the model flopped forward wouldn't hold its required position. To counter this, my model had stumpy legs, a squat body and longer arms.

Unfortunately, while this meant it moved and animated well, it wasn't the most attractive of characters. It was encouraging to see that the timing of motion had improved from the 'Bouncing Ball' task but it still had simple faults I wanted to fix for the second attempt at the 'Lifting' task.

'Lift Attempt 1' had the following faults - 

1) Due to the stumpy legs, the range of motion available for the 'bend' was limited - there were no knees and the distance from waist to floor wasn't big enough to show off motion.

2) Energy dissipation - Similar to the ball bounce, at the end of a 'motion' (i.e with the lift, from floor to waist/from waist to over head) energy is implied. This energy has to go somewhere - the usual way for this to be demonstrated in animation is for a smaller 'motion' to be added (i.e a slowing wobble or a small roll after a bounce) This has been missing from both tasks so far.


In the second attempt at the 'Lifting' task, I took in to account both the stability of my model and the human-ness of the less sturdy models and aimed to combine this to end up with a good shaped model that was also easy and stable enough to animate successfully.

...swing swing

Task 2 - Parented Movement

CG - Parent 2 or more objects together and animate motion with delay 
          
          Parenting - Linking a 'child' object to an 'adult' object. The child will then (under various contraints) follow the adult wherever it may go. Many 'children' can be linked to an 'adult'. 'Adults' can also be 'children'. Objects can be parented in any order - but to create longer hierarchies, the order must be correct.

During the lecture the task was to create an arm rig, complete with elbow joint, wrist/hand and fingers. The aim was to parent each object to its predecessor to create a limb that would function as a real arm would. Second to this was to make the arm sway to and fro, implementing a delay on secondary and tertiary sections to give a less robotic looking motion.

Problems creating the arm rig -

1) Parenting - it took several attempts at parenting and re-parenting the objects to get them to be linked in the intended order. Especially when parenting the fingers to the hand, three of the fingers kept getting attached to the first rather than all four fingers being attached as individual objects to the hand.

2) Moving the Pivot Point - on occasion, it was difficult to move the pivot point to the desired location depending on what camera view you are in as the 'grid' isn't visible in all views.

For the task, another simple rig had to be created where motion occurred and a primary action set of a secondary action (in the same way the arm moving created a delayed moving of the hand etc). This task asked for as much imagination as possible when it came to the object being created - suggestions given were balls with tails, so a bounce of the ball would set of a swish of the tail.

Oh my God, was this harder than it needed to be! For this task I decided to make a car move from one point to another - this was basically a cube with four shallow cylinders attached to it for the body and wheels.

...what sound does silence make?

So, Music Class huh?

I don't like classes like this for a few reasons -

1) They get taught to 'animators' not 'musicians' - I did music way before I did art so I find it hard looking at sound from a new angle. This is, however, a personal challenge I have to work on and not a failing in the class :D I need to reteach myself how to analyse music and soundtracks for their companionship with the visual side of things rather than just making music to sound good.

2) Because it's a secondary subject, i.e Animation with a Music side project - I don't think there's enough that I've learnt in regards to sound editing. It was more a case of, here's a computer - go play. I know that I could play around with all sorts of music software but if I don't know what it can do as a basic lesson, I have no chance of making a soundtrack good enough for the MASSIVE amount of marks it gets!

In this class we were taught about soundwaves and pitch, timbre and wavelength etc and how the ranges of these affect the sound produced. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how that has helped me in making a piece of soundtrack as when it comes to it you listen to the sounds you don't LOOK at them. It was interesting to a degree though.

We also created graphic scores - using symbols and shapes to denote what sort of sound you are imagining. To start with this was hard as I'm used to writing 'music' on sheet paper with notes and such but at the end I really liked how it made me think about how to represent a sound VISUALLY. Now, I don't think I ever want to animate in such an abstract way but I definitely think it's helped in terms of creating compatible combinations of sound and image.

Off to play with Ableton now (which I'm not loving and will be reverting to something else when I get home :D)

..the bouncing ball

Task 1 - Bouncing Balls

Stop Motion - Animate a heavy ball, a light ball and a splat.

...After the disastrous first 'bounce attempt' mid-lecture, it gave me a great opportunity to look at WHY it didn't work. When something is executed well, it's hard to tell why - it's good because 'it just is'. But when things fail, it's a lot easier to pick out what it was that didn't work.

'Bounce Attempt 1' didn't work for the following - 

1) The ball moved from point A (release) to point B (contact) at a steady pace

           Problem - The ball wasn't acting under any form of gravity, in real life it should have sped up between A and B due to the weight of the ball combining with gravity.

2) The ball left point B (contact) at the same speed as it connected with point B (contact)

           Problem - Upon contact, movement energy would have been taken away by the 'floor' causing the second arc to have been lower/slower than the previous.

3) The ball stopped abruptly on the final point B (contact) of the last arc

           Problem - The balls energy would have had to go somewhere. It should have had some form of motion to imply the dissipation of energy (i.e. rolling slightly, wobble etc)

 For the task, I animated a light ball along a path and a heavy ball up and down. To try and improve the timing/spacing and to give the illusion of lightness, I animated the 'light ball' in large arcs, bouncing high off the ground and with larger gaps between frames. It seemed to work better than the original attempt, however it felt off slightly in the second arc and having onion-skinning that showed more prior frames than just the previous 1 would have helped.

The heavy ball was animated up and down. From release to contact, the speed increased considerably to imply the action of gravity over a large weight. The movement from contact into the second bounce was considerably lower and slower - this was done as a lot of speed should be lost due to the amount of energy needed to spring a large weight back off the ground. Again, a wider frame-spanning onion-skinner would have been useful, and I was unsure how to end this test - in the end, I opted for a slight roll but something better could have been done.

To do the splat, it started of as what was going to be an up/down bounce - it was as it started 'squashing' in an attempt at 'squash and stretch' that it turned into the splat. The ball was squished down in increments until it was almost flat. Out of the three tasks, this felt the least successful - a real splat would have been less uniform. This ended up being squished out in all directions evenly whereas really it should have had trails 'run' in several random directions at different lengths of 'run'.

CG - Animate a bouncing ball along a path of travel. Implement squash, stretch and rotation.

..so you wanna be a stop-motion animator?

After the first official 'Stop-Motion' lecture, the things learnt are thus :

1) It's not as simple as youtubers make it look

2) It's not a full-time specialism choice

When you tell your lecturer that you want to be a stop-motion animator and their reply is '..so what's your REAL job going to be?' it makes you wonder.

---

Originally, you think that out of the three choices (CG, Stop-Mo and Drawn), Stop-Motion is going to be the easiest to learn and produce - I mean, it's just moving things about and clicking a camera right? Obviously the other two are more complex, when drawing requires artistic pencil skills and CG involves having a computer in your head?

Well that has turned about completely! Guess what? Stop-Motion is HARD! With CG, you learn a handful of button clicks and things will move (albeit not very well!) and the wonder of computer graphics will distract the viewer from the fact that, in reality, your animation is crap! The same goes for drawn animation to an extent, sure it's a bit jerky but do you know how many drawings they've done? Wow!

When it comes to stop motion, your not the only one who assumes it's easy - so the margin for error is gone! If it's only 'moving things about under a camera' the expectation is set pretty high - especially with the rise in homemade stop-motion videos on youtube - you sit and watch thinking 'I could do that!' Also, as everything is stop-motion is 'real' - i.e tangible in the real world - it is expected to look and act real. In CG and drawn animation, it's obvious that it's not real and makes no attempt to allude to such. With stop-motion, it seems that the illusion of life is far greater as the characters and the worlds they interact with ARE real in some sense - so the jump to the idea they have life is far shorter. This has meant that in order for stop-motion to compete with the magic of CG and Drawn animation, the level of 'real-ness' has to be near perfect. 

Who said stop-motion was easy?

...making maya happy

Yes!! I finally get to play with MAYA!!

I've had a fiddle with things like trial versions of 3DSMax and the like but there's just so many buttons! It looks really daunting and scary.

This first lecture made me so happy, Maya can be tamed! Basically, we first of all went over a generic list of things to do before you get started. These little things make Maya happy, and run smoothly - it essentially restores all settings to default (or where necessary, to the most appropriate setting as the dashboard can be customised as can the way actions are performed)

Introducing - The Graph Editor

I love you! Math + Art = Win.. It essentially is a graph with wiggly lines for all paths of movement - XYZ(+/-), rotation and scale too. I found that it just clicked with this. I don't think I'm arty at all to be honest, but I can look at 3 coloured arcs and just 'see' what the motion would be. I found it a lot easier to edit motion by moving graph points than actually moving the 3D object - I don't know if this is really the way to do it though.

Having said that, that was only for the bouncing ball we played with - Things might change as it gets more complicated... we shall see.