It's been a week, have another blog post :3

First off, it's come to my attention that I've put absolutely no life drawing on this blog o-o Despite it being named, 'life drawing, ramblings, digital animation and much more' tonight will be my third life drawing session since being at university, so I feel I should get on that. I shall, as soon as I get my camera from back home, photograph what I've done and post it up here ^-^

Life drawing is something I need to practice a lot, as I don't feel very confident with drawing the human form yet (fine art and fine art specialisms at A level were quite a struggle for me)  However, practice makes perfect and I've already seen improvement from just my first and second session here, so hopefully this upward curve will continue with my sessions.

Anyways ~
Onto the main subject of this blog post :D This random paper animated cube guy :3
Two weeks ago, we were given the task of animating a cube character jumping from one spot to another and then reacting to something off screen. This character was not allowed to have any feet, fingers or features and this task was to test our ability to convey emotions in simple characters.

I did this task using animation paper and a line tester, much in the way I had done my two 2D ball animations.

I decided my reaction would be for my character to wave. This task also allowed me to practice some of the basic principles of animation we were taught. Over the course of the past couple of weeks, we have been taught some vital principles of animation and have been allowed to check these out through projects such as my heavy and light ball animation. We were taught about the persistance of vision, frame rates and so far have learned 6 of the main principles related to animation.

1. Timing
2. Mass/Weight/Resistance
3. Stretch and Squash (I talked about these three in my bouncing balls post)
and then
4. Anticipation
5. Overlap
6. Emotion

The three principles I will be practicing in this cube animation.

Anticipation is pretty self explanitory, making a character anticipate something, be this walking, jumping or anything else. We were taught never to animate anything from a static, standing position and always make a character anticipate the movement (aka making a character lean back a little before begining to walk forwards)

Overlap is pretty much the opposite of anticipation, making a character move over a finish point a little bit, then making it stop, instead of just putting it into a stopping position to begin with. This is used to help emphasise movement, something considered very important in animation.

Emotion is how a character shows body language, it was explained to us that it is difficult for audiences to empasise with a character that isn't being expressive with body language.
We were told about a technique called the 'sillohette technique' which is used to make sure your characters are being expressive enough, it involves removing colour from an animation in order to see whether you can still tell what is going on from the movement.

Finally, exageration is another way to show Emotion, animation is almost always exaggerated and larger than life asnd without it being this way, it'd be pretty plain and boring.

Anyway, now i've gotten that down, lets talk about what i've done for this task! :D

I actually attempted this task twice, just because my first try I was really, really not happy with. It looked fine when I was working with it on the light box, however, when it came to actually line testing it, it really didn't look right at speed. (I hadn't animated the jump high enough and it ended up just looking not very smooth)

My second attempt (rubbed out most frames and re-did the jump part) I am much more pleased with
You can see this one below

So yush :D Two animations showing a reaction to something off screen o-o I shall see you all in my next blog post :D

A new task - Bouncing Ball Animations - Part 2

Part 2 of my of my bouncing ball animations post, go, go, go!

Similarly to my 2D bouncing ball animations, we were given this task in 3D. The software we used for this task was Autodesks 3D animation software, Maya.
I started off with a rig of a ball, by the name of 'squishy', our task was to animate squishy to seem both light and heavy by applying basic animation principles to it's movement.

Working with bouncing ball animations is a very good way to practice some of the basic principles of animation.I made sure to practice the principles of Stretch and Squash (the ability to stretch and squash an object depending on how fast it is accelerating to better create the illusion of movement), Timing (figuring how fast an object should move in relation to it's environment/the forces exerted on it) and weight (this includes the mass and resistance of the object).

I started off with the 'light' bouncing ball animation of Squishy. I gave the impression of it being light by giving this ball lots of stretch and squash and allowing it to bounce quite high when it hit the ground. This was my first time using any type of 3D software, so it took a little time to get used to the interface, particularly the rigging and keyframing process. I was given the advice to use the inbuilt dope sheet feature to better time this animation, making it a lot easier to time correctly.

My light, maya bouncing animation is shown above. I am, overall quite pleased with this as a first try, however, I think you can see the stretch way too much in the first 'fall' part of the animation. I also think it accelerates a little too slowly to begin with, making it seem like it was 'anticipating' hitting the ground which wouldn't happen in real life circumstances. I think I could have overdone the stretch and squash on the rest of the animation too and despite this being the light ball (would have more stretch and squash) I think putting a little bit less wouldn't harm the animation, making it a little more subtle.

The heavy bouncing ball animation was a little more complex to do as I had to limit my stretch and squash a lot to make it seem more realistic. The animation itself was a lot shorter as well as heavy balls do not bounce a lot, so it was more of a 'hit the ground, bounce a little then roll' sort of thing, instead of a longer sequence like the light ball had.

I tried to incorperate a small amount of roll into this animation (something that I wanted to do in the 2D one) however I don't think I have quite got the grasp of the software enough, yet, to be able to do this effectively. This will be something I will practice for my next 3D project. I did however get a little bit of a roll going at the end, where I made the ball fall onto it's side a little.

As you can see, my heavy ball animation is very short. I do prefer my light ball animation if I were to compare the two, however I think my heavy ball animation has a lot less issues in terms of clearly visible stretch and squash and  the 'anticipation' before the ball hit the ground.

If I were to compare my 2D ball animations with my 3D ones, I think my 2D ones were a little better, this is mainly because I knew what I was doing a little more with the 2D. I hope to improve my skills with using the Maya software and working with 3D in general a lot in this next year. One clear positive, using the 3D software has is that volume isn't so much of a problem. In 2D, particularly with the heavy ball, I found keeping the same volume in the ball at the start and through the stretch and squash was very difficult. By using 3D and rigs, it is much easier to keep the volume of a shape as you are not contantly re-drawing it in order to create the animation.

I have definitely really enjoyed both forms of animation that I have tried so far.

Anyways, hopefully if I can get hold of a camera at some point, I'll stick up some of my life drawings (I have had two sessions of this so far) and I may also be putting up some storyboards from the workshops I have done in those so far. (maybe some reviews of screenings and some personal artwork too?) There's so much I could be putting on here xD But I don't want to clutter it too much with irrelevant stuff, but yeah >.< hopefully I can get some of the stuff mentioned up soon!

Until next blog post I guess,
Char out!

A new task - Bouncing Ball Animations

New blog post, yush!
Okay, here goes! (I Still haven't decided on formal or informal, so you've got a kinda weird hybrid style I guess o-o)

Throughout the last two weeks we have been given a variety of tasks relating to making a ball bounce. The bouncing ball is a very good way to warm up with animation and helped me a lot when practicing timing. We were taught how to animate both on paper and on Autodesk's 3D software, Maya. I created both 'heavy' and 'light' ball animations using both these techniques.

Paper animation is typically done using a peg bar (a small strip of plastic which slots onto a light box, this has ridges in that fit onto paper, helping make sure you are keeping everything in the same place), Animation Paper (A thinner type of paper with holes punched along the bottom, to slot onto a peg bar), A light box (to help you see the drawing on the previous few pieces of paper) and finally a clutch pencil for drawing (a normal pencil could be used for this too, but I find a clutch pencil is more convinent due to there being no need to sharpen it).

After the main animation is done, using the peg bar and the animation paper on a light box, traditional animation needs to be captured before it can be made into a video. This can be done using a line tester (a camera suspended above a lit area) and a program to piece together the images captured. I used Stop Motion Pro for this process, playing both my animations at 25FPS and exporting them as a .WMV file.

As far as the animation itself goes, I found the light ball much easier to animate than the heavy ball. I enjoyed using the squash and stretch for the light ball and found that with the heavy ball (which would probably roll) it was incredibly difficult to maintain the shape of the ball (keeping it just an outline also) and make it seem like it was 'rolling' instead of just sliding along the floor. I think this task would've been much easier if I had some form of patterning on my heavy ball, such as a line around the middle or a star (I could show this rolling).

Below is my light, ball animation. I am quite pleased with the outcome of this one, I think I possibly however, may have used a little too much stretch and squash in some parts (particularly the opening fall of the ball as it is very noticable), could've done with giving it more of an arch on the first bounce and finally I think the last bounce went a little too much to the right, making my ball somewhat look like it had jumped itself, rather than it was reacting to physics.

Secondly my heavy ball, I am less pleased with this, mostly due to the 'rolling' as I mentioned above but I'm also not sure what has happened with the volume here (the ball seems to start off a little larger than it stretches in the first fall part). I'm not so sure about the physics of a heavy object and probably should've gone somewhere and watched things drop, so being honest, I'm not sure how well I have adheared to real life motion with this one, but I don't think it looks too out of place, so I'm going to hope I got this right xD

...annnnd this blog post has turned out to be crazy long o_O So I guess I'll post up and talk about my 3D stuff in a new post to avoid giving you all wall of text syndrome :3 So yee, until next post >:3

Starting out - A morphing animation

Char here, once again :D Being honest, I'm not quite sure how to set this blog out, should it be formal like my A2 media studies? or more familiar like my first post? Either way, I figured it'd be best to start logging the work I've been doing these past two weeks.

So, starting at the begining here. Our first set task was to create a second of a morphing animation, done traditionally on paper. This had to be 12 seconds long and was to be a continuation of animation done by the other members of our class (Alphabetically, AKA, the first person morphed one item into something else then the person behind them alphabetically would do the same until the whole class had created an animation consisting of many morphing objects and characters edited together.

The person before me alphabetically finished her animation with a Carrot. I chose to morph this carrot into a stag and then end with this stag morphing into a rabbit. I don't think my overall piece came out too badly however it wasn't particularly smooth, so I think I may have gotten a little ahead of myself considering how many frames (12) we were initially given to work with. My one second part of the animation can be seen on youtube, below -





Our lecturer edited everyone's pieces together in order, creating a 1 minute animation made by the whole class and below you can see the result! :D




I'll be posting here a lot more regularly now as we've been set quite a lot of tasks since this, especially on the drawing and maya front! :3 So until next time, I guess ~