I’ve moved my blog to adamsanimation.posterous.com.

Tumblr was giving me uploading problems.

Alrighty, here’s my 2nd pass at blocking out my balancing act shot.  I changed a few poses at the beginning and worked on posing out the hands better and tweaking the timing and spacing overall.  Next week’s assignment will be to polish it up and finalize it. And if you’ll permit me, I’d like to get a little more technical than usual…

Polishing an animation includes converting it from “stepped” mode to “splines”.  What that means in layman’s terms is basically that I will convert it from the choppy look to the smooth look and adjust all the keyframes in the Graph Editor to make the transition look right.  The computer will always want to create in-between frames that you don’t want because it’s doing it all mathematically, so you have to go in after converting it to splines and adjust things to make the movement read well.  

Below are screen shots of what a section of animation looks like in Stepped Mode and then Spline mode in the Graph Editor.  This is just one segment in time of Stewie’s pelvis control along the y-axis in 3D space.  In Stepped mode, the keyframes (black dots) are connected by straight lines that do not change their values between each key frame.  This gives the animation a choppy look, and the reason for starting out this way is so that you can focus on the main poses that you want you character to hit along the animation so that you can easily convey to the audience where, when and how the character is doing an action.   It forms the foundation of the final animation.  When you convert to Spline mode, you are taking all the straight lines and converting them to curves.  This gives you “in-between” frames along those curves, from one keyframe to the next.  It is these “in-betweens” that you have to finesse and mold to make the animation play well, because the computer by default will create a mathematically-perfect curve between each keyframe, and if you left it like that, the animation would be too even and unnaturally smooth.  Life has a nervous system, so you have to adjust the curves here and there to make Stewie look alive.

This was a tough one.  I had a helluva time tracking the ball movements precisely with the feet.  I have to not only rotate the ball in space to match how far the feet are moving it, but then I have to move the ball itself left or right or forward or backward just enough to match the amount of rotation so that the ball doesn’t look like it’s sliding on the ground.  Very difficult!  I hope I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew with this one…

Here are my planning sketches for the final assignment for this term.  I chose to do a guy balancing on a ball.  Found some good video reference on YouTube, so I basically sketched out what the acrobat did.  And below the sketches is my final version of Drunk Stewie.

And now here’s my second pass at Drunk Stewie.  I’ve rendered out the animation at full speed, which smooths it out compared to the first blocking pass I did last week.  This allows me to go in and refine all the movements and make sure body parts move with correct speed and a sense of weight and spacing.  Next week will be the final animation after I make tweaks based on my instructor’s feedback on this version.

Here’s my first blocking pass at Drunk Stewie.  Since we had to cap our animations at 200 frames, I wasn’t able to get the roll over at the end of the fall that I had planned for in my sketches, so I just shortened it to a basic landing.  I’m still not quite sure the fall works, but overall I’m pretty satisfied with the first pass.  We’ll see what the instructor says.

Okay, final week on the “about face” animation, and here is the (hopefully) polished and finished version.  Also I wanted to show you what I’m working on next.  Here are my planning sketches for a drunk stumble that I’m using a full body (without arms) for.  Why no arms?  Because everything starts with the core — the hips — and works out from there.  So they started us off with Ballie (hips and legs only), and now we move onto the Stewie model with a torso, head, hips and legs.  And then the third and final animation for this term will be Stewie with arms.  Baby steps…

Week 2 out of 3 in creating our first of three animations for this term.  This week focuses on the 2nd pass at “blocking” out the animation.  Taking our mentor’s notes, we have to refine the animation, fix any problems where the movements aren’t reading properly, adjust timing and spacing and weight issues, etc.  My main critique from last week was that Ballie was stomping instead of marching, and the foot that he pivots on to make the about face needed to be brought in closer to the other foot.  The feet also needed to be brought closer together throughout the entire animation for a more natural stance.  Here’s the 2nd pass at the animation.  Compare it to the previous week’s pass and see if it looks better: