Last week I animated a bouncing ball, so this week we had to kick it up a notch and animate TWO bouncing balls! Ok maybe its not THAT exciting. This weeks assignment was the "light and heavy ball" assignment. I decided to use a beach ball and a softball for this assignment. Like last week the very first step was to plan out the animation and film some reference. Now I didn't own either type of ball so I found a clip online for the softball and asked Lindsey to film reference of her beach ball for me. You can check out her post about the assignment here if you're interested.
Now that I had my reference and planning done it was time to animate! This assignment was interesting because I've never really put much thought into how I would approach to similar objects of different weights. Unfortunately this past week I was sick, so I didn't get to spend as much time on it as I would've of liked, but overall I think I did a good job. But I'll let you be the judge!
I got some good feedback from my mentor. The big thing he told me to be aware of was my spacing. He said my timing was pretty good, but its my spacing I have to keep an eye out for. Check back here later for the updated assignment!
Here it is, part two of my Animation Mentor assignment. This time you get to see some actual animation!
So our very first animation assignment was the classic Bouncing Ball Animation! I've previously done this assignment before, first in 2D and then again in 3D. Despite this I was still very excited for this animation, and I'm very happy with how it turned out! We had to animate a ball with the same weight as a basketball or as a soccer ball, so I went ahead and grabbed a soccer ball and filmed some reference, which you can see here!
After filming my reference I planned out my animation in my sketchbook. I had an idea as to what I wanted to do before I filmed the reference, so the reason I did my sketch afterwards was so I could take not of the timing I would need.
I went ahead and matched my animation so it was similar to the reference I shot. Then with some help from Chelsea, I was able to get my rotation to look pretty natural thanks to a tip she learned when she was in Class 01. Finally with some great feedback from my Peer Buddy Lorenzo, I ended up with this!
I was quite happy with how this turned out. I feel that this bounce was a lot more realistic than the other ball bounces I had done in the past. During this weeks Critique, my mentor said that he liked the sense of weight I had, but he wanted me to adjust the timing a little bit and also have it so the ball comes to a halt, rather than rolling off screen. I'll be doing a revision to this bounce after I finish this weeks assignment, so I'll update this post with the updated shot!
Here are the other three ball bounces I did previously when I was in the Character Animation program at UCF.
Oh before I forget, I have two more cool things to tell you! The first is I got a comment from one of Animation Mentors founders, Bobby Beck, on my ball bounce! Bobby works for Pixar and only commented on a handful of peoples assignments (including Lindsey's!) so this totally made my day when I saw it!
And the final thing is I just signed up for my next class! I got Jon Collins, who has worked on Star Wars Return of the Sith, Ice Age 2, Wall-E, Up, Toy Story 3, Brave, and more! I'm super excited that I got him because his class filled up super fast!
Alrighty so another week has passed and another assignment is completed! So I'm actually going to be splitting this post into two parts. The first part will focus on the pose assignment this week, and the second one will focus on the actual animation assignment. With that being said, lets get into this weeks assignment!
For this week, our pose had to convey a sense of excitement. One thing my mentor stressed for all of our pose assignments, was to have a reason for why they are feeling that certain emotion. I decided that the reason that Stu, the rig we used, was excited was because he just found out that he got his dream job! Now that I knew what I wanted Stu to feel, I had to get into sketching out some ideas.
Here are the sketches I did. I ended up liking a few of them so I decided to do two poses this week, with the second one being for extra practice. I decided to use pose #1 as my actual assignment and pose #5 as my bonus.
For this pose I really enjoyed the line of action that it had. as you can see I really exaggerated it past my original sketch. Now my feedback for this pose this week was that the feet felt a bit broken. Ray suggested that I take the camera right foot and pose it a little bit more up (ironically like my initial sketch) and then for the camera left leg to not make it as straight.
For the second pose I did, Ray ended up liking it more than the one I turned in for a grade. Isn't hindsight fun! He liked that this pose, along with some of the other ones I drew, weren't as cliched as a standard jumping up in success pose. He liked the fact that by having the character dancing, it was a different approach to the "excited" idea. His one thing of critique was to be careful of the sense of weight this pose had. Fun fact I actually did this pose to see if I could keep my balance this way and I was able to. Guess that means I have a better sense of balance than most. I should keep that in mind when I pose things for now on haha
Well thats it for this post! I'll have a new post up soon with my animation assignment. I'd love to know if you guys want me to show you all the different versions of the assignment before I had my final product, or if you like me just getting to the final pose?
HERE IT IS! MY FIRST REAL ANIMATION MENTOR POST! As you can tell I'm a TAD excited So last week our very assignment was to go out and draw some people. After we finished doing our sketches, we were supposed to go back and pose out the character Stu in Maya. You may remember me talking about posing back in this blogpost. This was actually a tough assignment because I had no clue what my mentor was looking for in our assignments. I knew that they wanted us to use a pose that followed the 12 Principles of Animation, but other than that I was in the dark. Here are the sketches I did, as you can tell they're nothing fancy but rather simple gestures since I just wanted to capture the pose as quickly as possible.
The sketch I circled was the one that I ended up going with. The original sketch was a woman walking holding a water bottle in her hand. She looked like she had some place to get to fast. Now that I knew what pose I wanted, it was time to bring it into Maya. I began to pose Stu so that it looked as close to my sketch as possible. After that I began to exaggerate the Line of Action, mess with the attitude of the pose (I made it more of a power walking type pose) and changed the silhouette so it would read better. After some great feedback from both Chelsea and Nick, I ended up with my final pose. Below is the progression of the pose from start to finish.
As you can see the pose really evolved from what I had originally. I was quite happy with my pose and was pleasantly surprise by my mentors critique on it! He gave me some great advice on making sure that my sketches are clear in regards to what is going on and talking about the attitude of each pose. He liked the one I did, especially the Line of Action, and gave me some great tips to improve it, The first was to move the extended leg slightly closer to the camera. That will make the leg a bit straighter while also making sure it isn't on the same visual plane as the other leg. His other major comment was in regards to the camera right arm. He said that right now it doesn't really flow with the camera left arm, so if I moved it closer to the body (ironically enough closer to how I started) it would flow better. He understood that I was going for a super clear silhouette but explained that you shouldn't force a silhouette just for the sake of a silhouette.
Now that I know what he expects, I can't wait to work on this weeks assignment. We have to do another pose and begin our first animation, a bouncing ball!
As always thanks for reading and enjoy!
~Josh
P.S. OH YEAH my fellow Animation Mentor classmate Lindsey Jones has a blog too, so go ahead and check it out here!
