Category: Animation (Maya)

I had done an upstairs cycle for an older personal project which looked choppy so I wanted to try out any of the staircase movement. I chose ‘Walking Downstairs’ exercise for the body mechanics. Below are my planning, 2D test and keyframe animations.

We started walk cycle with the blocking of key poses for the 1st week and then cleaning up the spline in further weeks.

For the blocking, the 4 main poses were Contact, Down, Passing and Up. I started by fixing my contact poses and then went on to key the middle poses. I had to integrate my learning from weight shift exercise in the process. And also, maintain a uniform motion graph and arcs for each subsequent cycle.

This week we focussed on weight shifts and posing.

To understand the concept of mass and action lines, I sketched some poses. While posing them on the character rig, I made sure to exagerate the action lines and keep the center of mass balanced.

For the weight shift, we made a blocking for week 5 and then spline for next week. Comparing the 1st test blocking and final spline animation, I can see the difference in movement.

The task this week was to fix the errors in blocking and create spline animation.

The first try was not right, particularly the ball motion was easing at each bounce and following asymmetric arcs. To fix that I went back to clean up the ball first and revised the tail accordingly.

The exercise for this week was to learn anticipation, and more enhanced use of overlapping actions, using a ball with a tail.

Bill Tytla – “Any animation consists of anticipation, action and reaction”

Going through the Animator’s Survival Kit, I tried to understand the overlapping action for this exercise.

The task was to work on the blocking only, with movements on each bone for every keyframe. This was slightly complicated to fix timing of the animation. It took multiple revisions to get right. I tried to add anticipations for each jump to relate to the jump height and distance as well.

The 12 principles of animation were introduced in class. While each principle is important, I feel they can be re-arranged in a sequential manner for a step-by-step approach.

So re-organizing the 12 principles according to my understanding –

1. Straight Ahead & Pose-to-Pose : deciding what action requires which method should be the 1st step.
2. Staging : Individual key-frames should be composed well.
3. Timing and Motion : Pose spacing and timing of the primary object should be fixed next.
4. Ease-in and out : To add a sense of acceleration and deceleration at the ends of the actions.
5. Arcs : While fixing the motion path, arcs or straight lines should be decided according to the action.
6. Squash and Stretch : This adds physical characteristic to the object.
7. Anticipation : Every action needs an opposite action before starting to prepare the audience.
8. Follow Through and Overlap : Parts like hair, cloth or tails keep moving after the main body stops and catch up afterwards.
9. Secondary Action : A reaction (similar to a tail) of other objects from the primary objects action.
10. Exaggeration and Appeal : The two can be merged as both are used to give a personality to the action.
11. Solid Drawing : As a 3D animator, it can be considered as the models and textures should be clean.

The second exercise was to learn Follow-through and overlapping principle through a pendulum.

After deciding the main disc timing, I did the keyframes straight ahead for the each pendulum arm with a diminishing amplitudes. Then editing the graphs of each arm to offset slightly from the previous one gave the desired result.

The Bouncing ball animation was the first exercise. With the aim to understand spacing and timing while applying squash and stretch principle.

I planned it using a guideline to denote the exponentially losing energy of the ball, both in height and distance. Once the planning was complete, I moved on to create key frames and edit the graph editor to achieve the desired interpolation.

After the location and rotation in place, I added squash and stretch to the ball for the impacts.