Category: animation

During this session, we have been introduced 12 principles of animation:

1. timing and spacing
2. anticipation
3. appeal
4. squash and stretch
5. exaggeration (pushing the motion)
6. overlapping ( e.g. moving hairs, jewelleries)
7. arcs ( for animation looks organic instead of robotic)
8. slow in and slow out
9. staging
10. straiht ahead and pose to pose
11. secondary action (how the secondary action giving meaning to the shot)
12. solid drawing

We have been concentrated on making overlapping animation through the pendulum, as there are mainly three parts of the pendulum and they will be working in different time:

As I noticed, the more frequent pendulum is shaking the less strength it will get in the end, and the slower it will become in the end with more key frames. Also, the energy of the secondary and third pendulum main joints should always be transferred by their primary joint on the top, they should.t be more powerful by the latter.

My working interface in Maya:

At the end of the session, I also developed my bouncing ball animation from the first week by fixing some squash and stretch issues:

During the weekend, I have planned out my own pendulum animation through sketch and supportive videos:

Also, I have been to Tate Britain to do some life drawings:

In this week’s session, George taught us some basic knowledge about animating a bouncing ball in Maya and how to refer to the rigged ball file in it after setting up a file project. By following his demonstration, I have finished a rough version in his class to understand the pipeline of keying the ball in spline, and the way to create a quick selection of all the NURBS curves.

There are some knowledge points I found were interesting in the session:

• animation in Maya should be always 24 frames per second, games can be 25 frames per second.
• animation is about 60% of planning, and 40% of doing the work.
• we should keep our animation simple and stupid during practive, as K.I.S.S.
• there are two useful YouTubers for animators, one is called ‘3D Animation Internship., and another one is called ‘Frame by Frame Animation’.

• animation should start with referencing my rigged file, in case there will be changed to the model and the rig.
• curve 1 explanation:

• curve 2 explanation:

• the gizmo in Maya always shows X, Y, and Z directions, meanwhile, they are in red, green and blue.

• when we are animating something, always animate it with x, y, z order.

• work in spline with arc is important for the bouncing ball, and work in blocking for the character animation.
• rotation of the ball after timing and spacing, and then adding squash and stretch in the end.
• never touch the main controller during animating of a rigged object.

• can set quick selection or bottom for keying the ball rigs.

To plan out this week’s prep– plan the animating bouncing ball from left-hand side view in Maya, with 100 frames and 24 frames per second. I downloaded Kinovea and did some research on how to use it, using the references I grabbed online to assist my animating work.

Below is the reference I used for my planning and the demonstration of using Kinovea.

Here is the short bouncing tennis ball I cropped in Kinovea:

I made marks on every low and high point when the tennis ball is reaching in this video to plan out the arc of its movement:

Here are two more videos I learnt before I move onto maya with the graph I made above:

Eventually, here is my final outcome of the bouncing ball referring to the bouncing tennis video above, and my working interface from Maya: