Arcs

Important too!

I am working on a heavy object lift for a character now. To get the sense of weight.

One thing looked wrong.. But I couldn't find out. Then I remembered shawn kelly's webinar. Arcs!

So I looked around then found something wrong with the lift. Then I looked at the butt.. ANd there it was!

The arc of it going up was messed up. Before I just went down then up. It was weird. Then I watched my reference that the butt gets a little bit lower and goes towards the box. That little thing changed a ton! Now I am going to have to look for different places and watch out for arcs now..

Having tons of fun blocking it out! It helps out a ton!

Rig problems?

Not sure if it is my rig or not. But when I rotate my rig past 90 degrees it gets messed up and like spazzes out...

I'm going to try out a proffesionally made rig to see if it is any better.

But I would be way to much tweaking if I had to fix all that.

Who said animation was easy? lol

Learning by trial and error

Siiinnccceee I am kind of learning by myself I am learning a ton from my mistakes.

First off it was with the planning. Second was with the video reference. And I figured out the new one. Its not really the animation part. More of the technical issue.

I blocked out the poses in Maya to get the timing right with no inbetweens. But when I added inbetweens. (flattening out the curves instead of stepped and clamped) A ton of deformation appears. Like the character was turning around and since I was rotating on the global control it was hard to get the rotation right and stuff. Just yea looks like a big mess now.

Anyways I am going to try to fix this and see what happens. If it doesn't turn out as good as I wanted. I am going toooo

Still block out the animation key poses. Then just go key to key on it.

When I make the key poses I am going to write them down on wordpad to see what parts I might need to fix late and which keys to keep.

After that I'll see what happens.

Blocking out animation

Is a HUUGE difference.

Before I thought that it wouldn't be a big difference but it is.

I got a way for Maya to not make any inbetweens so I can just go pose to pose.

I got around 300 frames worth of poses today! Well its like 15 poses but I got the timing and stuff for it right...hopefully.. Gonna take a look at it tomorrow.

But ya its a serious improvement I think and it saves a lot of time. Another thing that helped a lot is that I spent one whole day planning. (Well I played brawl too) But I knew what type of character I wanted and everything.

It was sooo worth doing that.

So tomorrow if I have time I am going to add more poses. More inbetween poses, and see if it is better. Then after that, gonna smooth it out and mess with the curves etc.

My planned out new animation!

After not planning out the animation. It inspired me to plan one out and see how helpful it is.

So this is what I wrote out on a word pad....

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Turn around

Someone is calling the name of the ball. He turns the other way to look and realizes the person isn't on that side. So then he goes to the other side to look. His left foot is planted on the ground and the right leg swings over for the last turn. The feet is stationary when he looked the wrong way.

This character is comfy and very "cool". He is just turning around because he heard someone calling his name and he is curious who is calling. Like you are waiting in line and then you hear your name.

Before he turns around he is patiently waiting in line looking around. After he turns around a ball is thrown at him and he stumbles back. After that he stares at a the ball and then he looks at the person that threw it at him all serious. He knows who throws it because the person that threw it was right there. So he doesn't look around. Now at this moment he is mad.

Then he is about to kick the ball. Anticipate it like he is gonna kick it hard. But then he lightly kicks it with his toe.

Then the ball roll of the scene.

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I tried to get everything that was needed to make this animation good into this description of it.

Now I know why the top animators don't go to the computer/drawing(except doodle key poses) until they know what they want.

More on anticipation and planning out animations

Ok well I am going to give up on my soccer kick animation because I realized I really screwed things up.

First of all... I didn't plan it out at ALL.. Which is a big mistake I won't make again... But hey you learn from your mistakes and I am ready to work on my new animation anyways. Second of all. I didn't work on my anticipation at all. I found a website a while ago (danimating.com) and I found a person hitting a tennis racket.

What I realized. This guy probably did a ton of studying references and took videos of himself before he made this animation. And furthermore you can tell what type of person it is. He is a pro because the ease of him serving and the power he had in it showed it. And after the action he landed with ease and shuffled his feet to get the return hit.

Another thing I realized was that. There are more frames for the anticipation instead of the actualy swing of the racket.

Actually when he swings the racket it goes in a few frames. To show how fast it is going, and to show power. What I made a mistake on was actually making the frames not skip when kicking the leg. I had it evenly spaced out as I can. But I realized it doesn't matter if you have the anticipation right.

And there was a slight breaking of the arm when he was serving but went by to fast that you cant tell.

Also another thing that I realized that there was a Double X. The crossing of the elbow.
(From the Animator's Survival Kit)

So rule of thumb. Work on anticipation a lot. Don't make the animation to slow (my problem) Fly by the movement. And prepare your animation!

Claps

After finding a snack to eat I sat down and decided to turn on the tv. This is when I saw the new Nickelodeon show called like "Dance on the sunset." This is the type of show that will only have on season *cough**cough*

Anyways one thing that I realized was the people clapping to the beat. I don't know how I came up to think of animation.. I guess its just getting into my head! Being very observant. Anyways...

What I realized was the the claps seem to be all anticipation! Because you never see the hands make contact. (well depends on the type of clap and timing you want.) But you never really see the hands touching each other completely. Probably just for one frame then they are apart. But the clap isn't all that fast. Just the anticipation for it lasts a long time.

The wrists leads when your hands are moving apart to prepare the clap. And your wrist usually leads when your hands are going together! So overlapping action!

But ofcourse anything can change. Break the rules!