Some more stuff from the animation basics module. I thought I’d publish these before moving on to the acting module starting tomorrow. I might or I might not have the patientce to go back to these later.

Hogan taking a bow. He just finished a virtuoso piano concerto. Standing ovations.

Meet Blake. I might use this character for my final project. He’s a bit weird around the waist. Like he bends in strange ways, so you have to counter-animate a lot, stretch him and stuff. But I like the fact that he doesn’t look like a school rig, like Hogan and Norman.

It was tricky to make the run cycle work in space. Since the movements are so fast, it’s hard to get nice fluid motions. I think I succeeded with the legs and feet. The arms however I have edited and edited, but they just refuse to swing. “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”

Here are some playblasts (unrendered Maya previews) from Animation Basics Week 3, which has been mostly about walk cycles. Meet Norman:

The first assignment was to create a “simple” generic walk cycle, just trying to get everything in place. This required a lot of “the hip bone’s connected to the back bone’s connected to the neck bone”-thinking, much more so than the things you can get away with in 2D. I worked three days with Norman…

We learned the importance of letting the character walk on the spot AND in space when creating a walk cycle. This way you can check things like that the feet have even spacing (so they don’t slide), and the way the movement of the character reads from different distances. I couldn’t resist giving Norman an expression.

The second assignment was to make a “character walk”, i.e. a walk cycle with some characteristics. I ended up with this goofy nerdy funky thing. Meet Basic Guy:

Basic Guy was more stretchy and cartoony than Norman. More suitable for this kind of walk I guess. Again, checking how the cycle reads in space.

At animation school in Viborg we’ve now entered the four week Animation Basics module. Here’s a collection of exercises from the first week.

The quintessential animation exercise: bouncing balls (in spaaaaaaace!). Actually I think it’s important you get this down allright before moving on to less simple stuff.

We had a go at the classic Luxo Jr lamp. The way it works is we get these ready made rigs, and then we get to play with them. So I didn’t model this, but I spent a helluva long time trying to make it shine and glow like a lamp, and that wasn’t even part of the assignment!

We spent two days animating a sack of flour. Yes, you may laugh. We also made it dance…

Meet Hogan. We will work a lot with this rig. He’s a bit funny, like you can see his neck throgh his mouth and stuff. But as I played with him I found him quite expressive. You can make him do just about anything. He’s like a digital puppet. The exercise was to make 7 poses for 7 characteristics/feelings. Can you tell which ones they are?