Maya 2

My second session at Maya, again working on the bouncing ball but this time into more detail on the actual principles and approaches to rigging and control the animation’s fluid movement .  First we looked on how to construct a squash effect to the ball without it moving from its pivot point.  At this point I am still getting my head around the controls and what does what.  Maya is still like no other programme I have used before, I thought I would be able to at least compare it to Photoshop but the overall setup and principles are not the same.  Within the first part of the lecture we looked into parenting and how to constrain two objects together.  A few times I had to ask James go over a few things as I’d just missed out what was said or some things just weren’t sinking in.  Most of the time, I just had trouble finding where certain windows were such as the set driver.  But finally I was able to complete the first session of the ball to squash and stretch.  I could see how the rigging of the ball to make the ball squash and stretch is referred to Disney’s principles; therefore my 2D skills still apply while animating on Maya, you just have to approach it a differnet way.

We then looked at the swinging arm, we were able to download a model of a basic arm from the mle that already had the pivot points and constrained points set for us.  Using our knowledge from the bouncing ball, we had to animate the arm swinging from side to side, using the graph editor to create a flowing loop of the waving arm.  I am still not used to the graph and the way to set key frames, as Maya inbetweens everything for you and it is all calculating the number or frames where as last year most of my animation was not key framed so it is something I simply need to overcome.  I am still a little lost with learning new aspects of Maya but am indeed finding it very interesting and now and mind blown how all the full length feature films are done considering I am still having trouble just bouncing a ball.  I am determined to continue attending the lectures and hope that I would have understood it enough to at least make a small sequence to put in my show reel.

2D Specialist Option Module BEGINS!

At the end of the week our 2D module had finally began with Matthew Gravelle.  Overall it was just a 'this is what you are gonna be doing' lesson, so we were given our semester planner and basically roughly going over it.
It felt good to be finally starting back on 2D again, I didnt really do any 2D animation over the summer so was afriad I'd be a little rusty after so long.  But after looking at the plan I was more excited than nervous, I was espcially looking forward to the dialogue between two characters. Never animated two characters interecting before.  Also am looking forward to a character going from one extreme emotion to another, I really want to do a medium close up of the face and really mess with facial emotions, most probably looking at Jim Carrey for reference.

For some reason I totally didn't think about what character I would use until we were given our first assignment. I just decided to re-design my last years character Alix, making her a bit older and different hair, it was a pain to animated each strand of her spiky hair.

After we were with Matt we had a little introduction to scanning our frames to photoshop with Stan and how to work the 'actions' tool, which will most probably save hours. Very very helpful.

3D Stopmotion Session

My specialist course had yet to start so I decided to attend the 3D stop motion class as well.  I found it most interesting and I have always been amazed by how stop motion is constructed and filmed.  The man giving the lecture was Austin Charlesworth and was an experienced animator from the industry.  He started straight off with saying where he’s worked and that 4 of those studios are now closed, a real look into the current stop motion industry, which at present doesn’t seem to be booming.  He also drove straight in to say that stop motion animators don’t really have full time jobs, on average will find ten months work and five months doing something else.   After hearing this I was quite glad I didn’t chose stop motion as I would have only really chosen it so I would have another skill in a different medium in animation not because I was passionate about it. For about an hour he showed us one of the children’s TV series he worked on called Igam Ogam, and how the mechanics worked and answered any questions we had.  I'd never heard of this series before and I didn't really enjoy watching it as much as other childrens series I've seen before but I did indeed appreciate the hours of effort that was put in by the animators and the bright colours were very eye catching, but overall not my style of entertainment or what route I'd like to take.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjWjn3s7TlQ&feature=related
[This is a trailer of the series that was shown to us, Igom Ogom]

One of the most interesting parts I found was when he showed the class various puppets and why they were good or bad by what they were constructed or how they were designed.  He also looked at how the problem with stop motion is that everything is real, therefore everything has a life span, such as materials rotting or breaking.  The final part of the lecture was him giving the class a go to animate a coin bouncing, from this I can see that the principles of animation with stop motion is the same as 2D but just a different way to approach it and create the movement. 

Overall I found it a very interesting insight of this form of animation, although it may not be for me I do certainly appreciate it more with all the effort that goes into it.  Depending on if I have free time from 2D and CGI lectures I may attend the other stop motion sessions as I would like to see how the modelling process works.