Week 7: Homework Progress

This is the Robot Arm assignment and the progress so far.

Week 7: Storytelling Poses for Robot Arm Assignment

This is a drawing of the storytelling poses of my animation.

Week 7: Robot Arm Video Reference

Here's two reference videos of robot arms in action.

Week 7: Pose-to-Pose & Straight Ahead Action

One of the 12 Principles of animation is Straight Ahead Action and Pose-to-Pose animation. it almost seems like the two are similar to each other but contrast a bit.

Straight Ahead Action is when a scene is drawn out and animated from beginning to end with subsequent scenes drawn out as well. This creates a more fluid and fuller scene in terms of movement of what's being animated, therefore, creating more realistic action sequences. This Straight Ahead Action method is used for fast and wild action scenes. However, with this method the scenes tend to lose size, volume and proportions can look a little funny. But with computer animation these issues are of little to no problem.

Pose-to-Pose animation differs from Straight Ahead Action in while straight ahead action is drawn out from beginning to end of a scene pose-to-pose animation is done in inbetween sequences and poses. In a way it's kind of like storyboarding but not storyboarding. It's more thought out and carefully planned. This method is used a lot for dramatic and emotional sequences. Pose-to-pose is like a blueprint of what the secene is eventually going to look like when it is completed and the missing pieces are filled. Pose-to-pose is somewhat like connecting the dots. The animator draws the main poses and sequences (create the dots), and then fills in the intervals later to make it complete (connect the dots).

A conbination of these two methods are often used when creating animating.

Creating Concept Vehicles in Maya

http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?vid=3733&autoplay=1

Here's a link to a tutorial on car modeling using faces, vertices and extruding.

Ease In Ease Out

http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?vid=28831&autoplay=1

This tutorial shows how to use ease in and ease out. The animation is a little advanced but still explains well ease in and ease out and it shows how it all looks like in the Graph Editor and how it works in the animation.

Midterm

This here thing is my midterm project. The mission was to animate this little fox creature up to 150 frames using the techniques we have learned in class so far. The most challenging part was the tail.