tayles animations

i'm learning how to animate, come and take a look! Taylor Brent | n9964631

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Week 12 - Walk Cycles with Personality

Last week we had to create basic, naturalistic walk cycles so this week we were given the task to create a walk cycle with a personality based off of a character of our choice. I chose Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. Yes, Eeyore is a donkey so he wasn’t exactly the easiest to replicate, so I instead aimed to portray his pessimistic outlook and melancholy tone. So I guess this is what I imagine Eeyore would walk like if he was a human.

It’s definitely not perfect and could use a little refining in the future but I think it conveys the tone pretty well. I tried playing around with timing; Eeyore is quite slow so I tried to show that as best I could. I also tried to have the character drag their feet a little.

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Video Essay

Here is my video essay on the 12 Principles of Animation.

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Video Essay Script

You can click here to find the script for my final video essay on the 12 principles of animation.

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Week 11 - Walk Cycles

This week was walk cycles! These took forever and they aren’t perfect, of course, but I’m pretty stoked with how they turned out. I included a 2D animated walk cycle I did about six months ago for comparison. I remember being so excited by how lifelike it seemed and look at how far I’ve come since then. I couldn’t have imagined it. I’m really happy with the hip movement and the general timing. Also, I think offsetting the chest rotation helped a lot. This was perhaps more of a sentimental reflection then you were hoping for markers, but hey.

Onwards and upwards.

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Week 10 - Character Weight Shift

This week our task to animate a character shifting their weight from one leg to another. We had the choice of animating in a side step but I feel like without one feels more natural. I’m pretty happy with how these turned out, I think it’s really good to get my head around these naturalistic movements.

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Week 9 - Pull, Push or Lift an Object

Saying this task was difficult is an understatement. I really struggled with this one. As you can see from the very little I’ve included due to both difficulty and time constraints. I’ll make sure to properly understand constraints for the future but unfortunately, this is all I have for this one.

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Week 8 - Character Jump (Polished)

From the photos here I’m sure you can tell I had a little bit of trouble with this one. Maya did not want to co-operate every time I tried to adjust anything. It was a lot of reverting back to previous saves and trying again. As a result, the jump isn’t as exaggerated as I would have liked but nevertheless, I think it runs fairly smoothly. Had to adjust the arm arcs to make them rotate the right way and generally look normal, adjust the timing and try to exaggerate some of the keyframes.

PSA: save lots of versions of your work, kids.

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Week 7 - Character Jump (Blocking Pass)

This week we were given a reference video of a man jumping and asked to create a blocking pass based off of the character’s key poses. I think this was a really good exercise for importing reference videos into Maya, as it was really useful to have the video so close to what I was working on. I also think it was a good exercise for recognising and interpreting key poses in movement.

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Week 5 - Ball With Tail Jumping Over A Gap

Our final task was to add a tail to the ball bouncing over a gap from last week. Had a bit of trouble keeping the tail attached to the ball rig but my tutor posted a fix online about how to solve the issue which was very helpful. Overall, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out but I think I could definitely come back to this and add some tail wagging or something when I have some more time! I think that after working through the previous exercises this was a lot easier to complete!

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Week 5 - Bouncing Ball with Tail

Next up, a bouncing ball with a tail! This exercise kind of adds on from the last one with the pendulum as it’s the same concepts and techniques with the addition of the bouncing ball. This was definitely much easier after figuring out the pendulum!

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Week 5 - Pendulum Swing

Our first task this week was to animate a pendulum swinging with overlapping action and follow through. This took me a little longer to wrap my head around, particularly the breakdowns in between the extremes that are half of one extreme and half of the other (again the tutorial explains it a lot better than I can!). I think just figuring out which direction each part of the cord should be going at any given point took some time to properly understand, but I think it’s one of those things where once you get it, you get it. And the timing! The timing took me a while as well just to kind of match the speed of the pendulum moving with the overlap. Anyway, I found the tutorials that I’ve linked above EXTREMELY helpful and by the end, I feel that I understand overlapping action and follow through heaps more :)

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Week 4 - Ball Jumping Over A Gap

The next part of this week’s exercise was to animate a ball bouncing over a small gap. Part of the challenge this week was to try to bring the ball to life as if it were a character and so we were encouraged to storyboard our ideas and try to come up with a concept or a list of traits for the ball. I think this was helpful to set the tone and get a feel for how the ball would bounce and react to the obstacles. Overall I’m pretty happy with how it turned out and I’m excited to put a tail on it next week!

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Week 4 - Change in Facial Expression

For this task I decided to animate a character blinking as I think that it’s a pretty useful exercise and I’ll definitely need to be able to do this in the future in order to create lifelike characters. The video tutorial I’ve linked above was so helpful! I really like the idea of being able to exaggerate reality in animation and the tutorial covered a lot of cool ways to do that. The main thing I took away from it was trying to sort of match the character’s head shape to their facial expression using squash and stretch i.e. ‘m’ sounds are squashed and ‘o’ sounds are stretched. I hope that makes sense, the video explains it a lot better than I can! But you can be as subtle or cartoony as you like depending on how you incorporate things like timing and squash and stretch. Anyway, I tried to incorporate this into my blink animation by having the character’s face squash down as his eyes close. I also tried to add a moving hold with slight head movement and a cheeky smirk from Ray! 

You can find Ray (the character rig) right over here if you wanna check it out (he’s pretty cool)

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Week 3 - Character Head Turns | Relaxed Head Turn

Again I found this head turn really enjoyable to animate. I can’t quite describe how satisfying it is to work on something, understand it and then have an end product as cool as this! I didn’t make a WIP video for this one as it didn’t take as long as long after the last one. I think it was interesting to see the difference in timing and spacing between both head turns (which the tutorial pointed out), I think it helped cement some concepts a little better for me. The mouth movements for this head turn were a little easier since the ‘ahhhh’ isn’t as intricate as the word ‘what’ from the surprised audio. Overall I’m pretty happy with how it turned out but definitely room for improvement as always :)

Link to the character rig right over here

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Week 3 - Character Head Turns | Surprised Head Turn

This was so much fun! This week we were also tasked to animate two different head turns based on two seperate audio tracks. This first one is obviously the surprised head turn. I found the tutorial I’ve linked above super helpful as it taught me a lot about what to do to make the movement look less robotic (specifically with the concepts of timing, arcs and moving holds). I think the most difficult part about this exercise was matching the audio track to the animation. As you can see I ended up recording myself saying ‘what’ as close to how the recording sounded as I could to get a better idea of how the character’s mouth, lips, chin and jaw should move. Overall I really enjoyed this exercise and I’m really happy with how it turned out! I like looking back at how my WIP video, with no moving hold or dialogue, progressed to the final result. I can’t wait to continue to practice and develop these skills :)

Oh and you can find the character rig I used right over here

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Week 3 - Pendulum Swing

This week our first task was to animate a pendulum swinging from side to side. I think this was a really good exercise to look at slow in and slow out. I didn’t find this a particularly difficult exercise however, I did find it quite useful. I think that I’m now able to look at the graph editor, identify what the animation will look like from the graph and just generally understand it a lot more.

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Week 2 - Bouncing Balls | The Ping Pong Ball

The final part of this week’s exercise was to animate a ping pong ball bouncing. I think the main challenge with this one for me was timing. Ping pong balls are so odd! I think translating the ball’s light weight yet sturdiness predominately came down to timing. This just meant a lot of tweaking and a lot of referencing! 

Overall, I think each of the bouncing balls had their own challenges but also gave me the opportuninty to learn and grow in different ways. This is an exercise I’d like to revisit in the future because whilst I’m quite happy with how the bouncing balls turned out, I definitely think there’s room for improvement, and there always will be!