Finishing touches...

Well I think I finally got finished up on the robot arm. Had a great Q&A which cleared up constraints and let us all put on the finishing touches to this assignment. This was really fun to do, and I'm glad I put a different spin on it by going for a more cartoony approach. Ok, so it's not perfect, and I'm sure I could spend a lot more hours tracking the arcs, looking out for spacing issues and a whole bunch of other things. But I'm gonna put this on the shelf for now and look forward to the next assignment.

Giving it more "snap"...

While doing the robot arm assignment I really thought I needed to give it more "snap" and I remembered that in an earlier exercise I'd posted on the 11 Second Club forums I was recommended that I take a look at one of Keith Lango's tutorials on snappy cartoon motion. It gave me a great insight into offsetting keys to add extra snap, and that you can actually add more snap by lengthening the time of the movement. It gave 3 examples that I've posted here. There's a couple of problems with the arms getting twisted in FK mode that I don't know how to fix, but as a quick exercise I think it's kinda successful and I learnt a great lesson. The first video is literally 2 key frames at either extreme with the tangents set to linear:

In the second one I offsetted the keys to add overlap, also adding ease in and out of the move:

And in the last one I pushed the extremes and actually pulled the key for the lower arm to hit the extreme the same time as the upper arm, just dragging back the hand and fingers, but giving a greater build up to each move:

It's a simple little exercise, and I didn't have time to move the rest of the body at all. I just wanted to focus in the arm. I think it's pretty successful.

Do the robot...

So this is the assignment I was looking forward to the most. I had a whole bunch of ideas going in to it, and I played around for a while and though I'd go for a more natural movement, nothing too robotty (I may have just made that word up!?) I ran into so many problems though. With every assignment I'm pushing myself to do better and there was points in this I was getting lost...to the point where I cut out a whole chunk and redid it. I think that was a valuable lesson. It just sucked though, I had that moment where I thought to myself..."perhaps I'm not cut out to be an animator?" I gotta remember though to take baby steps and nail the basics. Anyhoo...I've said too much! Here's the blocking for my robot arm. It's probably "blocked" a bit too much, but I've got this weird work flow at the moment. Gotta sort that out!

Maya Springboard

Man, it's been ages since I last posted on here! Been kinda busy with the Maya Springboard program. It's going really well. Everyone's really cool. There's no competitive feel about any of the critiques people give you, just genuine suggestions or praise. I think everyone's getting real excited about starting AM in January. Just over 7 weeks away!!! :D My mentor for the Springboard is Carlos Fins. He's a really nice guy. Just down to earth you know. He's really good at explaining things and he's got a lot of patience! I'm pretty chuffed with my work so far, but there's some really great stuff ot there. Kinda feel like I'm gonna have to bring my A game when I start AM :) Here's a couple of bits and pieces I've done so far...