Archive for the ‘Animation’ Category

Here is the first stage of a monkey run I'm working on.  It's nice and loose yet with a focus on volume and motion/arcs.  Done on 3s for the time being.  I'll finesse this a bit more before jumping in and making some nice, detailed drawings.  Then I'll spend some time doing some good inbetweens.  I need lots of practice on that inbetweening.  I always end up with jumping jiggley lines.

Here is the first attempt I've taken at a walk cycle in a long, long time.  I see plenty of issues with it, but most of them come from my sloppy inbetweening.  Overall though I think it is a good step (no pun intending) and I can't wait to get into more personality based walks.

 One thing I want to study after doing this is what happens to the knee when a leg starts bearing the weight on it.  You can see in my animation that I have the body continue down a bit as the leg absorbs the weight, which causes the knee to move forward.  Then the knee changes direction as he pushes off with that same leg.  It gives it a strange feeling that doesn't feel right.  If you know the answer, please let me know in the comments.

So, after such a long break away from animation I thought it would be wise to redo what I've done previously to catch myself up on what I've learned before moving forward.  This time I used the computer to clean things up just a bit.  Below are the results.  Now that I have these out of the way, look for new stuff soon.  My hope is to start in on some walk cycles by next month, in the meantime I still have a few simple, but necessary exercises yet to complete.  The explanations for these assignments can be found in previous posts from the first time I did the assignment, but if you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments and I'll get back as soon as I can.

Pencil, Paper, a Ruler… a little knowledge of perspective and basic timing and voila!

I'm curious how many of you see a cube rotating counterclockwise, and how many are seeing a strange sort of 3D trapezoid rotating clockwise?

A rather quick exercise, compared to the last one.  This one is dealing with weight and primariley how it affects timing/spacing.  The circle is meant to represent a bowling ball.  The quick fall, following by a very small bounce and the object coming to a rest shortly thereafter gives the illusion of weight to the object.

Okay, another animation lesson.  This one proved to be tax my brain a lot more than I anticipated.  I had to deal with Timing, Anticipation, Action, and Reaction, arcs, Slo-in and Slo-out, and overlapping action.  The idea behind it is the seaweed I animated earlier is now sliding left to right across the screen.  The movement of the seaweed has to travel up the length of the seaweed at differing lengths of time.  So the bottom moves first, and as you go up the more things lag behind in inheriting that movement.

I'm pretty happy with it except for the change in direction on screen left.  It feels a bit stiff, like the whole thing is rotating, instead of the movement traveling up the spine of the seaweed like it should. 

I kept this one loose and rough.

I just realized I'm posting my 'homework' results to these Brian Lemay lessons and I never gave them a proper intoduction.  How rude of me.  Well, here, I hope, is a proper intro for those curious.

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I originally went to school to become an animator.  Unfortunately I made the wrong choice in the school to go to and later found out they had quite a poor animation course.  However during that time I fell in love with 3d modeling and ran with that.  Modeling has served me well.  I have so far loved to do it professionally, and it has given me the chance to work with many great artists first at Glueworks, and now at Blue Sky Studios.  However, I find myself with once again yearning to bring things to life through animation, specifically through traditional animation, drawing each frame of movement.  So now, instead of going to an expensive school, I am going to home school myself.  Luckily there are many resources available to me.  There are my co-workers and animator friends who are open to giving advice, many resources out in internetland, as well as good books to learn from.  One such resource are the books by Brian Lemay.

Brian has much experience in animation.  From his website:

"He worked as an assistant animator on the feature film, Rock and Rule, character designer on the original Inspector Gadget series, and layout artist on Ewoks and Droids, Smurfs, Flintstone Kids, Laser Tag and Punky Brewster.

Brian Lemay was the Co-ordinator of the Classical Animation program at Sheridan College from 1996 - 2000. He was also an Instructor teaching Storyboarding, Layout, Character Design, Animation, Background Painting and Life Drawing from 1988 through 2000."

His book here teaches the fundamentals in a very methodical approach.  Starting simply and adding one element per assignment.  Each assignment reinforces the previous principles, so over time the early learned principles quickly become second knowledge and you don't even think about them.  Once I complete the lessons I'll give my full personal review of the course.  So far though I recommend it for any who wish to learn about, and create animation.

You can find out more about Brian Lemay, and purchase his learning material from his website: http://www.BrianLemay.com

Here is a simple assignment showing an important aspect of animation.  The anticipation/reaction of a movement helps sell the action to the audience.  The anticipation can help the viewer know that a big movement is coming up, just as the reaction can soften the end of a big movement.  Or it can be a more subtle shifting of weight like when your character picks up one leg and the weight shifts to the other foot before the character takes a big side step (anticipation) only to subltely settle into balance after the big sidestep (reaction).