Assignment 1 Part 1

1. Character

Robot Name: Flash

Flash thoughts:

"I used to be so fit and fast... but now, I'm stuck here in this dump."

"Another boring day at work. Why must I do this? It's always the same old crates going by one every 3 seconds. I wish something could happen that will make this horribly mundane life exciting again!"

2. Storyboard

3. Self-Critique

I think my animation would be quite interesting in showing how Flash finds out that his daily routine will not be so ordinary after all! In my storyboard above, it can be said that at scene 1 I staged a scene that the factory life was typical and boring, and following up with a story that shows how the belt malfunctions rather than going straight into the actions without developing a stage.

However, I do realize that my storyboard lacks key poses done by Flash and mainly illustrates on how the story flows instead. I think that storyboarding is of utmost importance when it comes to large movies and animations, but for this small animation, I did not really draw how the camera will look like at that specific frame. However, when I start on the animation in Maya, it is indubitably important that I develop the animation by capturing the key poses, personality and key poses of the speedy Flash when in action.

I used the principle of animation staging in frames 1 - 3 where Flash is shown to be looking at the box and shaking its head and picking up the box, this will tell the audience that Flash will definitely pick up the box.

I used the principle of secondary action in most of my frames where Flash will be shaking its head and moving its body while twisting around picking up boxes to show a more natural flow and give "life" to Flash.

Arc; Flash will carry boxes by following a certain arc to imitate gravity to increase the realistic value of the robot.

Around the last frames, I used the principle of slow in slow out that will make all the boxes slow down and increase Flash's speed of picking up. Before that, I also used the principle of staging where Flash roars before slowing down the speed of the boxes.

Lastly, using the principle of exaggeration at frame 5, Flash will jerk its head back suddenly to show the emotion of shock.

Pencil Animation

I realized how late this post was... and I skipped the Pencil animation lab.
Please pardon me on that.







Anyway, Pencil is a REALLY very basic 2D Animation program that allows you to just... learn very basic key framing. The steps in this tutorial (which I didn't have to refer to any of the tutorials) is very simple, CTRL+ I, press the + button to key frame it, rinse and repeat.

However, even the most simple programs has lessons to be learnt. These traditional key framing has been the bread and butter of today's animation techniques. Yes, we have advanced further by having graph editor and such, but it all boils down to key framing.

Week 13

. : : Process : : .

Due to not saving at intervals, I only can take screenshots from certain places and use the final model as an example as well.

In the above picture, I created a skeleton - joint and positioned it as such as shown above at the
joints of the mechanical arms. After that, I created an IK Handle as shown as the brown line above.


If we leave the joint alone without attaching to the model, only the joint will move and not the actual model. Thus, what you see above is me selecting the object then shift click the joints at that location and pressing "P" to parent them. This is done for the rest of the whole object.



Next, we create a controller with a curve>circle and freeze the transformations. This circle will be the invisible controller of the robot (at that area). In the above image, the bigger circle controls the linear and vertical movement of the crane head while the smaller one controls the rotation. These are called constraints and...


This is how we create a constraint. I created a point constraint for the bigger circle and an orient for the circle one to move it linear-ly and rotate on the xyz axis respectively. From there, we are pretty much ready to go for the animation.

For the animation, I added keyframes on the controllers instead of the object itself. I also applied some principles of animation (e.g. slow in slow out when picking the crate) to make it look more realistic. See the video above.

Exercise 4:

1) Apart from their different sizes, it is obvious from Luxo Jr. that the big lamp is “older” and that the small lamp is “younger”.

How is this communicated by the animation? Give at least THREE examples.

Do NOT say because the small lamp is playing with a ball, or that its name is Luxo Jr. – you should be looking at the animation, how the lamps move and emote (emote means to express emotions).

The bigger lamp shows larger but slower movement when compared to the smaller lamp that does child-like movements such as leaping continuously, shaking its "butt" and stepping on it while the larger lamp observes more. (e.g. child does not think much of the consequences while adults tend to observe and analyze the situation) When the ball is deflated, the smaller lamp gets really sad while the larger lamp shakes its head. (Depicting an adult saying that "you caused this yourself" while the child is crying because he lost his favorite toy)

2) Give an example from Luxo Jr of how timing is used for comic effect. Explain how the timing decisions contribute to the humour.

When the first ball was deflated, the animation shows the smaller lamp being really sad, and this sets the mood from hyper to emotional, all the actions made by the smaller lamp seem to slow down. However, soon, the larger lamp displays a shock emotion and suddenly a larger ball flies by. This is an example on how timing can be used to make it funny. Another example is when larger lamp looks at the camera and then slowly looks down and shakes his head.

3) When you create a joint chain, these form a hierarchy, with the first joint at the top and the last joint at the bottom. Explain why this is necessary for the joints to work properly.

A good example to explain would be a finger. Which is very similar to how the crane performs.
If we do not have the joint near our knuckles, we would not be able to move the joint that allows us to bend our fingers into a "C" and if that joint is missing we wont be able to move our last joint near our fingernails.