Monday 9 May 2011

Week 6 swings out...

See what i did there? swings out...... no?

Ok, this weeks assignment was focussed on overlapping action and the character we were issued was the mighty pendulum!. It was our first assignment with a pick list which meant we had two choices on what to do with our pendulum, they were basically keep it simple in 150 frames or get creative with 200 frames.

Now see what i did there?..... good.

Anyway I had some crazy ideas for this one, it was going to swoop, sweep and push around all sorts of obstacles, there was going to be brights lights, a fanfare, fireworks.... that was until I actually opened Maya and made a start anyway.

After roughly 10 hours animating spread over 2 days I realised my ideas were way out of reach from my actual animating skills and something was seriously seriously wrong. In all this time I hadn't even touched the pendulum part of the character, I had been fussing around with the base with disasterous results. I pretty much felt like I had failed and by Wednesday I was panicking and felt like the deadline was looming.

That night my savior came in the form of West Decker (http://blog.cleverpuppy.com/) he pretty much dragged me back to earth and reminded me of what I was actually at AM for, I came to learn and not kick ass like him from the start. He said I shouldn't be doing my animations to impress others, I should be doing them to learn animation!. I completely agreed with the guy and from that moment on I called shotgun on his wisdom.

I decided the best way to go from here was to keep it as simple as possible and then improve once I had the basics down. Things went pretty well from here on in, I decided to tackle the animation in a layered fashion. I started at the main base of the pendulum and then once that was done I moved onto the tail. To achieve the wave of the tail I used successive breaking of joints,  I could try to explain what this is but I wont as im not sure i've fully got my head around it myself yet.

Anyway heres what i came up with this week, thanks everyone - Adam

1 comment:

  1. Hey man, it's comforting to know that I'm not the only one having trouble with the assignments sometimes. Guess you really wanted to make perfect ease-in/outs? :D

    Personally I think the strategy of making the most awesome assignments that are rendered out and everything... is too risky. For me it works out best to try and keep it simple and make the basics work.

    I think your pendulum turned out pretty good!

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