25/02/13 - Richard Williams Videos

Today we were shown three educational videos created by Richard Williams, famous for his animation work on the film Who framed Roger Rabbit.

The first focussed on simple human walk-cycles and how to go about creating them. First thing to do is to set the Tempo, meaning the number of frames over which a step takes place.
Here's a quick list of some examples and how they could correlate to a human walk cycle:

§  4 Frames – Cartoon run, too fast for any living human to achieve

§  6 Frames – Human sprint/run

§  8 Frames – Human run/jog

§  12 Frames – Supposedly most common pace that real people use when walking

§  etc

25/02/13

Animation

Richard Williams (Who framed roger rabbit)

#1

Walk-Cycles:

-          Set the tempo

o   Differentiated by number of frames in a step

§  4 Frames – Cartoon run, too fast for any living human to achieve

§  6 Frames – Human sprint/run

§  8 Frames – Human run/jog

§  12 Frames – Supposedly most common pace that real people use when walking

§  etc

-          Start with contact points

o   Front heel on ground with NO weight

-          Create passing position (mid-point between contacts)

-          Create in-betweens to progressively fill in the gap

#2

Walk’s with personality

-          Exaggerated movements

-          “Break” a joint

o   Extend a limb further than is physically possible (Extreme exaggeration)

-          Combine breaks and exaggerations to create interesting walk cycles

#3

Variations (Sneaking, Run) and animal movement

11/02/13 - Poses

Today we were given a rigged humanoid/cartoony model and introduced to the concept of creating 'poses' for a character model.

We were initially left to familiarise ourselves with manipulating the model, which demonstrates good practice by having helpers attached to all of its bones.

We started off by creating a 'shy' pose, which you can see below.

This pose was created by making the character seem smaller. The forward tilted head creates a very timid appearance.

Next we created a 'confident' pose for our characters:

The wide stance and generally larger appearance creates the impression of someone with plenty of confidence.

After being talked through the creation of the above two poses we were let loose and given the task of creating as many different poses as we could for the duration of the lesson, you can see all of them below, enjoy!

Laughter:

I think this pose would be helped if we had some means of manipulating the eyes, the blank expression means that the meaning of this pose could be lost on many people.

Cowering:

This was originally supposed to be scared, but the term scared can be showed in a number of ways i think. This example hear shows fear of an outside force in my opinion, like something harassing the character or an imminent impact of some kind. Again the ability to manipulate the face would help this pose greatly.

Ascension:

This was the last pose i made during the session, not the most serious of poses but i believe it conveys the holy nature of the characters state. Also, in case you were wondering, yes, i did use photoshop to create this image!

I greatly enjoyed this session, the pre-made model we were given was a joy to use and really demonstrates, through proper rigging and constraints (such as not letting the elbow be rotated in a non-realistic way) the kind of standards that would be expected from a professional model rig. Something i have definitely taken from using this model however is that facial expressions can in some cases be integral to portraying a certain emotion or character state.

I also understood from this session that posing is not solely restricted to character models. A pose animation could be useful for a treasure chests open and close states, or for more complex yet not humanoid models that have several different animations.

04/02/13 - "Floppy"

Today we used the Rabbit-head/Spacehopper model that we had briefly for the end of our last lesson.
Our goal for was to create a looped bouncing animation for said model.