This week we went to Bradford Animation and Games Festival for a week, which was truly inspiring and engaging. I learned so much in the short space of a week to do with getting into the games and animation industry, within the UK and outside of the UK. I also had the pleasure to meet many well known faces and great animators and games makers within the industry. I wont go into too much detail about the trip as there is too much to say, but I will show some of the pictures from the week!
So this week we had to develop our 'Cubey'. This guy is very fun to animate with as a guide, mainly because of his simplicity, it means you have a lot of room to play about. We had to animate this guy in a whats called a 'take', when he is reacting to something offscreen, in a very, over dramatic way. This short 8 second clip took 3 hours to draw frame by frame, over 110 cells, one of the shortest stop motions I've done but was very fun.
After dealing with a lot of Maya recently, I've been glad to resort the good ol' pencil & paper. Although some people find this highly boring, I find myself much more involved and enjoying myself dealing with drawn animation, as opposed to 3d.
So the task...
It speaks for itself really, and here is what a I came up with...
For this next post, I'll briefly demonstrate the progress of my Maya capabilities, which are not great! - But I am getting there. We have been asked to use a template humanoid rig, called Burt, and to use him in a walk cycle, and also in a straight walk. I decided to have a little fun here and experiment with one of the 'Burts' interacting with the other by trying to avoid the walking cycle Burt.
Surprising, I have found this much easier than the ball exercise, and more enjoyable too. I Plan to play around with this a lot more as I know I have only just scratched the surface in terms of walk cycles!
Similarly to the 2D project set, we have to do the same thing, but in 3D, using a very complicated and scary looking application called Maya. This programme is amazing, but very VERY complicated. I've been playing around with it now for just over 2 weeks and still know very very little. But I've managed to get to grips (just about) with animating a ball, in the squash and stretch technique.
Below is the 'Light' ball, and I will upload the 'Heavy' Ball at a later date.
(sorry about the quality and size again - still working out how to show my work in a good format!)
I will also put of some drawings I have been doing for our drawing tutor this week!
This week's focus has been primarily on the basics of 2d and 3d animation, and that mainly means basic physics. Ive seen the whole 'Ball-bouncy-test' thing done before by various friends, so I knew we would have to do something similar.
For 2D principles and animation, we were told to draw a very bouncy, football-type ball, and then to animate a cannonball or bowling ball, basically to show something heavy, and then something light and bouncy. This process is called 'Squash & Stretch', and where appropriate a stretch and squash of the ball is meant to be applied to exaggerate speed, motion and weight.
Light
Heavy
I apologise for the lighting, its quite hard to see the balls at some points! But gives you a basic idea.
