Self Study TVPaint work

In self study on Monday I had an idea to animate a dance. I have finalised the animation with colour but the end result is also a surprise for someone so I’m not posting it here just yet 😉
To get the dance to repeat on to the right without having to repeat the whole drawing I used the ‘stamp’ feature in TVPaint and flipped it.

After that I refined the animation on a new layer and also lengthened the legs a bit (I used a straight line (which is invisible) to make sure the foot placement was level.
Anyway, I’ll post the rest of the process on Sunday.

And finally I spent another hour and a half animating my pre-arrival character again, this time with her hands growing again. I was going to make her punch with them, so I may do a separate animation.

Hope you like it 😀

3D Animation Attempts

This week we worked on some animations during seminars. I did say my goal was to practice a bit of 3D animation.

This one was done during Debra’s lecture. Not sure why the floor rendered that way but that’s not the focus 💀
The right leg kind of clips towards the end of the loop, I think it’s because it ends at that frame and it doesn’t transition smoothly, but learning about the GREASE Pencil tool, as well as knowing what to key frame and when, was a MASSIVE help for animating in Maya and I thoroughly enjoyed that lesson and feel confident animating basic character movements with simple timing.
I did also attempt to make a ‘running man’ animation using this rig but it turned out terrible so I wont post it yet.

And this is what we worked on today in Andy’s seminar. The choice of what to animate was completely up to us using this set up. I don’t feel confident enough yet to do whole sequences (making characters think, decide), so I just animated the dino stealing an egg.
There’s a few things I could improve here… it’s feet don’t stay still when they touch the ground, and I feel like his head should have probably been further down to begin with. But in general I didn’t think I’d be able to pull this off and I’m kinda happy with it

Character Expressions

Expression sheet I drew for my cartoon oc as reference for animation in future. I coloured this also on stream 🙂

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This week I plan on working on my essay outline and doing a bunch of animation trials in Maya to get to grips with it, since I do want to get better at 3D as well as 2D.

Wave Principle + Growing Hands Continued

In todays seminar (Tuesday) our focus was learning the ‘wave principle’ of animation.

This is my first test animation of the wave principle based on the demonstration Debra showed us. In my opinion, there is a slight stiffness there, I think it’s due to the anchor.

After I did that I tried it with a bird. The wings imo are fine, the motion of the head vs the body not so much… I don’t think the head should also go down when the wings do it looks so funny

And lastly (on the wave principle) I animated a cat waving its tail. I copied its body over to save redrawing it every time. I find it easier to animate things with volume.

Continuation of ‘Growing Hands’ during Seminar free time

I continued the animation during time in class. One thing I’ve noticed is my proportions slightly change when animating, but I also think it was cause I was using a different tablet to begin with. I’m still not finished :’D but I love how the strings on the trousers flow and how the weight of the hand makes the body continue going back once lifted.

Growing Hands!

Another animation test I did during my time in self-study on Monday this week, a work in progress.

3D Animation Ball w/ Tail

In yesterdays seminar we animated a ball with a tail. I found this more challenging than I expected to. I for one am not too happy with the outcome of the tail, it looks very stiff in my opinion (initially it didn’t upon the fall, but I think I changed something before rendering). This is just my first go anyway, so when I get around to working on the final animations for submission I will work on that better.

Morphs + More 2D Animations

Here’s a morph I did based on the first demonstration, of a letter turning to a number.

In lesson Debra mentioned morph explosions so I animated a quick explosion (or attempted to).

And here’s the one I found the most enjoyable to animate, especially with the colour change too! I’m really pleased with how I pulled off the slow-in – slow-out movements

I was gonna animate my character doing the nae nae but imo the base turned out way too lean. Anyway here it is I guess

I started this animation on Monday but didnt get the chance to finish it but did the rest in today’s class.

This (^) was specifically meant to be an attempt at an arcs. I’ve noticed also I tend to animate my characters leaning (slanting) to the right so I aim to work on that…

Andddd I did this as well, another go at Appeal/Solid Drawing cause I didn’t know what else to do, I was going to do my character doing a Hadouken but I like the way she throws the orb to the camera.

I did this animation on my personal computer using Clip Studio during a stream. I love how bouncy it turned out, it was another attempt at squash/stretch, appeal, solid drawing etc. I think I have appeal and solid drawing pretty much covered.

Also did this basic walk cycle in CSP on Stream.

-Natalie

Maya Animation

In lesson we animated a bouncing ball.

I’ve already animated in Maya before but after learning in depth about the animation graph editor I feel like I could animate way better. Time to begin 3D animation

Pre-Arrival Activity + Animation

Prior to starting the course as well we had to create a cartoon version of our selves suitable for animation, I just did myself in my usual humanoid drawing style at first

I did some sketches in my sketchbook before I finally settled with this idea. I thought of myself as an adventurer/explorer mouse and gave myself my usual bag and a grappling hook similar to the ones in Uncharted 4 (cause I loved that game). I also wore my usual huaraches at the time, which broke recently 😥

However when it came to posing the character and doing expressions, the very simplified face was throwing me off and I didnt feel like I was able to make good expressions with it… so after looking up a few references from artists I like I re did the character.

 

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Here are some of the initial sketches for the Design! (Once I get my sketchbook from home I’ll re scan these in better quality)

Then after I coloured it to finalise the design, and I’m happy with these outcomes. I drew a quick ‘meet the artist’ drawing for this.

Also, in todays self study, I animated my character, where I attempted ‘Exaggeration’ (with the yawn).

This took me about an hour-ish to animate, I think the transition from the yawn back to the ‘head in hand’ pose could have been a bit better, less stiff for example, but I aim to work on that over the next few weeks! ALSO, continuing on from my last post regarding my animations being too fast imo, I fixed that problem by keeping the frame rate at 24FPS (like I did for my animation at college) by animating two frames at a time and 1 frame for quick actions.

WIP Illusion of Life Animations

The first project brief for ‘Understanding Animation’ is basically covering the 12 basic principles of animation covered in ‘The Illusion of Life‘, those being:

Squash and Stretch, Anticipation, Staging, Straight Ahead Action & Pose to Pose, Follow Through & Overlapping Action, Slow In & Slow Out, Arcs, Secondary Action, Timing, Exaggeration, Solid Drawing and Appeal.

And we need to demonstrate these in 2D and 3D. So far this week I’ve worked on Squash and Stretch, Anticipation, Straight Ahead & Pose to Pose, some form of Slow in slow out and Arcs, some Secondary Action, and a bit of Exaggeration, all in 2D on TVPaint in class

Here are (above) the first animations I did for squash and stretch, just a basic bouncing ball.

Next I moved on to anticipation (when you prepare the audience for an action that’s about to be performed) and was struggling to do that with just a ball so I did a really simple ‘blob’ character throwing a ball.

Then after THAT, I had a go at Straight Ahead/Pose to Pose. This was really fun, at first I wanted the character to kick but he has no legs so it wasn’t working :’D

So these next two are my attempts at Follow Through/Overlapping Action and Secondary action (I skipped Slow In Slow Out and Arcs for now cause I didn’t know what to do for them). With follow through, the bunny’s ears ‘bounce back’ even after it’s stopped, this is the overlapping action. I might work on a better one later this week. I’m not too happy with my attempt at Secondary Action, not because it’s ‘terrible’ but after watching it again after making the next two animations (below) it helped me remember that my animations are going too fast, since I’m used to animating @ 12 FPS.

I went back and did a more fun animation of squash and stretch, where I made a little ‘birb’ character. I again at this point forgot to animate it with more frames to make it slower but I’m happy with the outcome, for submission I’ll fix it c:

And here’s my weird attempt at Arcs along with Post to Pose action where the character is Milly Rocking and ‘Hitting’ them folks :V

These animations were mainly just me getting used to using TVPaint for now.

2nd October Animation Lecture

Today in our lecture we watched 5 different animations all featuring different animation techniques, telling different stories, and all being for a different purpose.

Of the five animations that we watched my favourite was the one titled ‘Billy’s Balloon’ by Don Hertzfeldt.

Still from ‘Billy’s Balloon’

BILLY’S BALLOON VIDEO

I loved this animation the most out of all five. Originally I thought it was going to be a really said animation at first but it ended up being hilarious, I love how slightly messed up it is and how the balloon is evil. I also loved how we gradually learn that this isn’t the only child with a phantom balloon out there, and how we’re momentarily tricked to thinking that the balloon is only joking with Billy, yet continues to bully him. The animation also kept me entertained cause it added some new, unpredictable jokes as it went on.

Don Hertzfeldt has social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter) and website links to some of his animation work, which can be found in the About section of his YouTube page.

Don has made more films. Don has worked on a Blu-Ray collection of his work, old and recent, like his most recent film ‘IT’S SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY‘, and others such as World of Tomorrow, The Meaning of Life, Rejected, Wisdom Teeth (and more listed on his website)