Announcements- ART/CSC/FST 320

Spring 2013: Homework #5, Character Design Prep

Posted by Eric Patterson
/ March 19, 2013 / Leave a comment
To begin preparation for your next project, the character design, modeling, and rigging, we need to get started soon so that you have something to rig by the end of March. With this in mind, your homework for this week is to complete your initial character work:
- Research and find reference material for the type of character that you would like to create.
- Work through several sketches and/or a maquette (bonus).
- Create your image planes.
- Start a Maya project folder with at least something in it started toward modeling.
- Upload initial work to Blackboard for a homework grade by Thursday, March 28.
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Spring 2013: Video Reference Clips

Posted by Eric Patterson
/ March 14, 2013 / Leave a comment

We’ll work on this some as a class exercise. This clip will also be one of the several for your “project #2.” Here is a link to the folder with the video image sequences already prepared for you. Download one of your choice, bring in as an image plane (with image-sequence button checked). Use this as a guide to find your extremes/breakdowns for each action, leading to which poses you keyframe for pose to pose animation. As a reminder, keyframe the major body motion of the poses first, then work your way down the hierarchy of character movement toward secondary animation.

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Spring 2013: Modeling Practice

Posted by Eric Patterson
/ March 12, 2013 / Leave a comment

We may use this a bit today.

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Spring 2013: Continued Reading

Posted by Eric Patterson
/ March 12, 2013 / Leave a comment
As we continue through discussing character animation, follow along with this material in your books:
- Chapter 4 in “Character Animation” detailing some more practice on anticipation and timing. The dive exercise from this chapter will be part of your upcoming project 2.
- Chapter 5 in “Character Animation” working more with walk cycles. (Also, see the supplemental material from “Animator’s Survival Guide” for many great examples of different walks).
- Also, begin chapter 7 in “Character Animation” — this discusses important material for “acting-out” a scene. The “coin pick-up” is one choice for your upcoming project 2.
- Lastly, read chapters 3 & 4 in the “How to Cheat in Maya 2013: Tools and Techniques for Character Animation” for more material on using the graph-editor and tools in Maya for effective key-framed animation.
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Spring 2013: Notes for Basics of Animation

Posted by Eric Patterson
/ February 28, 2013 / Leave a comment

Here are the excerpts discussed in class. I’d print these for you but don’t want to kill trees. Grab these quickly, and please do not share outside of the class. I’m going to take the link down by next class.

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Spring 2013: Walk Cycles

Posted by Eric Patterson
/ February 28, 2013 / Leave a comment

Here’s a very basic example of a walk-cycle, a fundamental animation exercise. We’ll practice with the flour sack and also look at more examples soon. Read through Chapter 3 or so in your character animation text.

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Spring 2013: Rigs for Exercises and Project 2

Posted by Eric Patterson
/ February 28, 2013 / Leave a comment

In addition to the “masked guy” character, here are three places to find some freely available character rigs: 11-Second Club, Creative Crash, and Lester Bank’s blog post. Look around and choose one that you will have fun using and also wouldn’t mind seeing a lot. Or seeing on your reel — which by the way, if the license accords non-commercial use, you are welcome to use these for your reel. (You should, of course, credit the source for the model and rig — but there is usually a breakdown on your portfolio/reel submission where this is done for every shot in your reel). There are a lot of fun ones, and some of them (such as the Andy Rig) are configurable for different looks.

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Spring 2013: Who’s that masked man?

Posted by Eric Patterson
/ February 26, 2013 / Leave a comment

Character rig for testing and use throughout the semester.

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Spring 2013: Animating a Shot

Posted by Eric Patterson
/ February 26, 2013 / Leave a comment

Click here for the needed files to complete. We’ll practice breaking a shot down into actions which are represented by extremes or keys. Thumbnails and animation timing diagrams help us prepare to animate the scene effectively. These will eventually be turned into keyframed poses in Maya where the timing and spacing will be tweaked via the graph editor for the best look. (In this particular example, too, we are going to look at using our scanned thumbnails to help us space the keys throughout our frames as we would on the dope sheet to plan our animation. We can do a similar thing with frames from a video to plan our animations). This will be due along with a few other shots as part of your “Project 2,” full details to be posted soon.

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Spring 2013: A Sack of Flour

Posted by Eric Patterson
/ February 19, 2013 / Leave a comment

Here is a simple rig to practice some character animation. We’ll work with this a bit as we move into more advanced character animation and rigging. Take a few moments to try the rig and play a bit.

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