- Read Chapters 3 & 5. Get the flour sack rig ready to go.
- Animate a walk cycle. If you feel comfortable with the basic movement, animate one to communicate a mood. Start with the primary animation movements, then work toward secondary animation, follow-through, etc.
- Animate a push or a pull.
- Render 720p H.264 movie files. (Think quality for your reel!)
- Upload Maya project folders and movie files.
- Publish movie files to your website.
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Walk Cycles
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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A Sack of Flour
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. -
UNCW Flash Fiction Contest
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Homework #4: Watch From Pencils to Pixels and Discuss
Watch this documentary in the next few few days sometime. Join the “320 Forum” group on this site, and in the Pencils-to-Pixels topic discuss the documentary, things that interested you, and the following: - How do commercial attitudes affect all types of animation as an art form?
- Are there abilities that 3D animation has that 2D does not? Vice-versa?
- How has 2D animation informed 3D animation?
- How could 3D animation better benefit from techniques learned through the development of 2D animation?
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Article on Pixar’s La Luna
Click the image for the jump to the article.
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Profiles, Activity Stream, and Forums are Up!
- Everyone in the class, please use the “Sign-In -> Register” menu on the main menu bar to create a new account. Please use your UNCW ID and email for your account name but your real name as you normally prefer it for your profile name. Please complete the rest of the profile, too — take a few minutes and come up with some fun answers for the profile info. If you have ideas for things to add to the profile, let me know.
- Once you submit your registration, it will mention that you need to activate. (It also may ask for an avatar picture right away, but that didn’t seem to work until after activated?) Go ahead and check your UNCW email and click the link to activate your account. Return to Sign In and choose “Login.” You should have another small menu bar appear at the very top of the page. Under this menu bar, choose “My Account,” “Profile,” and then “Change Avatar.” Upload either a real picture or a drawing, painting, etc. of yourself (that looks like you). You can edit your profile answers here, too, and if we add more, later, they can be edited here.
- (As soon as you have it, too, you should add your web address for your 320 portfolio site to the profile field for it).
- Once you’re added to the site, and you’ve added your picture, the activity stream should show your new account and profile picture update. You can add any status updates, comments, links, thoughts about assignments, things that relate, etc. here for the whole class to see. Good examples might be articles on animation that you find, links to Vimeo/You-Tube/Flickr that relate, etc. You might also post links here to your own site updates or own Vimeo video posts.
- Also, you’ll be able to participate in forums. You can create different topics as questions, discussion, etc. I’ve created a general discussion forum just to start. Try it out once you’ve got your account going.
This may be a bit of a test-run, but hopefully it will be fun and useful, and we’ll be able to better coordinate the production later from here, share things of interest, etc. We might even come up with some other useful ideas for this along the way, too. Have fun!
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The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore & The Oscars
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.
This great animation is nominated this year for the Best Animated Short Academy Award. (La Luna, another great animation, by Pixar will probably beat it, but they’re both really great shorts!)
Check-out more information here about the nominations this year in the short and feature categories.