We’ll discuss production setup with Shotgun a bit today as well as workflow for animating a shot, then work through a walk-cycle example.

   

Here’s a very basic example of a walk-cycle, a fundamental animation exercise. Read chapter 5 in Character Animation Fundamentals as well as refer to The Animator’s Survival Kit or other texts for good references. Here are some excerpts.  Grab these, and do not share outside of the class. (I’m going to take the link down soon).

Things are getting setup for both productions on Shotgun.  In the meantime, you can login and check-out the sample Big Buck Bunny project.

Here’s the list of positions so far.

 

Sony Pictures Animation and Imageworks through IPAX have offered up one of their feature-film rigs for your fun (and possible contest entries).  This is good timing for this class, as you can use it in any of your upcoming homework or projects! Also, here’s a link to a video where animator Chad Stewart steps through the Zombie rig.

As mentioned in the email, there will be no class meeting today.  We should have a regular class meeting on Wednesday. For today, please watch these two videos that offer some good information about animating a lift movement in Maya, also using constraints to help the character’s hands move relative to a prop (rather than a prop relative to a hand).

• Lifting a Heavy Weight Part 1
• Lifting a Heavy Weight Part 2

Make sure that you have completed all homework and web exercises up to this point before class on Wednesday and bring any questions about animation work in Maya so far.  Also, production crew — bring list of assets, any updates to concept art, and any updates to storyboards and animatics.  We’ll plan to setup things in Shotgun on Wednesday for the productions. For bonus credit, after watching the videos above, complete another lift movement using parent constraints for prop movement using a rig other than the Goon or Groggy.  (It could be another rig included from the book downloads, or a free Maya rig from creativecrash.com).