Three shots:

• Walk cycle animated to indicate an emotion, mood, or performance (happy, sad, sneak, gallop, run, etcetera).  See chapter 5 in Character Animation Fundamentals as well as The Animator’s Survival Kit for more information and examples.  Work to convey your chosen mood here; avoid just keyframing and calling it something after the fact.
• What’s in the Box?  Your character opens a box of some kind, in which the audience cannot see.  The character reacts and must sell the audience on the reaction to what’s inside.  Choose from happy, sad, angry, surprise, contempt, fear, or disgust or a more complex progression of emotions.
• Performance Piece with Lip-Sync:  Choose a favorite line from a film or game or record your own dialogue.  Have your character act a performance that somehow connects to the dialogue — be creative!  Convey as much emotion through primary animation moving down to secondary, then key-frame lip-sync performance to the dialogue for the final touches along with facial animation to convey the full emotion of the acting.

You may use the Goon in any version, Groggy, or if you choose, another rig — just make sure to test its range of motion and performance and that you can use it before attempting to animate with it. Post these to your portfolio site.  Be prepared to present on the due date.  

Animate with your best poses, timing/spacing, and principles of animation from frame 121 in the thumbnails onto the spider-squash! Bring at least a playblast if not a render to discuss Tuesday.  Submit a render before fall break.

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. We’re going to use this for an in-class exercise and some practice. 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 key-framed 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.

Read:

• Chapter 3 on the graph editor in How to Cheat in Maya 2013.
• Chapter 6 on rigs in How to Cheat in Maya 2013.
• Chapter 3 on basic character movement in Character Animation Fundamentals.

Do:

• Download the rigs from the HowToCheatInMaya.com site (3D Assets Rig at the top of the files/chapters list).
• Read through chapter 6 on rigs as above and experiment with the controls (some translate, some rotate, etc).  Also, make sure to check the forward kinematics / inverse kinematics discussion (and possibly read Maya help, etc) in chapter 6.
• Animate the “lift” exercise from chapter 3 in Character Animation Fundamentals using either the goon rig or groggy rig from the How to Cheat in Maya rigs that you downloaded.
• Add some interest to your clip with a floor, shaders, lighting, and polished render settings. Render your image sequence and create a 1280 x 720 h.264 .mov file.  Include this movie file in the movies folder of your Maya project folder and upload the Maya project folder (delete old scene files and image sequences) to your Dropbox submission for 320_LASTNAME_H3 folder.

This is due by Thursday, September 26.

Read:

• Chapter 2 in How to Cheat in Maya that discusses Splines and Tangents for making animation changes in the Graph Editor.
• Chapter 2 in Character Animation that discusses matter, weight, and timing.

Do:

• Choose two or three of the ball movements (or splash) from chapter 2 in Character Animation. Complete one as a hand-drawn animation and the other two as 3D animations in Maya.  Use the graph editor to work on your timing.  Attempt through your key-framing and graph-editing to use as many of the principles of animation discussed in class (and ch 1 of How To…).
• Place your three 1280×720 h.264 .mov files in your 320_LASTNAME_H2 Dropbox folder.  This time, also include your Maya project folder (but make sure to remove all but your most recent Maya scene file and any extra renders, etc. before submitting).

Due Tuesday, September 17