Animation Mentor Student
This week was the polar opposite of last week for me, and not in a good way. Whereas last week, I had plenty of work to keep me busy, this week I only had one assignment to do. This should have allowed me to get it done and out of the way quickly, right? Unfortunately, no. While last week I started my homework immediately and finished it within a few days, this week I pushed things way back until the night before it was due. Still not a huge problem. I’m used to finishing work on a tight schedule. Furthermore, the assignment was straightforward, even if the concept of the week (overlapping action) has been referred to as the most difficult fundamental principle of animation.
The problems I had with this assignment were ones that I brought onto myself. I took what should have been a simple assignment and added much more to it than was necessary. The bare minimum I should have done was to animate a pendulum traveling in a straight line from left to right, starting from a standstill and coming to a complete stop at the end. The point of this animation was to show understanding of overlapping action of joints, meaning that I should get the motion of the pendulum tail to move in a wave form when stopping or changing direction. In such instances, all joints do not move at the same time, but instead react to the motion of the preceding joint, causing a delay in change of direction of each joint in the natural swing of a pendulum. But instead of taking the straightforward route, I chose to add some of my signature flare, throwing in some loop-de-loops, multiple directional changes, and just to make certain it was over the top, a few flamethrowers for good measure. Sometimes I just have to look back and say, “What was I thinking?” Even the planning for this assignment looks unnecessarily complicated.
My complicated blueprints for the motion of a pendulum.
After planning my assignment, I jumped into Maya to do the animation, and many things gave me problems. Getting the overall motion of the pendulum tail to look natural was hard enough in and of itself, but struggling with technical difficulties furthered my frustration. While fighting with the quirks of the software program used to be a regular thing for me, I have since streamlined my workflow to avoid most problems, making thoughtful decisions that don’t generally cause the program to “explode.” However, since I was rushed for time, I threw all caution to the wind and just started doing. Big mistake. It wasn’t long before my file references were all screwed up and my experiment in animating a portion of the assignment using physical dynamics simulations completely fell apart. I wasted hours trying to get gravity to affect my pendulum in the correct way in order to save time, ironically enough. In the end I went back to animating it how I should have in the first place, by key-framing everything. Even though rushing my work was partly to blame, I remain convinced that animators (outside of visual effects people) shouldn’t even bother with dynamics. You lose creative control over everything you attach real-world physics to and then have to hope and pray the simulation does what you want. It’s definitely better just to take the extra time to animate everything by hand.
After going back and animating the pendulum by keyframing, I tried to create some flame effects using Maya fluids. I have done this before, with mildly convincing results, but this time around I couldn’t get a flame that looked like anything more than what a tiny lighter could produce. Ultimately, I just added in some stock footage of flames into the scene using After Effects, as well as a Mario theme to top things off. By this time, I was really pushing the clock, and managed to submit my assignment with only a minute left until the deadline. Whew. Talk about cutting it close.
The above video is actually that of a revision to the assignment I first turned in. I managed to fix some things, but there are still some major issues with it. At the time of this writing (which is already after Class 1 had ended), I can confidently state that this was my weakest work of the entire term. At least I improve on everything after this point.