In an effort to get up to date on blog entries (I am currently in Week 6 of Class 2, yet am nearly 12 weeks behind with this article), I’ll try to keep this and all future journals fairly short, at least until I am caught up. With that said, the following is what I came up with for Week 8:

The Stu pose and sketches of the week were to show strength and physical prowess. This was fairly difficult, as I not only wanted to show that the character was strong, but also that he was struggling with a difficult task. If I don’t push the poses far enough, I risk making the task look effortless and thus portray it as not a feat of strength. However, if I push the poses too far I could show Stu as a weakling, incapable of properly lifting a heavy object. After looking at a lot of reference images, I think I maintained a decent balance on a few of the poses below.

My favorite poses were numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, and 10. I was leaning towards 5 because of the nice arc in the back, but after listening to the opinions of my classmates I switched to number 3, which may be less interesting in my opinion, but shows a stronger stance. Check out the image below to see how it translated into 3D.

I was a little underwhelmed by the response I got to this pose from my mentor. This week we had a substitute by the name of Ethan Hurd. Some of his film credits include Toy Story 2, Shrek, Madagascar, Open Season, Surf’s Up, Bolt, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. He was an excellent teacher for the short time that I had him, but I could never get the glowing critique from him that I so desired. For the above pose, I was told that it didn’t sell the idea of strength so much as suggesting that Stu is in love with the rock. I still got an A on the assignment, but such remarks made me feel as if I completely missed the mark.

In addition to the sketches shown earlier, I had to plan out some sketches for a vanilla walk cycle. The term “vanilla” means that this should be a basic no frills walk. It should lack any discernible personality yet include proper weight and physicality.

I received a lot of flak for the above sketches. Your first thought may be like that of some of my classmates and my substitute mentor: that these are not even sketches. They are. In order to practice becoming more proficient with my Wacom table that I have had but rarely used for years, I did the above work in Photoshop with pen and tablet. There is nothing wrong with drawing in a medium other than pencil and paper, yet everyone seemed to think that I cheated and just took screenshots of my blocking in Maya. This was a somewhat hurtful accusation; leave it to me to make planning so true to my finished blocking that people think I did the blocking first. This was not the case, and I cleared it up with Ethan later on. Nevertheless, after this point I decided that I would make my sketches much rougher in order to avoid confusion. Despite the criticism, I was very satisfied with my planning and I think it led to a better blocking pass in Maya, seen below.

I did exactly what I wanted to do on this blocking pass. No revisions were necessary before heading into spline the following week.

The primary assignment for this week was to animate a character called Tailor, which consisted of a ball with a squirrel-like tail. While the tail functions like a pendulum in many ways, it is also different (and more challenging) in that it has life and muscles to it. Therefore, I had to be conscious of overlap on the tail and the effects of gravity and drag on it without allowing it to look like a limp, lifeless appendage. I spent a lot of time planning this assignment out. I knew that I wanted to do something more than just a few meaningless bounces, and ideally I would have liked to tell a short story. However, I knew the dangers of spending too much time on the idea and too little time on the execution. As a middle ground to my two competing desires, I decided to retell a story that I had already told before in a previous animation called Nuttin’s Free. This would allow me to reuse some props and ideas so that I could get straight to animating.

Well perhaps not straight to animating. I did have to do some sketches to show what action Tailor was to do in the assignment. In previous weeks I had really enjoyed the fact that some of my classmates spent the time to do these sketches in Photoshop as opposed to just drawing quick and dirty thumbnails on paper. So I did the same thing in order to add an extra level of polish to my planning. Below you can see what I came up with. It very accurately depicts what would happen in my final animation.

Pretty planning, but this was also an example of form over function.

The planning above does some things right: I carefully document all of the important frame numbers, I show relational positions between frames and props, and I show accurate squash and stretch. A major problem with this planning, however, is that a lost sight of what the purpose of planning is. I was so intent on creating something that was nice to look at, that I forgot that planning should really be for my benefit alone. I shouldn’t have tried to impress my mentor and classmates with some colorful and computer-generated planning. I ended up wasting time that I could have spent on the actual animation. I could have done sketches that were just as functional by hand in much less time. Sure, they wouldn’t have looked as nice, but who cares? Thumbnails shouldn’t have to be pretty. It’s also important to note that I messed up a bit on the Tail Cycle. Because I tried to cram everything onto the page without creating messy overlap between my drawings, my tail positions are off, most noticeably on frame 45. The tail should drop down below the level it is at on frame 44. I should never have changed a thumbnail just so that it looks nicer in the planning. The only purpose of planning is to benefit the animation. I’ll remember this from now on.

At least I left myself enough time to animate this week. Yet I still hadn’t grasped the idea of overlapping action completely. I understood it in theory, but couldn’t yet put it on paper, so to speak. I initially thought that I did a pretty decent job on my first pass animation. Below you can see what I came up with.

However, there’s a lot wrong with this picture, as my mentor was sure to point out. The tail is quite stiff throughout, and at times the focus of the piece gets lost among all the additional props and scenery detail. Yet again, form over function. In the first few frames of the animation, there’s no reason at all to obscure Tailor’s tail with the leaves of the tree, except that I wanted a lot of leaves. The purpose of the assignment though was to highlight the motion of a squirrel tail. My revision the following week fixed a few of these issues, simplifying the idea and removing a lot of needless clutter.

The tail could use some tune-up still, that’s for certain. It’s still a little stiff in a few instances when flying through the air. However, it at least is a big improvement on the previous week, and it’s good enough to allow me to leave it alone and focus on the assignment coming up for Week 8.

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.