Animation 101: Ball bounce

Basketball bounce 

From all the ball bounce videos I had made I was the most pleased with my basketball ball bounce. By no means it is great, but from all the animations that I had made – this is the one that I hated the least. I think like it looks like the ball has the right weight to it. It still has mistakes like the final bounce is probably a bit too high and a bit too fast. Other than that I am quite pleased with the result.

 

Ping Pong ball bounce

I used reference footage from the internet. It is not the best reference footage, I should have made my own reference videos but I hadn’t, because I did not have time for it.

About my ping pong ball bounce video – I think I have to address the quality of the video first, because there is a lot going on. I made my stop motion in a weird angle, because I could not get rid of the shadow of the tripod. Also you can see a shadow flickering on the right hand side of the video. It is not the best. The other issue is the disappearance of the ”floor.”  I do not know if it was the software’s fault or the camera, but it has cropped the bottom of my video which is a shame, cause it did exist! At least on the screen it did. Not the greatest, I did struggle. I am not very pleased with it. Now when it comes to the actual ping pong ball bounce – it could have been a bit faster. I think if I had the whole animation a bit faster it would look more believable. Maybe it’s not even the whole animation that needs to be faster, but the beginning of it.

 

Beach ball bounce

My beach ball bounce attempt is a bit odd. I am not sure if you can tell that it is a beach ball, because at times it looks a bit too heavy for a beach ball. I think the issue with this animation is the way beach ball lands on the ground. I think it stays on the ground for a bit too long.

 

Bowling ball bounce

As bad as I am with the bar sheets, I should have made one for the bowling ball as well, but I did not. I thought that the bowling ball is going to be quite easy. ”As long as you can make it look heavy, you’ll be good” – that is what I kept telling myself and that is why it is not the best animation. First of all, I should have not used little white cap, because that killed the illusion even before you saw the actual movement. Next time I’ll definitely make a bars sheet and make sure to use the right props.

 

Maya

I attempted to do the bowling ball bounce animation in Maya but it did not go so well. I can not really get used to the software. Bar sheets and graph editor did not seem to help either. I gave it a go.

Animation 101: Interaction

We were given the creative freedom to make any scenario that we wanted for this assignment. I really liked that. I could finally step out of my box and do something that I wanted to.

For the block interaction assignment in stop motion I decided to make an animation were two blocks become friends. In my head I was imagining a party were these two blocks did not fit in and once they met each other they found something in common and became friends.

My animation looks a bit too hectic and it is a bit too fast. It needed some holds in it. Now that I am re-watching my animation again, I can see that it looks a bit too dark as well. It could have been better, but that being said, I think you can still tell what is happening in the video. It is cute and I do not hate it. Success?

I would have created the same scenario in Maya, but I am not very good at Maya, so I had to make a different scenario. It’s the complete opposite of my stop motion interaction. While my stop motion video was cute and nice, my Maya one is not so friendly. I picked a bullying scene – two big cubes picking on one small cube with. My little cube becomes Hulk and scares his bullies. What a plot twist ey

It was quicker to make everything in Maya, but I still struggled with it. Animation is one thing and rendering is something completely else.

Just a torture.

Animation 101: Pendulum

I tried to do the pendulum in stop motion so many times and it seemed like I was not getting better at it. It was frustrating me a lot. I don’t do that well with the bar sheets, so I had made cut outs instead. I tried different calculations every time, but the end result seemed to end up being the same.

I watched a lot of videos about pendulum and I thought that I understand how it works. It does not seem that there is that much to it, but when I actually had to make the animation it just flopped.

Now when I look at my stop motion videos I can see everything that I had done wrong in them, but at the time my eyes were too tired to see all the mistakes. I can see that all of the swings are going a bit too high up.

My Maya pendulum animation is a bit better than my stop motion one, because I did Maya one later. I think if I had done it the other way around then my stop motion pendulum animation would have been better. Plus I had done the stop motion pendulum animation so many times that I kind of already knew where I had gone wrong the previous times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Animation 101: Anticipation

For me it was really difficult to do animation for anticipation in stop motion, because I kept ruining the set. All I can say is that I do not like blue tack. It was almost impossible to lift the wooden cube from the set without lifting the paint with it. I would either stain the set or I would lift the paint from the set by accident. All because of the blue tack. I knew that my animation was not great, but then again I couldn’t just give it another go and ruin the set even more. It would have been impossible for the next person to use it, so I just left it.

My animation is not great by any means. I can tell that it has a lot of mistakes. In the beginning it looks like my cube trips, because instead of tilting it back I had made it tilt forwards. I do not know how could I make such a big mistake but I had.  After I had already ruined the set I just did not want to give it another go.

 

At least I did not make the same mistake in Maya. It follows the right principle. It tilted back and then it tilted forwards as it’s supposed to.

When it comes to Maya, I am still taking baby steps. I do not particularly like Maya so it is hard for me to push myself to learn it, so I kept the animation very simple.

Animation 101: Slow in and Slow out

Back in the stop motion room. I was still nervous, but at least now I knew what I was expecting.

I think I should have added more frames to my animation, because there it looks like there is a very small build up? I think it should have gone a bit faster in the middle, but overall I think I have done alright. It is a smooth animation.

When it comes to Maya – Maya does slow in and slow out automatically for you so I did not do Maya animation. All you do is change the graph from linear curve to S curve.

Animation 101: Stop Motion A to B

I found introduction to stop motion to be a bit intimidating. I’ve had very little experience with stop motion animation, so I was quite nervous to be in the stop motion room. I was nervous of knocking down the tripod and damaging the camera or the set, so I tried to be very safe.

I think it took me a bit too long to make this animation, because of how nervous I was. Everything was new to me. I had never set up lighting for a set or done much animation before hand. I think for a newbie I had done alright. 

Animation 101: Maya A to B

Last week I had my introduction to Austodesk Maya. We were told and shown how to operate different tools in the software. Everything that was shown to us on the screen seemed very easy and I thought I would have no problems with picking it up, and my first assignment in Maya would be dead easy. My first assignment was to animate object from a to b. It was more difficult than I had anticipated..

I finally had sat down and tried to get to know how to use Autodesk Maya.  I attempted to move an object from a to b and I can not tell you how overwhelmed I got by the whole process. I had never used Maya before, but right off the bat I wanted to operate it the same way as I would operate Adobe Photoshop. I know that both software’s are completely different, but I still kept doing that and it was slowing me down. All the tutorials I was watching on YouTube were made in older versions of Maya but here I was, confused, using the latest version of it. Figuring out how to move the object was one thing but then I had to figure out how to save it as animation. So much struggle. Luckily I was not alone in the class and second year students helped me out with the animation. I really felt defeated. I will try to study Maya even harder, because I do want to learn it. Still learning how to crawl, hopefully I will be able to take my baby steps quite soon.

BEHOLD the first not very great animations on my blog.