CAN 1 Strong Poses Project 2

Hello Everyone,

Here is the second installment of my CAN 1 class blog posts. This post is about my strong poses project. In this project we were required to do one page of exploratory poses that expressed 7 different pre-defined emotions, one page of blocked out scenes to show off our 7 chosen poses and lastly a Maya file and play blast of Bugsy in said poses that we chose earlier.

Pre-Pro was the place to begin. The 7 predefined emotions were relaxed, fear, anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, and the seventh was just a balanced pose on either one foot or one hand. It took me quite a few hours to brainstorm all my poses and I recommend that if you are hitting your head against a brick wall then it is a good idea to just look up reference of people posing.

I then went onto the Maya scene. I began to pose Bugsy into all sorts of poses having fun and trying to create good negative space. All the emotions did not come across as strongly as I wanted but given the limitations that the Bugsy rig has I managed to get the idea across.

This whole video is in stepped so that you focus on the poses themselves. All in all this project helped me stay in touch with the animator within by making me use my MEL button making skills and by allowing me to use the graph editor and dope sheet. Overall tons of fun.

Until next time,
Rebecca Luse

CAN 1 Eggy Walk Project 1

Hello Everyone,

Another class project to post so here goes. CAN 1 (character animation) had me doing this project that they call the Eggy Walk. Why such an interesting name? Well the little character known as Bugsy is walking around with an egg shell covering his upper torso. So naturally it is a walking "egg".

The project requirements were as follows. Make Bugsy walk across the screen by including contact, passing, up, and down poses. Also we were to make the walk more realistic by adding foot rolls and hip tilts and twists. There were two other sections to this project that were optional but they provided a chance to get more points. These sections were a walk/turn and then stop in front of either a mailbox or a scale (Depended on the background you chose.) and the second section was to do the walk/turn but instead of staying stopped do a pause and then jump onto the scale. If both these were attempted they added an extra 10 points to your grade.

I decided to do the Eggy Walk with a turn and stop at the end for my CAN 1 Project 1. I spent a good amount of time getting familiar with the rig taking time to make MEL buttons to key the whole rig and to select the whole rig so that animating would be easier. Once familiar I jumped into contact poses and then passing poses. I had the most issue with the fact that I made my steps to wide. I did not realize this until around the final phase because each adjustment made my knees lock out. So keep that in mind when animating, take realistic sized to smaller steps just to be safe.

Next came my ups and downs. I tended to lean to far forward in my ups and to far back in my downs which can make the character look off balance, this was a pain to fix but definitely gave a better result. After those were done I adjusted my hips and tried to add foot rolls. Eggy walk was completed but I was not done yet. On to the turn/stop!

I did a few more steps the same as I had done earlier only this time I added a little turn to the hips so that Bugsy could turn so that he could check his mail. The steps here were smaller so they were more complicated to get to look right but they all have the same principles. Finally it came time to stop Bugsy. Simple add a few moving holds and simply stop moving the character.

I learned a lot and am proud to announce I can finally understand animation better than I did in FOA (fundamentals of animation). I got a couple critiques from my lab instructor and was not afraid to ask the lecture teacher to critique me in front of class all in hopes to make this project as complete and pretty as possible. Remember your eyes can only see so much, ask for others to look at your stuff and you might just be pleasantly surprised at the results of taking their advice.

Until next post,
Rebecca Luse

VEF 1 Rigid Bodies Project

Hello (to all readers),

I would like to take a moment to talk about my VEF 1 or visual effects class rigid bodies project. The specifications for this project were to create, using Maya, 10 unique active rigid body events and to add at least 3 constraints. Once completed we were instructed to bake out the animation and then to either play blast or render the final video. This final video turn in will be what is graded for the project.

Once we were informed of this project I took time to plan out my motion. I decided to rely heavily on pin constraints for the hammer and all the seesaws and added gravity fields to almost all active bodies to create as realistic motion as possible. I also added a few hinge constraints on any swinging doors and to help the cup fall properly. This project was challenging but in a good way. Every time it baked out differently then it played I had to find ways to fix it which meant it was time to put on my problem solving cap. No matter how many times I had to redo I found a new love and passion for simulation.

I did have time to render my video so it is fully rendered out (it took about 7 hours) using Maya Mental Ray and composited together in Nuke, After Effects and Final cut. I chose to add a clip from the song Everything is Honey from the 2011 Winnie the Pooh movie to add a little fun to the video.

Besides learning about active and rigid bodies we learned about constraints and fields to make the simulation/animation more realistic when it comes to the physics of motion. I learned how to use these tools in Maya quite well and once you are hooked, you are hooked for life.