Study Task 9 - Walk Cycles 2D, 3D and Beyond

This week was all about walk cycles. We were first thrown in the deep end and asked to try it out ourselves with our stop motion puppets.

Beryl puppet walk cycle

My puppet sadly has lead shoes and prefers to slide rather than walk, although it still came out better than I expected for a first attempt.

We were then taught how to do a basic 24 frame walk cycle by breaking it down into 8 frames and then tweening them until they amounted to 24 frames.

Basic 8 frame walk cycle learned in class

We then applied this to a character (or in my case, Mark from the Beano animation).

Guide for my Beano walk cycle (that I ultimately flipped for the scene)

Mark's walk cycle

Using what we learned with key frames and the graph editor in Maya, we made the Moom character walk too.

The Moom-Walk

What worked well:

• Both walk cycles turned out a lot smoother than expected
• Adding follow through to Mark's clothes

What could be improved:

• More experimentation to add character and emotion to a walk
• The follow through on Mark's hood could have been a bit better

Study Task 4 - Maya 5: Animation basics

In this Maya session we learned how to animate using keyframes and the graph editor. I was initially trying to animate the squash and stretch of a ball bounce by directly changing the size and dimensions of the sphere until we were shown how to use the squash property, though I think I need more practice playing around with this function because it ended up looking a lot less natural than my manual method. Given more time I would fix this.

What worked well:

• The motion was very fluid

What could be improved:

• Altering the easing and the values of the squash at certain points to make the movement look more natural

Study Task 4 - Maya 4: Backgrounds

This week we were using Maya to model out our Beano backgrounds as a means of previsualisation to help with the backgrounds and storyboarding. I ultimately made a model of the inside of the electronics store for one of my scenes, and also a tree which took a few attempts because Maya kept crashing.

This was fun to make despite the number of attempts it took

This acted as a reference to one of my 3D-ish scenes

What worked well:

• Rotating my tree trunk cylinder before branching it out to add to that tree texture
• The store model became a good reference for one of my scenes

What could be improved:

• Changing the shape of the tree foliage so it doesn't look so much a like a Savannah tree
• Perhaps adding colour to my store scene

Study Task 5 - Maya 3: Moom

This week we were introduced to the Moom character in Maya and spent the session learning how to pose them to help us with previsualisation of our Beano dynamic poses.

Obligatory Saturday Night Fever pose

Made a quick model guitar so it could pose like Beryl when she's rocking it out

What worked well:

• Facial expressions
• The use of references to make the poses work

What could be improved:

• The rocker pose could be more exaggerated with more back and neck curving

Study Task 5 - Maya 2: Lighting

This Maya session is where our previous photography inductions came in useful - we learned how to light up objects in a scene in Maya which entailed a knowledge of the types of lighting in a scene, i.e. the key light, back light and fill light. We also learned how to apply textures to objects. I like the flexibility and sheer amount of possibilities in using Maya to control assets like shadows and how reflective a surface can be, though as of yet I have a long ways to go before I can master this program.

Unfortunately I couldn't manage to get a render due to Maya crashing on me consistently which I believe had something to do with me playing around with an ocean texture, but I'll hopefully use my newfound knowledge in future Maya projects.

What worked well:

1. The effect of lighting on the different textures within the program
2. The ability to toggle certain shadows on and off to make certain light sources stand out

What could be improved:

1. Saving often to avoid losing everything every time Maya crashes