Sunday, April 29, 2007

Session 104 - Heavy & Light Ball Bounce

So, this week our assignment was to create an animation of two balls bouncing, one that is light and one that is heavy. I chose to do something like a bowling ball and a ping pong ball. So first I went and bought some ping pong balls and bounced them around for a while. I didn't want to buy a bowling ball though, but I was able to find some good video reference on youtube. This was incredibly helpful and I think is the reason I was able to get it looking so heavy in the end.

After the observation I did some rough sketches of how I wanted it to work, then I went and animated the heavy ball alone. This was a bit easier for the way I was doing it because basically I wanted the ping pong ball to be bouncing around and hitting off the bowling ball but for the bowling ball to not really be affected by it. After I had the heavy ball pretty much down, I put the light ball in and just kinda let it go where it wanted to. I had to adjust the timing to get it to bounce in the right place to hit the heavy ball, but it ended up working out alright. Not exactly how I sketched it, but that's probably a good thing if you look at my sketches. Here they are:

Final Heavy/Light Ball Bounce Sketch:


So, as you can see it is pretty freaking confusing, and not exactly what I ended up with. I tried to give it color so it was less confusing, but that only gets you so far. Anyhow, here's the final ball bounce!

Final Heavy/Light Ball Bounce:


I think this turned out pretty well. Ping pong balls bounce around a hell of a lot in real life. This would have been very hard to do if we were supposed to work in all 3 dimensions. yipes. Oh, also, there was no pose assignment this week. Sorry! Maybe next week!

Sunday, April 22, 2007

AM Blog.Start

So I decided to start one of these newfangled animation mentor blogs so people could check out the work I've been doing at AM. Sooo, to get things started.. I'm in Class 1 (of 6) right now, with mentor Elliot Roberts. I'm just starting week 4 (Session 104) right now, but that will come in a later post once I've actually done something for it. Here's the stuff from my previous weeks!

Session 101:
This week we didn't have an actual assignment other than to just do some housekeeping stuff. We also had a live Q/A sessions with Shawn Kelly. This was awesome. He has so much energy, and is just so excited about animation I felt like he got the entire class seriously revved up to start the course. We also met Elliot, and just kinda introduced ourselves and talked about whatever stuff. It was funtimes.com, and I think our class got off to a good start.

Session 102:
This week we were supposed to do a bunch of sketches and then choose our favorite and pose the Stu character with the sketch as a reference. I ended up doing a few because I didn't know which sketch would make the best pose. Here are my sketches:



Final (Sitting) Pose:


Flex Pose:


Reach Pose:


So yeah, I felt like the sitting pose ended up being the most interesting one. The flex one was pretty good too, so it was a tough decision. Yeah!

Session 103:
In week 3 our assignment was to do a ball bouncing with the weight and bounce of a basketball. So I went out and bought a basketball, and stood outside dropping it on the ground for a while to see how it bounces. This is what I came up with after a few days of working on it and tweaking the heck out of it.

Ball Bounce:


We were also supposed to do some poses in the vain of what we did last week, but this week we were supposed to do them to the theme of "Excitement". I came up with a few poses, but my singing in the rain one was most definitely my favorite. Here they are!

Sketches:


Final (Singing in the Rain) Pose:


Hooray Pose:


TeeHee Pose:


And that's it! I'll be posting at least once a week to keep this thing up to date with what I've been working on. Hooray!

 
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