Maya Animation

Although i found it difficult to get my head around at first, i actually really enjoyed testing out animating in maya. It was alot easier than it looked once i understood it. I did have a few problems as the first three times I tried to playblast the bouncy ball exercise Maya crashed and lost everything i had done. I found the way the keyframes worked was very simple, and liked how the different features that allowed the assets to be influenced by the 12 principles, like squash, worked. I was intimidated by maya animation before but now i feel i could possibly use it in other work in the future. It was actually much easier than a program like animate to fix things like timing if you animated something too fast or slow.

Modelling in Maya

I was originally really intimidated by Maya because it looked so complicated and professional, and I did find it difficult to remember all the different keys and work out how to do things, but after following the guides on estudio and practising a bit more I found it was easier than it looked to begin with. It took a while to get used to the different controls and remember where things were, but the truck exercise helped me so that when I went on to trying to modelling something of my own choosing I had a bit of knowledge of what to do. I decided to make a water bottle that was on my desk at the time. Since then said water bottle has been binned so I cant post a picture of it unfortunately. I started making the water bottle by creating a cylinder shape, which i lengthened and beveled alot to make the edges more curved. I then used more cylinder shapes which i beveled to create the top half of the bottle, and another smaller and thinner one for the lid. I set the segments of the bevels differently to get different degrees of curves. Once I was done I coloured it using a shiny blue colour which i think worked well. I am overall pleased with my bottle.

OUAN406- Final Animation

I have just finished tidying up my animation and fixing the timing a little bit, as well as adding some details like desks in the first scene and putting in the backgrounds. I scanned in my oil pastel drawings for backgrounds, but found that because there was such a dramatic zoom in my animation at the beginning, the quality was bad and it distracted from the animation. I fixed this by using watercolor effect brushes in photoshop to get the abstract effect that my group agreed on and then importing the different backgrounds into animate. I really like the finished look of the backgrounds. 

I also added in the desks around my character in the first shot, which i faded out using the alpha effect in animate and i think this makes the animation more effective because it shows how intimidating the room seems to my character. I downloaded a VCAM to do the dramatic zooms and to follow around the different moving elements of my animation so it is all one continuous shot. If i had the time I would like to make my animation more polished, for example I'd like to frame by frame the fly more, especially when he lands, because he should be more flat here, but i didnt have time to fix it. Overall, I am really pleased with the final animation, especially because i was so intimidated by the brief to begin with.

Applied Animation final crit

On tuesday we had our final critique for the applied animation module. The feedback we received as a whole was positive; everyone agreed that our three animations tie together nicely and that they each illustrate the point we were trying to make about how hard having autism can be. Individually, the feedback i received was that my transitions worked and flowed really well and the voice over really lended itself to the animation. Negative comments included rethinking some of the shot framing, as at this point a few scenes werent centered properly, which i knew was a problem, and adding backgrounds, which I havent got around to yet. I have made a few oil pastel backgrounds which i scanned in to test with the animation, and found that because of the zooms the quality is really bad at points, meaning ill have to rethink some of these and maybe use a different medium or do some backgrounds digitally.

National Autistic Society brief progress

Over the last week I've been working on my autism animation. I found it really challenging to begin with because I havent really done anything like it before, and i was intimidated by the amount of difficult zooms and morphing that I had to do. The animation also has to be one continuous shot in order to fit our groups theme and so they all flow together. As usual, i put off starting for a bit because of this fear that I wouldnt be able to do it, but once i asked Matt and a few people more adept with Adobe Animate than me, I just went for it and the results arent terrible. I had to draw my character from above for the first shot, so I had to take a few reference photos of people from a height to get this to look right (it took longer than it should have.) After this, I had to work out how to morph  this image into the buzzing fly which comes next. I achieved this by experimenting with different in-betweens until i found one that looked like a natural transition, and gradually erased the surroundings in the first shot frame by frame so they flowed away naturally and didnt just disappear. I think this actually looked much better than i was expecting it to. Next I had the fly land, and also gradually erased it and drew lines sprouting from its legs that would make up a surface for the hand to write in in the next shot. I found the hand the most difficult part so far, because Ive never really animated something as complex before, so I had to take a few reference videos of my own hand writing and base my animation off that. It was frustrating because each tiny movement made a big difference in how the animation of the hand flowed, so it took alot of practice and trial and error to try and get something that looked natural, but im quite happy with how it turned out. The next part of the animation involved making the pen that was writing morph into a pairof legs walking, to show how footsteps can be distracting in an exam situation for someone with autism. As with the previous transitions, I made the hand flow away with gradual erasing, leaving the pen which i broadened and added a foot sprouting gradually. I used Preston Blairs 'Cartoon Animation' book to help me with the walk cycle, and im really happy with how it turned out, but i think ill have to slow it down a bit for the final animation.