Advanced Animation - Exercises

29/08/2023 - 03/10/2023
Kim MinJoon 0353248
Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media / GCD61604 / Taylor's University
Exercises

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Instructions

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Tasks

Exercise 1 - Bouncing Ball

For the first exercise of the module, just like the fundamentals class, we needed to make a ball bounce on blender. From what I heard of the class, most of the things that we were gong to do was going to be done on blender. 

Mr Kamal has given us the brief of what we're trying to accomplish in the exercise was to make a ball bounce in respect of the material and what type of ball is bouncing. There were 5 different things we had to do for this exercise. So he showed us some demos of previous works and it showcased a bunch of different balls like a football, basketball, table tennis ball, etc. 

So it was quite simple and easy to get an idea of what we were doing. 

I started it off with a normal ball bouncing to see what I was doing in class. Then after the class exercise, I went ahead and started with the football. 

Figure 1.1: Graph Editing #1

Figure 1.2: Graph Editing #2

Figure 1.3: Ball going out of frame

I think that the football was quite simple since it resembled and bounced a lot like the ball that I made during class so I just sort of remade that and changed it up a little bit. 

However, one thing that I didn't really get right was that the ball went out of the intended camera view so it just looked like it bounced out. 

Figure 1.4: Soccer Ball Bounce Pattern

After refining the graph and everything, I exported it, then moved onto the beach ball. 

For the beach ball, it was clear that it needed to be lighter than the football. So adjusting the timing, and the distance it bounced it made it look like a beach ball.

Figure 1.5: Beach Ball Bounce Pattern

One thing that made the table tennis ball special was that it bounced back up really high after being dropped.

Figure 1.6: Tennis Ball Bounce Pattern

Then unlike the table tennis ball, the bowling ball didn't really have much bounce and just stopped bouncing after a few seconds. 

Finally, we needed to make a ball have squish so with the same ball that I made in the beginning, I made it have squash and stretch so that it could be seen as a very elastic ball.

Figure 1.7: Squash and Stretch Ball Bounce Pattern #1

Figure 1.8: Squash and Stretch Ball Bounce Pattern #2

Figure 1.9: Stretching of the ball

Exercise 2 - Pendulum

For the second exercise, it was a different approach to follow through. A pendulum was shown with a disk that is floating and a rigged tail at the bottom hanging from the disk. It was given to us with the direction to make the pendulum move and stop with the tail swaying back and forth by anticipating how it will be affected by speed and such. 

Figure 2.1: Pendulum Movement

I first tried to make it sway here and there by making the disk go to the right. I made the animation key points to make sure that the tail was at where it was supposed to be. 

Then I made it sway to the right a few seconds after the stopping of the disk movement. 

Figure 2.2: Pendulum Swaying Tail

I thought that it was better that I shouldn't make it sway more than it was when it was swaying from the left because it would've been losing its momentum. After, I just repeated the swaying until it comes to a stop but the final outcome didn't look very pleasing at all as it was too little swaying that it looked like the tail was just a erect object that was trying to go back to its original form.

Figure 2.3: Pendulum Graph Editing

 I eventually did another try but this time a lot more movement from the tail and that meant I needed to make the disk move faster. 

The tail was moved a lot more to the left as it was swaying and that helped out with the other swaying in the end. 

Figure 2.4: Pendulum Improved Movement

Figure 2.5: Pendulum Improved Graph

Exercise 3 - Emotion Poses

For the last exercise, we were needed to get reference to different emotions like anger, sadness, scared, etc. and study those poses to make in blender. We first needed to draw silhouettes of the body shapes, then track the body to know the points of the body. 

I found images of emotions that I wanted to make on google and pinterest, then on photoshop, drew the silhouette and the line of action for all of the images. 

Figure 3.1: Emotion Study (Happy)

With that, I started to make the poses with the rigged character that is given for the assignment. I tried my best to replicate what I saw in the pictures and from the study of the poses.

The fingers were not really how I wanted it to be like from the preset menu so I changed up the fingers a little bit so that it would be more diverse in a way. 

Figure 3.2: Emotion Rigging (Happy)

The same progress went for all of the other emotions. I especially wanted to to try to make the sad one be very intimate and heartbreaking for the character so I made him be sat down and holding his head that made it seem like he was thinking about his life. It didn't entire follow the study of the silhouette but it had resemblance and similarities that I wanted to follow and change. 

Figure 3.3: Emotion Rigging (Sad) #1

Figure 3.4: Emotion Rigging (Sad) #2

Figure 3.5: Emotion Rigging Slides

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Reflections

Experience

I liked the exercises that we had a lot. It really felt that we were learning different ways of rigging and how to animate the characters and the rigs that is built upon the characters and objects.

Observations

I was liking this exercise more than what I thought and maybe it was because we learnt something similar to this but in 2d in the previous semester but I also found it that I was not really keeping track of what I was doing because I was busy trying out other things. 

Findings

I found the graph in blender to be quite daunting and stressful, as I didn't really know what I was controlling. It feels almost the same as animating in after effects but because in blender it is 3d objects that I am working with, it feels like I am lost in knowing what I am trying to accomplish with the graphs.