Animation Mentor AN01 - Week 05
For our assignment this week, we dove even deeper into the concept of “Overlapping action” by looking at the movement of a “pendulum”….
No… not THAT kind of pendulum you sicko! THIS kind of pendulum…
It’s a dangling joint chain where each ball in the chain can rotate affecting the joints below it. The idea is to animate the “character” moving around the screen and account for the overlapping action as the platform drags the chain of spheres around the screen.
I decided to start with a simple left to right motion where the pendulum accelerates from zero to a very hard stop with a strong effect on the joints below. As always it starts with a crappy sketch…
Working in Maya, I animated something in short order… The first part of animating the block from left to right is cake and that let me focus on the subtleties of the pendulum action…
I was feeling pretty good about this, and then one of my classmates posted up an amazing interpretation of the assignment where she had the pendulum bouncing a ball and then hitting the ball with its tail in a summersaulting motion. It was sooooooo good and inspired me to do a second pendulum animation with more personality.
I decided to have my pendulum catch a heavy bowling ball falling off a ledge and carry it across the screen to deposit it on another ledge where it would continue to roll off screen.
Armed with a clear sentence, I did a quick set of storyboards to help understand the the animation better…
The sketching helped me get my head around the motion and I dove into the project by blocking out key poses with “stepped” keyframes. Stepped keys have no animation between them and are a great way to quickly build a timing of “still” poses.
The timing felt pretty good and I immediately started to refine the tail movement. That was NOT a good move LOL… I spent A LOT of time screwing around with all three objects… Ball, platform, tail. It was too much to keep track of all at once.
Instead, I really needed to lock down the interaction of the ball and the platform first because that movement would ultimately drive the movement of the tail.
This made things MUCH easier to comprehend and based this motion, I was able to start with straight version of the tail to get the direction and timing down…
With that feeling pretty good, it was then much easier to get to a finished result by animating the rest of the joints in the tail and adding in some ball rotation…
Devastation Pose…
The last part of this week’s assignment was to do another pose for the prompt “Devastation” based on sketches…
I made the mistake of watching the news this past week so my poses got a little “bleak”, but posing is so much fun, I went a little overboard, and did 3 poses instead of one. Below are the poses plus a timelapse of how I created each one…
