Animation Mentor AN01 - Week 07
This week I had my first real challenge with the concept of “overlapping action”. The assignment was to use the “Tailor Rig” to illustrate the concept. Tailor is a ball with a cute squirrel tail, and last week I created a scene where he tries to jump onto a teeter totter and lift another character.
The first part of the assignment was to animate Tailor withOUT his tail, so we could focus on getting great squash and stretch in the ball part of his body and I turned in this…
This week a started working on the tail. The movement I have for the ball is very fast and bouncy. It was really challenging to get my head around how the tail should move, so I tried just added a straight tail to him to make sure the direction of the tail movement was right…
With that done, I started to make the tail flexible by adding rotation to the separate joints. It seemed like things were going well, but I think I had too much movement on the tail from the beginning and it just didn’t feel right.
I tried several attempts and decided to just turn in what I have and let the instructor dissect the movement. I got some fantastic feedback from Tim Ingersoll, the instructor and his notes really helped me understand how the tail should feel. I had way too many keyframes and too much movement and that wasn’t allowing me to get full use of the tail to create smooth overlapping motion.
I went back to the file and tweaked it some more to get the animation you see below!
It’s sooooooo much better, and what's more important is that I can really “see” what I had done wrong in the first pass!
We also had to create a pose this week and as usual, I did three instead of just one LOL.
