Animation Mentor AN01 - Week 06
Week 6 of Animation basics is the beginning of a 2 week project on the concepts of overlapping action and squash and stretch. The goal is to create a short animation using the “Tailor” rig. The first week of the project is just getting the body to feel “bouncy” and then the second week will be adding in the tail.
Tailor is “squirrel like” in that it is a ball with a “fluffy” tail that articulates in 4 places. The ball part of the rig has a squash/stretch parameter that makes the body tall and thin or short and squat. It’s a very simple rig that is purpose built to focus on these two concepts in particular.
We worked with this rig in the tail animation from Week 4 and it is a lot of fun to animate so I decided to push myself and create a little “story” for my project. As always my projects start with a sentence…
Armed with a clear description I created a quick storyboard in Procreate on my iPad. The original idea was to have just a heavy “cartoon weight” or anvil on the teeter totter, but then I decided to add a second character that would just be sitting there oblivious to the action going on behind it. The “Monster Ball” character was perfect for that because he looks heavy and is also a simple rig with minimal controls.
I was able to block in the motion of the ball really fast, so I decided to “upgrade” my project with a bit of interaction between the two characters. Instead of having the Monster ball oblivious, I would turn him around have him eagerly waiting for his partner to bounce him on the teeter totter. That got me to this point…
With the timing worked out I could focus on refining the movement of both Tailor without the tail and the Monster. The hardest part of that whole process was the bit where he hits the teeter totter and it bends down. Getting Tailor to stick there as it bends was surprisingly tricky but It came out pretty well.
Then I made a decision to try and have the Monster open his mouth and stick out it’s tongue in response to Tailer saying “are you ready?” This led me to YouTube and looking at slow motion video of dogs panting. LOL you can find anything there!! I also wasn’t quite sure how to move him in his little excited hop, so I shot some reference footage of myself and timed it up with the dog panting to put into Maya as a reference plane…
Dog tongues are beautiful and horrifying LOL… perfect for a cartoon monster character and having a reference made it sooooooo much easier to animate. I was able to get a really good movement in just a few minutes of work. THAT is the awesome power of reference video!
Here’s what I turned in for the assignment this week…
The Monster Ball character was way beyond the scope of the actual assignment, but my goal from the beginning has been to push myself and the basics of this assignment were a good foundation to build a more complicated scene that would keep me challenged without going too far out of scope.
I got some great feedback from the instructor, Tim Ingersoll and I’m busy making tweaks and adding in the tail movement for Week 07… stay tuned!
