Author: Elizaveta Kuznetsova

Weight Shifts

This week we are focusing on weight shifts while walking. However, for now we are working on hips movement and, thus, we animate the step motion.

I shooted a lot of references, but I decided to post this one as I consider it the most demonstrative.

Here is my sketch based on the reference.

And here is my final animation of the step.

Pose To Pose Animation

This week we are using our Franky poses from last week and connecting them into an animation. The idea is to make it go from one pose to another and make it smooth.

Overlapping Action

This week we continue to work with ball with tail animation. It appears that there is a big room for improvement. In my first version I messed up with not only tail motion but also with balls action. Thus I started from correcting the motion arcs of the ball itself. Then I focused on the tail’s motions and overlapping movement. What is more, I tried to add more anticipation before my ‘squirrel’ jumps. I animated a little flick of the tail before ‘squirrel’ starts to move.

Basic Polish

This week we polish our living boxes animation. Last time movement of my box which wakes up and tries to turn over looked very unnatural. It happened because I did not focus on the anticipation before turning over. Thus, it looked like, the box suddenly has enough power to jump from its olace with no swinging. I fixed this issue in the new version of animation.

P.S. Golden Poses

This week we make three different emotional poses and what can be more emotional than ballet?

Critiquing Pendulum

This week I received critique on my pendulum assignment. It appears I do not have to correct a lot of details. I need to put the chain a bit lower when pendulum stops and add more offset keys in order to make the chain more realistic when it slows down.

Here is the new corrected version.

Ball with tail

We continue to work with offsetting technique and now we are adding anticipation in our animation. Anticipation shows the so-called ‘backstage’ of action, preporation to do something. This principle helps to make more dynamic motion. Our task to practice these two principles was to animate ball with tail. As a reference example, I used squirrel jumps.

Here is my sketch based on the reference.

And this is what I ended with.

Anticipation and Basic Acting in Animation

This week we started to learn about acting in animation and what makes this acting believable. In order to make our characters more appealing, we need to give them goal which they want to achieve, personality which will define their actions, and visible thoughts process.

Do you remember juice boxes from the previous week? Well, it is time to start remembering them now because we will turn our inanimate boxes to the real heroes of their story. The case is one of the boxes suddenly wakes up after the fall and understands that it is alive.

P.S. Golden Poses

Our favorite golden poses are back.

Today’s challege is to show regret emotion.

Here is the reference and my model.

Critiquing Ball

This week I have received the feedback on my bouncing ball animation. My sketch was quite fine but I have what to improve in the animation. Apparantely, I have to add more breakdowns and let the ball fall and stop more gradially. It seems that I made the timing too rapid, thus, I need to give the ball time to slow down when it is landing on the ground.

Pendulum

This week we studied overlapping action. It is type of action when several dependants move at the same time and this movement affects the whole body. Pendulum is one of the most demonstrative examples as it has several sections which move at the same time affecting one another. While animating a chain, I had to keep in mind that movement of the first section is followed by the movemend of the second one and the third one. It was a bit overwelming to control every part of the chain while setting the offsets in order to make swinging look more natural.

Weight in Animation

Weight is very important component of objects. In animation, if you want to make anything look realistic, you will have to work with weight. It is quite complicated part when it comes to animate it. The main tip to make it look realistiq is to work with timing and spacing of the body. First is the speed of the body while second is variation of that speed while movement. This part is, indeed, tricky as different objects have different weight.

Our assignment was to show how two juice boxes fall from the table on the ground. However, one box was full when another one was empty. Thus, the weight of these two boxes was different which affected the way they had to fall down.

P.S. Golden Pose

I decided not to put this one in caption as we will be doing golden poses every week.

My final result.

Bouncing Ball

Every jorney starts with the basics.

Week 1 assinment was to animate bouncing ball and show it’s dynamics. First, I worked with timing, spacing, and rotation. Then in order to make this look realistic, I studied how the gravity affected the ball and it’s bounciness. It would squash the ball when it hits the ground and stretch after that. Overall, creating every animation is a set of steps which starts from planning or, to be more precise, from sketch.

Now, it is time to procced to the animation.

Golden Pose

This week we focused on the consept of the “golden poses”. Golden pose is the most defining pose of the character in which all the features of the said character are best looking. It is not only about beautiful position and angle. Ideally, such poses should portray the character’s emotions and personality. The one golden pose that immediately comes to my mind is JoJo pose. That is why, I decided to recreate JoJo’s golden pose. For me, golden poses in JoJo are one of the most incredible posing among characters.

Unexpectedly, but Eren seems to like JoJo pose even more than I do.

Here is my final result.