Animation Journey

Monday, April 25, 2005

Week 4

What a week. I'm exhausted. I barely got my work in this week. I missed Q and A because I was driving an old truck to Oregon for a friend who needed one. Long story, but i digress.

We got our grades this week, and I was absolutely mortified to see a B+ for my grade last week. I couldn't belive it. I was working hard, my review was "great work as usual Phil" BUT I was critiqued for not haveing squash and stretch in the work I turned in! (I was really concerned last week about turning in work without S&S, but it was the assignment NOT to add the S&S so I deliberately left it out!) I feel I was likely docked for that, and it upset me. If you don't do A work in the business world, you lose business, so I was alarmed. I'm calm now, but man it paniced a bit.

This week we are to add S&S to our bouncing ball and add a heavy ball to compare the feel of the timing and spacing. I reviewed a bunch of other critiques and saw that those who rendered thier work were getting more (animated) reactions from their mentors, so I took a bunch of extra time to render mine. I felt like I had to keep up with the others. Now I just feel silly about it. My apologies to my fellow AMers for getting so competitive and so anal. I'm using playblast from now on.

Here is my assignment this week.

Bouncing Bowling Balls
(its 16MB.. so be patient downloading this :)

I rather like it. I corrected the arcs as Derek pointed them out, and really pushed the S&S for the light ball. Here are some details:

  • I flattened out the height of the ball bounce for a more graceful curve.
  • The toughest part was accurately rolling the ball... WITH a deformer in place. Once I fugured out how to do that it went pretty quickly.
  • One the heavy ball, I left the ball on the surface for a full two frames for each contact. This is not visible, but it is definately perceptable.
  • I used a camera shake to emphasize the impact on the second contact frame of the two frames.
  • I added a little hop to the light ball on the immediately following third frame. I deliberately chose to not roll the light ball on this little hop, just a simple hop to keep the bowling ball in the foreground. Any S&S or roll would have taken attention off the main character of that moment.
  • I turned off shadows (or turned we way down) per a fellow student critique, and added a stylish AM Bowling logo on the ball to really show the rotation.
This was fun assignment becuase it was my first time dealing with rendering and surface nodes in Maya. I think the animation itself was a gas too, and I hope, now, that the rendering won't detract from the actual animation. It took me a bit of time to model the bowling ball (can you say "booooo-leeean"?)

Finally, I have made a deliberate decision to not pay much attention to my grade. If I get a B out of a class, but I enjoyed it and learned a bunch, then it will eventually add up to a body of good work. No one is going to hire me becuase I got A's.. they will hire me becuase I do good work. Fail faster fail faster. That is the path to excellence.

-P

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