Back to Basics

To start the new year of I wanted to loosen myself up and get back to the swing of things with my animation. I've received feedback on my Computer Arts Practice coursework and my animation quality was mixed with some being good, and others quite 'floaty'. I put this down to not having great timing in these animations and my experience in getting the result I want from Maya. I will be continuing animation as my focus in Computer Arts Practice and so want to also back this up with my exploration in Creative Research.

The first task I wanted to do was a pendulum swing to allow me to play around with Maya's graph editor to get the motion and timing I wanted. I discovered a few helpful options in the graph editor such as quick frame copying, looping animations. I then discovered what I was looking for, a "eureka" moment for me. Weighted tangents were always something I desired but didn't know how to access or even know what to search for. By default they are turned off and to turn them off requires accessing a menu item followed by an icon. To see the difference here is my pendulum swing without weighted tangents:

And here it is with weighted tangents:

Although not perfect, I am much more happy with this result, its something that would've benefited me so much last semester as I struggled to get the curves how I wanted. Larger weights on the curves gives me that slow start from dropping the pendulum, before it was going straight into the motion.

Second task was a ball bounce, something an animator would typically try before anything else. I particularly wanted to continue exploring the weighted tangents as well as some squash and stretch. Not that impressive but its nice to come back to an exercise like this from time to time.

The next task I did was a character turning their head. The focus was on anticipation, natural movement and overlapping action as well as trying out an eye blink.

I found the following websites and articles to be a lot of help:
http://www.11secondclub.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=4773
http://www.11secondclub.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=19776
http://www.animatorisland.com/51-great-animation-exercises-to-master/
http://www.animatorisland.com/animation-secret-getting-there-is-half-the-fun/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ig3DiQ4XbUk
https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse458/09au/content/html/exercises/graph_editor_exercise.html
http://blog.digitaltutors.com/animating-believable-eye-blinks/