Mon, November 23, 2009

By the way, I don't come up with the names for these characters – just like the puppies you pick up at the pound, they already have a name; you can change the names if you want, but you run the risk that they won't come when you call them. The ballcoon's given name is Tailor (a little on the nose if you ask me; I'd have endorsed Taylor instead), and you already know Stu well. Ballie is the new character this week; a ball with legs for walkin'.

There's another version of Ballie with only one leg, which we could use to do a hop if we didn't feel up to animating Tailor, but I went with Tailor, so that character hasn't shown up at onebee yet. He was obviously named at the end of a long weekend at Animation Mentor headquarters, when everyone was just ready to go home. His name is One Leg.

Stu's assigned pose this week was "physical strength." Less challenging than "devastation," but a particular kick in the pants for me, given my heartfelt renunciation of props. Without something heavy for Stu to hold, carry, or shove, I'd be stuck with a cliché bodybuilder pose, or nothing at all. I went through a few options in the sketching phase, and none particularly excited me.

I ended up selecting a pose where Stu is pulling on a rope that's attached to something heavy that's high above, out of frame. Perhaps it's a building, or maybe a Macy's balloon? I liked leaving it vague, because as I've said before, I think the pose should be about communicating the assigned emotion, not about telling a particular story. Some people put Stu under a comically exaggerated set of barbells or something – where the prop communicates the strength more than the pose does, but of course I hated that. A couple of people had Stu carrying a relatively small box – about the size of a large novelty snow globe – but whatever was in the box was super heavy. I wish I had thought of this. He could've been carrying a dark matter pellet from Futurama! Those things are about the size of a ping pong ball but weigh more than a car. That would've been a fun pose to do.

For reasons known only to my subconscious, I sketched the pose facing left-to-right at first. In the computer, one of Stu's arms is rigged FK (forward kinematics) and the other is rigged IK (inverse kinematics), so I recently started planning these poses based on which hand was more appropriate for which style of posing. (I'll spare you the extended IK vs. FK discussion unless someone asks, but you can Google it if you're dying to know.) Anyway, that explains why he's facing the other way in the final pose; I considered flipping it back in Photoshop at the end, but the pose isn't any stronger one way or the other, so I left it.

Our other assignment this week was a "vanilla walk," the instructor's way of referring to a character's walk cycle without any personality or flair, just basic walking action. This is our first two-part assignment, and I'm thrilled about that. Normally, each Sunday we post some animation, and each Monday or Tuesday night, we receive a critique in which our mentor offers his advice about how it could be made better. We have the option to revise and resubmit (not for a grade, just for our own practice, and to hear his comments on the revision – much more valuable than a grade), but we also have a new assignment due Sunday already, so there's normally not a lot of time for that. I'm really glad to have a week where the assignment is the revision.

We learned a lot about walk cycles in our lecture, Brian went over even more techniques in our Q&A session, and I studied Richard Williams's entertaining and informative book The Animator's Survival Kit, which has an entire chapter on walks. The following sketch attempts to encapsulate some of what I learned, as a blueprint for moving to the computer and setting up my assignment.

Because it's a two-part assignment, this week we were asked to leave our animation in "blocking" mode, which means not every frame is animated. Out of every 24 frames (which is two steps, or one stride), only 8 poses are set, as shown in the sketch. (Actually, there are two extra poses at frames 11 and 23, but still there are a lot of frames missing, and that's why it looks a little jerky; it's intentional.)

One of the wonderful things about animating in the computer is that once you've finished, you can render the same clip from any angle you want for free. Equally exciting to me (though perhaps not to you), you can set all kinds of rendering options, like choosing to make parts of the animation invisible. As part of a demonstration in the lecture, we looked at the final animation without the legs, to see that it ends up resembling that old bouncing ball from a few weeks ago. I thought that was pretty cool.

With all this going on, there wasn't time to animate a revision to my critically panned cult favorite Tailor clip "Ballcoons in Love", so I'll have to get to that this week.

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