2d-3danimationworkbookdump

[2d-3danimationworkbookdump]

3D Animation in Maya

Ah, Maya... A high-price 3D animation software most commonly used by pros, and we were being taught how to use it! I thoroughly enjoyed learning 3D animation in Maya. However, the software was rather buggy. Most commonly, there was lag, crashes, and perhaps the most frustrating... The model would occasionally duplicate when all I wanted to do was paste keyframes. To introduce us to the basic concepts of 3D animation, we used Cavalry to create different walk cycles with a simple puppet rig, a ball with legs. With this we learned to use keyframes, and how these software create in-betweens automatically. We learned how to adjust these in-between's motion curves to fit the animation. The next thing we did to get started with Maya was create a 3D animation of Ash Ketchum. We each made a walk cycle. I'm very used to using Blender 3D's controls, so it took me a while to get the hang of Maya's. Next up was creating another short animation of the Ash Ketchum model. I made mine notice someone in the distance, turn his head and lip-sync "Hey!" Next up was our main 3D project. We were tasked to create 6 3D animations. There were other models provided, and I chose Squirtle! Here's the planning I made for each animation.

These were the keyframes for my 3D animations. I stuck to all of these except for the attack animation, which became a backflip tail whip. The first walk animation ended up slower than I intended, so I gave him cool sunglasses and turned it into a swagger, slow-mo walk instead. These animations were an absolute blast to make! The model was super easy to work with, and Maya, though difficult at times, made 3D animation enjoyable! Overall, I absolutely loved this course. I've been animating 2D for a couple years and having an opportunity to improve my 2D skills and learn 3D was fantastic. It was a lot of hard work, but I'm proud of the progress and stuff I've made!

All my video files will be dumped into a ZIP.

[2d-3danimationworkbookdump]

2D Animation Final Project

We then moved on to our main project for 2D animation. This was a very rocky process for me, but I'm so happy with how it turned out despite this. Here is the brainstorming for what I originally had in mind: A duck giving a tour of his home to his YouTube fans as a subscriber special, interrupted by the visitation of aliens.

After receiving critique, my idea shifted. -Aliens visit to research farm life -Ducks give aliens a tour of the farm By the storyboard stage, this changed into two ducks meeting up and having a conversation about aliens. Which was then interrupted by aliens. I had three main plans for this. Two were very similar, simply changing the ending to leave one duck in shock, the other in panic. The third idea had the aliens visiting all being imagined by one of the ducks.

Once I imported my chosen storyboard into photoshop, it suddenly occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to work on my animation at home. I couldn't import my project into any of my own animation programs, so instead I got to work creating a new storyboard in Krita, a similar program and free alternative. This storyboard used the song "Shit" by Bo Burnham. This became my final 2D animation. After almost 2 weeks of staying up late, I managed to finish the animation. I definitely bit off a lot, but I managed to chew it. Only just. it was a stressful but rewarding experience, and my skills evolves. To save myself time, I went through several design iterations to simplify the main character. You can also see my notes, crossing off every completed shot. I focused on the more complicated shots first. Prioritizing scenes helped ease a little bit of stress.

Aside from the duck/alien stories, I had an extra idea. This one was about Puddle, a spirit of dreams, chasing down Nit, a spirit of nightmares. This would have been a remake of one of my old animations "Weird Dog", which had the same plot.

Apologies for low image quality.

[2d-3danimationworkbookdump]

Next we created a basic animation using photoshop. In this, we animated a girl going from a sad to happy mood, using squash and stretch and anticipation to give life to our animation. Photoshop was confusing to use for animation, and a lot of it didn't make sense to me. For example, using layers as each frame seemed bizarre. I'm very used to using programs that have frames and layers entirely separate! It took a while to wrap my head around, but I'm happy with the result.

[2d-3danimationworkbookdump]

(Videos elsewhere due to... Tumblr) We started off by learning the 12 principles of animation, making short stop motion sequences with dinosaurs, tigers and paper. This was done in teams of 3. My group made animations using slow in & slow out, follow through, and squash and stretch. The latter was the most successful, as we used paper to animate a meteor, enabling us to transform something in the scene, which was near impossible to do with the plastic animals supplied.