Category: Maya Animation

I started to do the blocking animation for the body mechanics. The lecturer told me that my reference is too long and it does. It is already over 5 seconds, so I cut 2 seconds in the beginning.

I started to do some planning for the body mechanics animation. I did some sketches and took some reference photos from two angles.

This week I found the right direction and started to do the final polish on the walk cycle animation.

This week, I polished my walk cycle animation. The lecturer gave me some suggestions on my blocking. I should find the highest point of the walk cycle animation again. The highest point in last week’s blocking was wrong. Secondly, my footsteps were not in the right position. I always wanted to use very few keyframes to complete this animation, but then I found that I needed to make keyframes for each frame when the foot was lifted up.

The Walk Cycle is the most difficult thing in animation. I started to create the walk cycle animation. The lecturer told us there are three crucial concepts behind the walk cycle:

Key Poses: In a walk cycle, these represent the contact points. Breakdowns: The transitional passing positions between the key poses. Extremes: The highest and lowest moments in the walk cycle.

I created two versions of the walk cycle:

This week, with the guidance of the instructor, I continued to polish the tail animation.

Also, I started to create the weight shift animation in blocking, and I recorded a video for reference.

This week I started to polish my tail animation, and I found a problem. My rig model’s body can only be stretched up and down, and its direction cannot be adjusted. Because my blocking was made according to the real squirrel jumping, I had to re-make the blocking.

I am going to start making an animation of a ball with a tail. I have made many similar animations before, but I have a new feeling this time. The reference I found this time is the jumping of a squirrel in real life. The squirrel’s tail will move in the same way as the squirrel’s body, just a few frames slower.

In week 2, I learned 12 principles of animation: Squash and stretch; Timing and Motion; Anticipation; Staging; Follow-through and Overlapping Action; Slow in and slow out; ArcSecondary action; Timing; Exaggeration; Solid drawing; Appeal.

Also, the assignment is to create a critique ball animation, I created a blocking animation first, splined it and polished in the end.