Final shot for the Vanilla Walk cycle.

2nd Progress Shot for the walk cycle.

Arcs

All actions that are performed in animation are followed by an arc or a circular path. These arcs are clearly visible in the graph editor and are separated by key frames. Arcs in animation give a more natural action and better flow. Few examples of arcs are head turns, eye movements, arms swinging, balls bouncing, pretty much anything that is moving.

Reference Links:

http://www.evl.uic.edu/ralph/508S99/arcs.html

http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/aim/a_notes/anim_principles.html

This is my progress shot for my Vanilla Walk Cycle Animation; it is still in blocked mode   and I have yet to take it into the graph editor to smooth it out.

This is the video reference I decided to use for the walk cycle animation and I also posted another two more as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=_04mWgkYRnk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBp6lfPy5wU

Observing People Walking:
For this particular assignment; there were many different types of people that walk a certain way all being unique but also fall into categories. I noticed that people who walk in groups walk much slower because they're holding a conversation and do not want to rush the conversation. People who use the cell phone tend to go off to the side and walk around in circles until they finish their conversation and go back onto the sidewalk to head to their destination. I also noticed that older people tend to walk with a limp for the simple fact that it is much harder for them to walk because of their age. Business people and students walk much faster; they are always in a hurry especially in the mornings. During late afternoon, people tend to walk much slower, they're much more at ease when walking. Another category of people I noticed were the tourists; the tourist are usually walking slow and observing the area and always carry shopping bags. Despite of the categories, I saw a huge difference between men and women. When women walk they move their hips more. And for more "heavier" people they walk side to side with their legs more spread out.  Overall, I observed that even if people are just walking they seem to reflect their personality or mood at the time.

Anticipation

One of the links mentioned that an action occurs in three parts: 1) the preparation for the action (this is anticipation) 2) the action 3) the termination of the action. In other words, anticipation prepares the audience for something that is going to take place.  Some examples for this principle is getting ready to arm you swing your arms back, raising your foot before you kick the ball, or staring at something before you pick it up.

Reference Links:

http://tysonanimationvisualarts.blogspot.com/2012/01/12-principles-of-animation-detailed.html

http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/aim/a_notes/anim_principles.html

http://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/animation/character_animation/principles/anticipation.htm

This is the final work for my Robot Arm assignment. Two robot arms are playing chess with each other.

So far for my robot arm, I have only framed the pose-to-pose keys. I still have yet to animate the actual full cycle and of the arm picking and the actual chess piece.

This is the video reference I looked at for the robot arm assignment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_U4Hfgp7rQ&feature=relmfu

This is the pose-to-pose sketch for the robot arm

Straight Ahead & Pose-to-Pose

Straight ahead is another animation principle. It is hand draw & the animator draws the first single frame and continues drawing every single frame until they get to the final frame. And in order to capture single frames the animator usually draws the in between frames with unusual movement. In other words, the animator draws the first and last frame and then they draw the in-between frames as well.
Pose-to-Pose is literally the animator planning their action pose to pose. The poses are the important frames of the story that best tell the story that the animator is trying to tell. This principle is great for planning for poses and timing.
*The picture illustrates straight ahead (top) & pose-to-pose (bottom).

Reference Link:

http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mobile-design/blog/animation_principle_four_strai/

http://www.evl.uic.edu/ralph/508S99/straight.html

Final work for the Path Animation Assignment; done in maya.

This is my progress so far; I plan to fix up the environment, I want to give it pillars as well. Also, I plan to tweak with the inputs to give a more realistic path. I'm not sure if this is just an issue I'm running into but for some reason my keys would not set and I have to leave it as if or else the cart does not even move at all. But other than that, I feel I do have to hang it of and can't wait to add more tweaks to make it realistic.

Instead of posting a video I'd added the reference link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I-T7vQRKT8&feature=related

This video is not necessarily showing you every step you have to take to model a car but it is highlighting the necessary steps to take when modeling a vehicle in general. This is a very detailed model but I believe it is highlighting the main point when it comes to modeling a vehicle; using surfaces to have a better design for your car.

EASE IN & EASE OUT
This is another principle of animation and the best way to illustrate/explain this principle is when a object gradually accelerates, or comes to rest, from a pose. As I stated earlier in squash and stretch, the best example is a bouncing ball because as it goes up gravity affects and it slows down this is when easing in occurs in the ball. Easing out occurs in a ball when it starts its downward motion much more rapidly until it hits the ground.

Reference Links:

http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~patrick/csc418/notes/tutorial11.pdf

http://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/animation/character_animation/principles/slow_in_and_out.htm

Finished version for my Midterm final.

This is the progress for the ball and tail midterm; so far I have managed to complete the ball bounce by adding squash and stretch into it and now I’m concentrating on the tail which is similar to the pendulum exercise (overlapping action).

This is the reference for the midterm assignment. 

SQUASH & STRETCH

When creature move, they always change in shape one way or another except for furniture, which is why this principle is important in animation. The best object to demonstrate this would be a rubber ball, the squashing occurs when it hits the ground and the stretching occurs right before it hits the ground and afterwards. In the links they state that a stretch in one direction, must be accompanied by a squash in the other direction. And another important rule to remember is that its volume always remains constant otherwise it will appear off balance.

Sources:

http://www.evl.uic.edu/ralph/508S99/squash.html

http://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/animation/character_animation/principles/squash_and_stretch.htm

This is my progress for the pendulum homework assignment.

Pendulum Reference

Follow Through & Overlapping Action

Follow through is the termination part of an action. Since actions do no really come to a sudden stop they slow down and follow through is exactly that(it slowly comes to a stop). Also, follow through is displayed if there are loose parts to the character or object and the weight of those loose parts dictates how slow/fast the speed will be. Overlapping actions means to start a second before the first action has completely finished. This is also supposed to make the animation more interesting.
Overlapping action sounds similar to follow through but what i get out of it is what connects follow through to make a stop.
These principles are presented when you are kicking a ball. When you kick the ball, you leg is still moving up and then you have to lower it down.

http://www.evl.uic.edu/ralph/508S99/follow.html

This is the final version of my weighted ball exercise. (Bowling ball vs. Weighted ball)

Timing and Spacing

Timing is elusive and only exists while the animation is projected or played back. It also give the meaning to movement and it is usually achieved by drawing the same thing in two different positions and inserting a number of other drawings between the two. Animations as drawings have no weight, construction, nor forces acting upon them; the animator must give them meaning by adding weight. Spacing is the places in a space where animated objects usually move. This is in between the frames and when an animator is focusing on spacing they have to focus on the weight of the object either heavy and light objects.

http://www.kss.sd23.bc.ca/chalmers/animation12/2005/VAC/timing.pdf

VC325 - 3D Computer Animation
This is what I have so far for the weighted ball assignment.

VC325 - 3D Computer Animation
This is the exercise ball reference; I'm using for the assignment.

Victor Navone Spline Tutorials

VC325 - 3D Computer Animation

This tutorial hit on many terms, described the spline-based workflow, and described the do’s and dont’s when it comes to animating.
The tutorial is started of with the basics describing if a spline is ascending that means that the value is increasing and the ball is moving to the right. And if the spline is descending that means the value is decreasing. It also explained on the graph editor that a change in the direction of the slope means a change in the object’s direction. They also gave heads up that tangent handles behave similar like Adobe Illustrator bezier paths. Lastly they state that when you start out animation it is best to start with flat tangents.

Ease-In’s & Ease-Out’s:
When it comes to keys/tangents the amount to move and tilt a key for an ease depends on a lot of things: the distance between the two poses, the weight and size of the object, the intensity of the action, and the style of animation. When something is easing-in, it is stopping at a slower pace and when something is easing-out, it is starting at a much slower pace.

Fast-In & Out’s:
To get a fast-in or fast-out  you do not need to change the value of any key. You can either change the keys to be linear, break the tangent handles, or shorten them until they cease to affect the shape of the spline. For Fast-Out, Ease-In: there is no acceleration in the spacing only deceleration because the ball is moving fastest right after it has been hit, and from there it only decelerate. For Ease-Out, Fast-In: there is deceleration or whatever is being animated will continue rolling until an immovable object stopped it.

Anticipation & Overshoot:
Simple version for making an object feel alive. And NEVER combine the two together.
The second part of the tutorial starts off by describing specific tips and advice that will help you create much cleaner animation.

Smoothness: The tangent rotated so that the splines pass smoothly thorugh the keys.
Curve Containment: For a curve containment, you should let the keys describe you extremes, not your curves and try to keep the spline handles from overshooting other keys in time.
Economy of Key: This section is about deleting unneccesary keys that you do not need and also it will make your splines look cleaner and easier to edit.
Variation: Another good tip they give is your graph editor looks repetitive then your animation will appear repetitive so what you can do is make a change in your value, timing, and tangents.

Easy Eases: You can easily use tangent handles to describe your action instead of adding a lot of keys; this speed workflow.

Easy Overlap: Adding overlapping actions to things like tails, har and even the spine can be tedious but it’s necessary to show weight.

Lastly the tutorial covered the Spline-Based workflow. In this workflow, they talk about how to convert your the stepped curves to spines. The best thing to do is to convert all your keys to flat tangents and from there you can determine yourself which tangent handles should be smoothed. Most of your time is devoted in the last step where you have to smooth out the roots.

VC325 - 3D Computer Animation
Reference Video for basketball animtion

Polycount Wiki

Great resource; long list of websites full of resources.

http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryAnimation

Animation 101; Puppets for CG Animation

Animation 101: basic principles about animation and what to look for in good animation

Puppets for CG Animation: The do’s and dont’s of animation

http://www.anticz.com/learn.htm

3D Buzz: Maya Tutorials

This is a great site that includes tutorials for just about anything that has to do with Maya.

http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/sv_videonav.php?fid=fae9dd3c5bfedc126bb44d4aac6b4a3b

Maya Tutorials

Movie 1: Zoom, Pan, & Roll: Navigations
This short film briefly demonstrates how to zoom, pan, and rotate along the perspective view. In order to do this, one must hold the alt key (Windows) or option key (Mac) and left-click the mouse to rotate, middle button to pan, and right-click to zoom.

Movie 2: Move, Rotate, and Scale
In this film, it shows you how to be able to see in all your orthographic views by simply using the space bar. It also shows the three manipulators: move, rotate, and scale; y-axis = green, z-axis = blue, and x-axis = red. It also gives advice that if you want to move an object freely, or scale uniformly, drag the central handle. Lastly, the video talks about how when you highlight an object it can be moved and if you want to move more than one object you just highlight the objects and it briefly states that you can also manipulate the components (edges, vertices, faces) of an object.

Movie 3: Create & View Objects
This film describes the type of objects that can be made in Maya such as NURBS and polygons. It then goes on describing that polygons are made up by faces that are flat and that NURBS are made up of curves and are smooth. Also, the menus of these objects are located by the create menu (NURBS primitive & Polygon primitive). In this movie, the channel box is introduced and they briefly state that it displays information for an object such as transform attributes (position, scale, rotation) and shape attributes (inputs). Lastly, the video shows you the 3 different ways to view an object: wireframe, smooth shade all, and wireframe on shaded. Also, by using the keys 1, 2, 3 you can see different views of the object however it doesn’t change the actual shape of an object.

Movie 4: Components
This video shows you right-clicking on the mouse your component menu pops up and you select on the specific part by clicking on it and you deselect by clicking on  nothing. If you want to add to your selection simply hold on to the shift key and to deselect faces you hold the control key. And to return back to the object you simply right-click again and go to the menu and hit select.

Movie 5: Discover Secret Menu
This describes the six different menu sets and how every time you click on each one menu item on the top menu updates. If you want to change the options for a particular action in Maya, you can click on the box that is shown in the end. Also, they talk about the Hotbox which is an advanced method to get to menus quickly.

Movie 6: Keyframe Animation
This describes that in order to make a key frame on the time slider on the bottom you must hit the “S” key and if you want to change the current frame, click another frame number in the time slider using the left mouse button and then manipulate the object press “S” again and you make another key frame. If you want to review your work you can press play to play back your frames.

Movie 7: Materials, Lights, and Rendering
Using the marking menu select assign new material. After selecting the material, the attribute editor appears and in there you arrange around the color and also assign a texture. In order to view the texture, you click on the “textured” button on the top. Lastly, they talk about rendering an object and also shows you where the render settings are located.

Overall, these Maya tutorials were review to me however, I did learn about using the keys 1, 2, 3 to view the objects; I didn’t know that the #2 was an option; I just thought 1 & 3 were the only ones.