!!!BOOTCAMP 3!!!!

Okay gang, time to spice it up a little! This bootcamp will introduce
a little bit of acting excercise while at the same time being a review of what we've already worked on.

Da Juice Box!!

So traditional animator's often do acting tests with a Flour Sack, and all the emotions they can squeeze out of it. The CG equivalent is the Juice Box (yeah we could make a flour sack, but I think the juice box is more suited to CG) So this little box is ALIVE! You are to make us believe that it is thinking and existing and EMOTING. Boxes
can hop, boxes can waddle, boxes can even skid if they get enough momentum! (Hell they can probably fly with their straws as propellers if you really wanted them to) I built a squash/stretch pose, but I don't like it to much, feel free to use it, or push your skills more by bringing out a squash/stretch feel just by your poses. And that straw, excellent opportunity to bring out some follow through action (sometimes improperly called 2ndary action) The straw is also a great way to put some character in. (Think of Woody in Toy Story 1 inside of the soda cup running into Pizza Planet)

So here's the model
and here it is zipped up if that is easier to download

Of course feel free to alter the model, or add simple (I said simple, like: a cube) environmental props to play with.

EXCERCISE A:
Simple locomotion. Pick 2 emotions and move the box from 1 side of the screen to the other with one emotion (go ahead and start and stop offscreen) and then back with the other. You might want to experiment with stride length and a hop cycle. Or not. If your having trouble choosing an emotion, do them all, or grab a
thesaurus and look up all the permutations.
A BONUS POINTS: think of a real emotion, don't choose sad, choose "I'm so depressed I can hardly breathe" sad, or "agony, agony, my lover is lost to me" wringing sad. These are both sad, but different kinds of movement. Don't just act sad, RE-ACT to something.

EXCERCISE B:
Advanced locomotion. Pick 2 more emotions. Have the character cross the screen not just with 1 repeated motion, but with varied motions. (Like hopping in, skidding, twirling, and cartwheeling out.)
B BONUS POINTS: show the character change emotions from the first to the second, while on screen.

EXCERCISE C:
Difficult. I was just reading "Acting for Animator's" and he was talking about how we are often negotiating status between each other. Try this, a juice box is waiting around. A 2nd juice box enters the screen. They exit together. The 2nd juice box is the boss of the first juice box. Try to show that in how the 1st juice box energy
movement and attitude change when the 2nd one is around. (yeah, I told you it was difficult)

Good Luck.

Like always lets say due by next Wednesday night Jan.19 and if you are reading this after then you might want to post a new thread to get critiques.

Keep in mind Disney's 12 Principles

Timing
Ease In and Out (or Slow In and Out)
Arcs
Anticipation
Exaggeration
Squash and Stretch
Secondary Action
Follow Through and Overlapping Action
Straight Ahead Action and Pose-To-Pose Action
Staging
Appeal
Personality

-Alonso


(you know, now that I look at it, I'm not sure that is the official 12, but I like this list pretty well, it beats out "solid Drawing" for our purposes at least)

Wow looks like a toughy . It will be a fun challenge though!, this will really improve everyones animation skills!

off with the kid gloves and on with the sledgehammers, eh? This should be.. challenging to say the least.

Ahh, a challenge. Here I go. And this time, my 250free account works, so I can post it, unlike Exercise 2.

Is this to hard? I didn't think it was to bad ie make a happy bouncing box, make a sad bouncing box, and then push yourself further afterwards.

Here's a little thing to play with to experiment with how emotions can affect a walk cycle


Remember, little steps. Just try a simple approach, once you accomplish that move on to more advanced.

-Alonso

Oh no its not to hard. The excersizes difficulty have been increasing at a good rate! I'm new to AM and i'm managing to pull it off so far

this is the kind of thing ive been waiting for

Well I finished excersize A! Here it is

Excersize A

Nice walk cycle! I like the skipping, but watch out for slipping. Good job!

Here's my movement cycle (the first one, that is). First ever attempt at character animation.

Wow, great job guys. I'm gonna start mine soon. I've been... busy.

Here's my first go at this animation boot camp thing. I did a slight variation on excercise C, instead of both characters exiting the scree together, one of them stays behind. Enjoy, it's called "Sleeping on duty."

Wow Nat!, you did a great job at giving those juice boxes personality, keep it up!

Here's a few ideas I had, I will work on them some more Saturday.

Normal walk cycle:

Walking a bit slower (same cycle):

...and, a very happy hop. No cycle, animated in chor:

nice walk cycle paul.

Patrick, good walk cycles! There seems to be a slight jerk in the slomotion walk cycle not sure why that happens. I guess making a walk cycle would of been easier, I animated my whole cycle in the chorography, a lot of repetetive work......

Thanks!
I didn't even catch the hitch until after I rendered it. Back to the drawing board, er, action window!

finally got mine rendered out. I couldnt resist decaling the box.

I did the first pass across in the chor which was fun, then i decided to try a walk cycle for the way back. Making the action , easy. Making the path, easy. Constraining the juicebox to path,errh once you figure out that am already added its own keys where it thinks the ease should be. Adding the action to the juicebox, bloody nightmare. Expecially if you try and use the book as a refrence... Turns out I have to set the ease keyframes where i want, at the proper length, for alltime, before i place the action. and then drop the action in and put in the length that ive determined... grumble brumble

Easy is definatly not the term for that 'feature'...

Oh and using an on/off pose in the chor wiped out the pose settings of the action...

Furthermore... for some reason the juicebox is levitating on the way back... no idea how that happened... kinda works so im not too upset about it.

Here is da clip 768kB divx

-simon

Hee hee thanks for pinning these Zack

Patrick:
LONGER PIECE:The hops feel real, good anticipation in there to get the energy to get airborn. The upper wiggling happens a little to fast to understand by the eye, so it's a little confusing, slow it down and it will work better. Great follow through on the straw.
SLOW WALK:That's a very stately walk, it looks good. The only thing I would suggest trying differently is to try and get a snooty feeling with straw (assuming it's snooty, and not just militarilly erect). Maybe putting a slight kink backwards in it, or having it bent a lot forward, but tipped very far back < Think of some aristocratic git with his nose in the air and try and get that feeling. By changing the angle to the straw you will add interest to your animation by adding more arcs.
FAST WALK:The walk looks right, and the straw moves fine with it. But it doesn't quite make sense for the character. Of course these are teeny little tests so these kind of questions would be answered in anything longer, but, why would the box be wobbling so fast to get somewhere? If it was in a hurry to get somewhere it would hop, it seems to me. The action is fine, but the character's inner logic is a little iffy


Nat:
Pretty elaborate piece here. First off, it looks like it's falling asleep, and then jerking awake. If this was the intention falling asleep should be longer and slower so it reads more clearly, and the contrast with jerking back up would be stronger. The looking around is pretty good, you stage that well. Try changing the angle of the bottom half of the straw as well, it's a little strange that it's so straight up so long. Not quite sure what the following movement is, it's yawning and going back to sleep? The sleeping movement is readable but it goes all asleep really fast. The surprise hop is good. The take after the hop takes to long, after landing try 1 clean anticipation pose and then a strong reversal pose looking at the new box, and then hoping back into the fear pose. The trembling reads. you could push that fear pose further (arcing away from the 2nd box, maybe hiding behind it's own top a little). Also it feels like the straw should watch the 2nd box hop off, maybe even scooting back to get out of the way. Or if box 1 is supposed to have it's eyes closed, point the straw down at the ground on screen left, as if it was curled over itself and hiding it's head. Great animation in box 2 as it watches box 1 freak out, nice and subtle keeping the audience attention where it belongs. Being a little bigger box I kind of want a little more anticipation for each hop to get the energy up to get in the air. Good follow through on the straw during the hops. Excellent job!

Markus:
Nice! Very happy skippy bounce. It might be improved by adding some forward arc in the top part, instead of just side to side swinging around the front on it's way from side to side. 2nd movement is good to. Try this experiment, with the 2nd movement grab the timeline and stretch it twice as long. The movement seems a little calmer yet it happens in the same time as the first. At it's current speed the straw is a little distracting bouncing up and down, try leaving it mostly down and swinging it from side to side. Good job, perky little boxes

Simon:
Love that intro, peaking onto the screen. Since we are always expecting human motions in anthropamorphised objects you might try drooping the straw as it swings from it's left to right when it's checking stuff out, the way your head would go down if you looked left and then right. The hops are pretty good. The box is off balance though, if it were really like that it would fall over. It would be more believable if the curve happened further back so the center of gravity was still over the base. Also you need a little more anticipation and recovery, you need something to build up the energy to get into the air, and sometime to show that the ground has stopped that energy from coming down. Auugh that straw gives great personality! Cute exit back the other way. I don't know much about constraining to path, I never use it because it always seems easier to just animate things on my own then let the computer do to much. But I think your problem here (assuming the path is actually on the ground plane) is that constrain to path constrains the model bone to the path, which is apparently below the model. The model bone is the big black bone you see when you click on random space in bones mode of the modeling window. All models always come with a model bone. It's also what changes are based on in choreography mode, in a choreography. Somehow you can tell it how long you want your character to take traversing a line, and then with stride length (if you've set it) it will realistically cover the whole path. And key framing the ease, you probably figured it out, but ease 0% is at the beginning of the line, and ease 100% is at the end, which I think it starts at by itself so I theoretically you shouldn't have to add on top of that. If your having questions you can pop over to the reusable action forum and they can probably help. Also EVERYBODY if your having problems think of ways to cheat, like here for example, since the model has left the screen you can switch in an identical model to do the path action so you don't screw up the other action you've already completed (if you are having problems with that.)

Great job so far everyone, great personality in our little box, keep going!!!

-Alonso

Nos3d13: well, we're waiting

Jeff:
Trippy man The movements are interesting, but a little hard to understand where they came from. The hop in the air with a wriggle, snapping into a flip, the timing is off so it's not reading that way. You need more time in the beginning before it takes off so that we feel the energy building to propel it into the air. If it's hopping in the air its going to need the same kind of arc as a bouncing ball, so fast going up and down and a little bit of hang time at the top. Fast going up is where your wriggle will be, and then ending with the hang time, then as it starts to go down that's when the snap comes in. The snap has to be fast to be believable. We need to treat the viewer as if they were a little slow, with anticipation warn them what's going to happen, and then with follow through let them understand what just happened. You need a little time after the flip to let the viewer know that the fip has just happened and the energy from it is stopping, and the box is considering a new motion. Everything is kind of going at a similar somewhat floaty speed, to really sell motion you have to break it up, make somethings sharp and fast, other things slow and smooth, a big help to this is to use your curve/channel editors. Good effort, keep practicing and improving!

Here's my take on A:

Exercise A

I had trouble with it, though.

First, I tried to make the sad and happy walks in different actions, and dragged and dropped them onto the model in the choreography.

However, I had a hard time getting the ending position of the sad walk and the beginning position of the happy walk to match up. It would spin when trying to interpolate between the two actions. I didn't constrain it to a path.

So, I started over and did both walks as a single Choreography Action, which worked better.

Any tips on how to blend two different actions?

Nat: Great job!! I like the move where the soldier turned to look both ways before it fell asleep, and then when the "Sarge" came by and the soldier salutes, the jiggle of the straw really shows that he's nervous.

Marcus: Also good job on the skipping motion, and on the proud walk, the way the top of the box tilts up helps show the pride of the character. Maybe the proud walk could be slower, though.

inkblot: Interesting rolling motion! I'm not sure what emotion it is , but it looks like it was hard to animate.

Patrick:

1. Good walk cycle on the first one. How did you get the bottom of the box to twist? I couldn't figure out how to do that with this rig.

2. The second walk was good, too, but the straw didn't move.

3. Good motion on the hop, but I agree that the twist in mid-air happens too fast.

Cindy,
Nice job. I noticed a lot of sliding on the sad pass. Here's a great tutorial wich explains how to stop slippage. I loved your hopping pass. Your juice box looks very happy!

Patrick - The wiggle looks better now.

About the sliding - that was because I couldn't figure out how to get the box to look like the "feet" were moving when it was walking. I'll take a look at that tutorial you mentioned.

Thanks for the comments!

Hi!

Here is my try with this one. I planned to do a walk cycle, but got carried away.
So it is exercise 3 for a start.





juicy

Wow! That was great! THey really felt alive there. GREAT WORK! Only one problem, that's not that big. On the first juice box's second step, he seems to start moving as his "foot" starts coming in. So the foot moves towards him while he moves towards the step point.

Pat:
That wiggle in the hop looks better. The straw looks great, you are hand animating that aren't you (you know to work on your skills ) Looks like your box rig is better than the one I made, how did you set it up?

Cindy:
It looks pretty depressed. I think to get more of a walking feel you should try swinging the corner forward (as if your trying to walk with your pants around your ankles or if you were trying to move a heavy dresser) you know side to side and forward. The straw makes me feel like it's really wailing, if you want just depressed try and keep all motions really low and small, like everything takes more energy than it's worth. That's one happy box! The only thing I would maybe change is to but some bend in the box, curving over and springing up, just for more visual interest.
As for adding actions to the chor. If you click on the red bar you should be able to drag one action until it starts where you want it. Also when you open the action names you can choose how it will interact with other actions, choose from blend, replace, and add. Replace wipes out anything else done before, so if you changed the default size of your model in the chor and have a replace action, it will go back to default size. Add combines actions (this is if you want to put a hand waving cycle on top of a walk cycle), blend blends things together finding the average. Best to experiment with them.

Michel:
Fun, very snappy! On the step with the stretching the corner, I think it might look a little better if you shifted the weight of the box over the extended foot, and left the other corner behind a little, and then let it catch up. So foot, body, other foot. More natural like a biped. It's fun that the boxes are falling, I think you could give the audience a little more warning he's looking around and then up, maybe by using the straw, or maybe by having the box look left and right and then up so we know it's looking around. The 2nd corner step doesn't look as right because it's a further distance and the corner starts zipping back into the box before the step is completed, I think this would look better if it were a little hop instead (slight antic and then hop). Great squetch on the landing of the 2nd box. And good preperation to be landed upon. I think that if you have the 1st box's straw pointed more directly at the 2nd box after the tap the pointing up will read more clearly. Fabulous job!

-Alonso

Pat:
That wiggle in the hop looks better. The straw looks great, you are hand animating that aren't you (you know to work on your skills ) Looks like your box rig is better than the one I made, how did you set it up?

Cindy:
It looks pretty depressed. I think to get more of a walking feel you should try swinging the corner forward (as if your trying to walk with your pants around your ankles or if you were trying to move a heavy dresser) you know side to side and forward. The straw makes me feel like it's really wailing, if you want just depressed try and keep all motions really low and small, like everything takes more energy than it's worth. That's one happy box! The only thing I would maybe change is to but some bend in the box, curving over and springing up, just for more visual interest.
As for adding actions to the chor. If you click on the red bar you should be able to drag one action until it starts where you want it. Also when you open the action names you can choose how it will interact with other actions, choose from blend, replace, and add. Replace wipes out anything else done before, so if you changed the default size of your model in the chor and have a replace action, it will go back to default size. Add combines actions (this is if you want to put a hand waving cycle on top of a walk cycle), blend blends things together finding the average. Best to experiment with them.

Michel:
Fun, very snappy! On the step with the stretching the corner, I think it might look a little better if you shifted the weight of the box over the extended foot, and left the other corner behind a little, and then let it catch up. So foot, body, other foot. More natural like a biped. It's fun that the boxes are falling, I think you could give the audience a little more warning he's looking around and then up, maybe by using the straw, or maybe by having the box look left and right and then up so we know it's looking around. The 2nd corner step doesn't look as right because it's a further distance and the corner starts zipping back into the box before the step is completed, I think this would look better if it were a little hop instead (slight antic and then hop). Great squetch on the landing of the 2nd box. And good preperation to be landed upon. I think that if you have the 1st box's straw pointed more directly at the 2nd box after the tap the pointing up will read more clearly. Fabulous job!

-Alonso

Michel - Funny stuff! Great job on the sneaking movement. I noticed the problem with the foot, too, but that's the only thing that needs fixed.

Here's my attempt at exercise B:

Exercise B

All right, stupid question time. Is there a way to add time between existing keyframes? I really don't want to manually add/delete every control point for every bone after the point I want to add time to.

OK, here's another shot at Exercise A. I tried to get the bottom of the box to look more like it's walking, and tweaked the hop and spin some more. I'm not totally happy with the walk cycle yet, though.

Exercise A - version 2

Ha! That was fun! , I should enter these more often, they're great for practice. Anyways, here's my excersize B, hope you enjoy! -Robert Lazzarini

Jeff, that reminds me, I usually try and start an animation on at least frame 100, that way if I need to move around keys I can move them sooner as easily as later (when you get really long actions it's nice not to have the option.)

-Alonso

I did say it was a stupid question.

The 100 frame idea is a good workaround. Do you have to move everything back if you want to stack or repeat motions, or does the software detect the beginning of the action?

Robert - Pretty good walk cycle - the "foot" movement looks better than mine.

Thanks for your encouraging words!

Cindy:
Your showing good personality with the straw. And the bouncy stuff reads well as excited and joyous. The side to side motion helps selll the glide forward as being self initiated motion, my brain is stuck on these juice boxes hopping, but if juice boxes really do glide along instead of hopping when we aren't looking, your's would blend right in.
Much closer on the rocking forward for walking, but it's sliding at the same time. If you are going to walk it in each corner needs to be pinned to the ground until the weight has shifted off of it to the other corner. (with such a small base for our box, it will probably take forever to walk anywhere ) Those arcs in the body in the happy jumps are good, good improvement! There's a point where the box is on the ground hunched over, was this a recovery from landing? If so it needs to be more of a moving hold. Land frame fairly straight, 2 frames later to this extreme, 10 frames later key again this extreme (spline interpolation will give you the moving hold) then come out of it (for example). That would let us see where the energy from the downward hop went, the box absorbed it, the way we would absorb a landing with our knees and bending over. Love the way that straw snaps to attention at the end. Good improvements, your getting better!

Robert:
Your walk in is good, corner to corner, not moving until the weight is off that corner (might be a little slippage here) The final step doesn't need to go as high since it's not moving forward as much. Excellent emotion change, great follow through on the straw, especially whipping it up around and behind!! Cute little proud waddle off. My biggest piece of advice would be to put more follow through in the straw, make it looser, swinging side to side. But that's mostly personal preference.

Michel:
Those are good improvements, but very subtle. Since this is just an excercise be willing to be totally bold and try huge changes, (you can always save different versions). The more you risk the more your reap!

-Alonso

Hey Patrick, took a look at your rig. Just an idea you might try: currently your squetch pose is just moving the cp's around, an alternate way to do this is to click on a bone and scale it (hotkey s). Don't scale all of it, just it's width and depth. That affects the cp's also, but they continue to respond to the bones in the same way as they used to, whereas posing cp's straight sometimes has unexpected interaction results.

It's deceptively difficult to rig these simple things isn't it?

-Alonso

Michel - The foot looks better now. Good job!

Finally got done with exercise C.

Exercise C - "Get back to work!"

Cindy:
Great job! Nice personality and interaction! i love the shoving with the straw. The walking looks better now, because the boxes are shifting side to side so fast, like their getting up enough friction to get going forward. That smack in the back is well done, good reaction from the orange one. Something you might try is putting more flex into the box when the straw is gesturing or poking, right now it's the equivalent of someone poking with their arm and holding the rest of the body stock still. I have found the more you bring a character's whole body into the action the more you sell the action and the more engaging it is to watch. Great effort!

-Alonso

Good job Cindy!

The story reads well. Good timing between the boxes reactions. One little thing i see is that you maybe have to lower some long curves in the graph window, to get some stop motion here and there. That is getting fun, isn't it?

Thanks for the comments! Yes, I agree the box should bend a little before poking the other box.

great job cindy, I still havent found time to work one my other excersizes...