It looks like everyone is making their own thread for the boot camp exercises so here's mine.

Boot Camp 1 Exercise A

This was really fun. I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out the motion at the end is a little off. maybe later i'll go back and tweak it a bit and see ifi can get it to look better

Good start, here are some things to look at:

Small Ball
1. It will be at maximum stretch just before impact. Yours appears to 'anticipate' the impact.
2. Second bounce doesn't even touch the ground and looks like that a frame or 2 is actually missing.
3. Considering the size of the squash on the first hit there is not much bounce and doesn't relate to the second and third impacts.

Large Ball
1. Good overall but the roll off is unevenly paced.

Cheers

David

Thank you for your comments. I have done some more work on this project this morning.

Big Ball :

I fixed the wierd roll off of the big ball, i had some extra key frames that were throwing the motion off. I deleted them and it looks better to me.

Small Ball:

played around with the stretch a bit, made it stretch a bit less

your right about the second bounce missing a frame or two. in my project the ball touches the ground, I guess the compression in quicktime lost a few frames. the new version i have posted fixes this.

i reduced the squash so its not as flat. hopefully it looks a bit more believable than the first version.

Here is boot camp1 excercise B : bounce the balls across the screen.

I'm having alot of fun and learning alot doing these exercises.

I tried to make the balls look like they were made of different materials. One soft and squishy and the other one hard . I tried to give the big one "Life" not really sure if it comes through tho. Been looking at this for a while

Comments are welcome

Hey Erik
ABC 1 looks really strong. Only two things I see that could be slightly tweaked. First when yellow is squashing, it's only getting shorter, meaning it's losing mass (not physically possible) this is really a rigging problem not animation, and your squashes are happening so fast it's not really visible, but it might add a little more veracity to the feeling if while it gets shorter it also gets wider. There's something a tiny bit off on the large ones bounces, but I'm not sure what. It's already so close, I'm thinking it might just be an ease issue, can you slow into the arc on the bounce a little (not a lot of frames to play with). The bounces feel a little slow, maybe playing with the ease/slow would make them snappier and feel better. Or maybe just making the second bounce a tad faster would work. Definetly experiment on a save as version because it's so close right now. Looking really good!

Number 2 with the wall is good, but needs more polish. Again the squashing being only vertical with out getting wider is throwing this one off much more, because we aren't able to see what the original shape is supposed to be. (If you have broadband and time the expressions tech talk will teach you how to fix this)(but I think the models I supplied already had mass conserving squash and stretch, if your using those try moving the second null up and down, or playing with the pose sliders).
So it looks like the larger one bounces in, stops, antics down, then clears the wall. (It's not reading very well because of the odd squash). It looks like you have a good sense of squashing at the bottom of a hop, stretching for speed, and then returning to neutral shape at the tops of hops, so that's good. For that antic to read your going to have to give us time to see that it's landed from it's first bounce, had time to stop and consider, and then decide to antic down. I'd suggest having a slight squash from landing the bounce, then maybe five frames of just neutral shape, then anticipate down. The downward antic also needs to be longer to sell that it could jump that high from it.
The timing for the smaller yellow one feels off, it doesn't feel like it has the speed to go so far through the air.

Great start.

-Alonso

Alonso

Thank you for the comments and for pointing out that the balls are maintaining their volume in the squash and stretch pose. I was wondering why no one mentioned that before. It seems i'm having a problem with version 12 of A:M. I opened this project in version 11.1b and the balls flatten and stretch and keep their volume like they are supposed to. I had a similar situation when going through TAoA:M last week, some things would work in V11.1 and not in V12. Think i might try reinstalling v12.

I played around a bit with your suggestions on excercise B. added some time for antics before the jump over the wall like you sugggested. I think is plays a bit better. I adjusted the flight of the yellow ball too. gave it a steeper entry.

I havent had a chance to go back and look at excercise A yet but i will.

I'm glad i started doing the boot camp. I'm having a ton of fun and i'm learning so much, and i'm only on the first one

~Erik

* for some reason i cant upload my file, I get an errror message saying my file is to large or the wrong format for the forum even tho its under 1 mb. I'll try again later

Well looks like i can upload now. so here's the file

Hi Erik,

I couldn't upload last night either. I had a look at your latest exercise. I like the action going on. The blue ball has good squash and stretch in the first bounce, but I think it might hang in the air to long when it bounces back up. It also looks a little strange that it stops suddenly on the second bounce. Also when he goes to jump over, maybe anticipate up a bit and then squash further down to get some momentum to get over the wall. The bounce and timing of the little ball looks very good to me. The only thing to add might be a bit of squash and stretch, but in any case the movement of the little ball is very believable. Good work!

Good improvements Erik.
The movements of the blue ball are working for me. The reason they work is I assume the ball is moving of it's own decision (like choosing to bounce over the wall) and so the slight snappiness to the bounces I am reading as a choice of the ball's in how to move, so I like it. The pause after the landing before anticipating for the wall works very well to set that up as a second seperate action. The antic to get over that wall could still be stretched out a few more frames to better sell the gathering of energy needed. And you could try a small antic up before the bigger antic down like Paula suggests. But all in all it's looking really good, and you know how it is, people will always find something they think you should change.

The yellow ball looks totally fine to me now. One thing to consider for future animations is staging, in this case staging using timing. I don't know which ball to watch, my eye isn't being directed more towards one or the other. That's fine here because it's just an excercise, but it's a good thing to keep in mind that you should help direct the viewer where you want them to put their attention. Contrasting speed is one way to do this (check out John Lasseter's notes on computer animation for a good summary of this (I think www.animationmeat.com probably has them).

Great Job!

-Alonso

Thanks for your feedback guys its helped alot.

I'm posting a rework of exercise A. with some changes to the squash and stretch. For some reason the expression for the ball model that controls the squash and strech doesnt work right in my v12.0h. i was wondering if anyone else had the same problem.

I'm going to call exercise A and B done and move on to exercise C tonight. I think i'll try planning the action out on paper first to get the timing and staging right.


~Erik

The general timing of the bounces looks very good, however some things that would bear revisiting...

- take out the Squetch entirely on the "heavy" ball. A rigid ball would appear heavier.

- have a stretched contact frame immediately before the squash frame on the light ball; this will relieve the poppiness of the bounce. less squash might do well also.

- the squetch seems to be always oriented straight up and down even though the ball never moves straight up and down. It would be more effective if it were oriented along the direction the ball was moving. Squetch on a ball is a stylized rendition of the inertial forces acting upon the ball. Properly orienting the squetch aids this.

Don't declare this done yet. Most of theses are easy fixes but you do have to actually do them to become accustomed managing the minute details involved.

Robert

Thanks for your comments. You bring up some very good points. I was going to move on to the next exercise but the more i thought about what you said the more i wanted to go back and tweak it a bit more, so I did.
Your right about the rotation it adds alot to the squetch. I had it in an earlier version that i never posted , but it didnt look right, it had some weird wobble in the ball so decided to take out the rotation.

~Erik

Here's one more version of Excercise A. I reduced the amount of squetch on the yellow ball a bit

(No internet for me, I'm at the public library to check)

Looks good to me. If you wanted you could nuetral out the shape more at the peak of the bounces, and you could put a little more lean into the angle of the squetch (it's a flaw of the model that it rotates from the base null instead of the center so that it's hard to make smooth on an arc, you wind up having to counter animate.)
Like all animation, there will always be nitpicking and tweaking forever, so it's really a question of when you feel it's done and your time and enthusiasm are better engaged elsewhere.
And just to disagree with Robcat I sometimes put really subtle and fast squetch on heavy dense objects to help sell the feeling of weight more.

Your doing great!
-Alonso

Heres a new exercise i've been working on for the last week or so. I still need to tweak a few things but figured i'd post what i got so far

Hey I just caught your revised ball bounces, they look much better. I'm glad you went back to them.

I think I figured out why the heavy ball isn't looking as heavy as it could.

consider that in its first fall it takes 10 frames to cover about half the height of the screen to the ground.

After the first bounce it rises up about 1/20th of the screen height and yet takes 7 frames to fall back down from the apex again.

On its first fall it took only about 4 frames to start from rest and fall about that same 1/20th screen height distance.

So, between your first and second falls you've decreased the apparent force of gravity which can not happen. Gravity is a constant.

Just something to be aware of as you animate further. But they do look much better.

Looking really good. Nice interaction, nice little excercise you've set yourself. The ball bounce looks pretty nice, and it reads well that it's talking to the lamp. The main thing that I see on the ball is that it gets up the platform a little to easy, this is a bigger jump than it's earlier ones, but I'm not feeling a bigger effort. I think maybe just holding the down anticipation a little longer before the 2 bounces might work. Just watching your arcs in slow mo they look really nice, good squetch going on also.
I think a little longer antic on the lamp before the big jump would also help. Also with the lamp, I kind of want to see more flex in the base, to better sell follow through and overlap. Maybe having the base even more extended after a lift off, and then curls in even further after the top of the arc, right now it's kind of 2 mostly still poses for the foot, I think having more easing around those poses would have more life. When the lamp pulls back as the ball talks to it, I kind of feel like it should lower itself also because it feels a little close to the edge of it's center of gravity. Finally when the lamp jumps up to the platform your missing a beautiful opportunity to display some forces and follow through by letting the foot have follow through after it catches itself with its head, maybe even having the foot slip a little and then the whole lamp curls up to get the foot a higher purchase. (But likely your root bone is in the foot so this would mean a lot of counter animating.)

Looking really strong!

-Alonso

Its been a while since i posted anything here.

I've reworked the lamp exercise a little with some of your suggestions.

Excellent Erik. The only critque would be that the ball reacts a fraction too soon to the lamps slip on the cube.

Great Animation. My only comment would be to make sure you really check the graph editor for the Base and smooth out the rough spots. Looks a bit choppy. Great Job.

Great! Good improvements. Looks good to me, I don't have anymore critiques. (sorry)

-Alonso

That's a nice little animation! Very cute! I could see that yeah, the ball does react just a tad early to the lamp's struggle, but I don't see the "rough spots" for the lamp base that Pixar pointed out. I know he's a pro, so maybe an elaboration on what the problem is?

One thing I really liked about your animation is that you gave the ending some breathing space. All too often it seems that people end the animation on the last frame of action. For instance, with "The Door's Stuck" someone did an Indianna Shaggy where he gets flattened by this huge rolling ball. Its great, and made me laugh, but it ends the moment Shaggy gets flattened, even his hat is frozen in mid air.

When you give your characters time to exit the "stage" like you did in your last animation, it really makes the whole thing feel complete. I think its good to do, even on a small project, and makes the animation just that more enjoyable to watch. Why don't you add sound effects now? There's lots of sites on line that have boingy sounds for free, just do a google search.

Nice work!

Thanks for all your comments guys.

here's a new version of the lamp excercise. I messed around with the timing of the ball and lamp on the box a bit.

hey you, back to work

-Alonso