Hello

I decided to do some work on my animation skills so I am doing bootcamp. I also ordered the anzovin's animate cd's but will start with this. I have been trying to animate for years but have never really sat down and did the nitty gritty on the basics. So I haven't really progressed as I should have. I want to be better so I can make killer cut scenes for my video games. Froggy shoot out will have a bunch of cut scenes so I need to work on this. I am doing the old bootcamp not the ultimate one. I want to do it kind of quick then move on to the cd's then maybe I'll do the full ultimate boot camp.

Well, here is my first stab at the first exercise. I am trying to make them visually appealing too because I want to edit them into a little demo reel when I am done. That's why the fancy background. 3.56 mb

http://www.3dfrog.com/wips/bootcamp/exercise1a.mov

comments and criticisms welcome

Thanks

Ok, I see some issues.

Before I go thru it, take a look at this

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&sh...ndpost&p=143990

and see if you can identify some of them yourself first. For now, just concentrate on the small ball.

Ok

The main thing that strikes me is that the ball eases in and out on your bounce. How do I do an ease in and ease out? Is there a feature or do I have to create more points on the graph editor and do it that way?

Also I see that at the top of the bounce the ball is in it's original shape.

Anything else?

Thanks

There's no ease in or out of the bounce. It hits the ground at full speed and leaves at full speed.

The ease happens at the peak.

Yeah I just worded it bad. sorry. I get the effect though. What is the best way to create that kind of ease in a:m?

Use Bias handles in the curve editor. Just like in modeling.

Some example curves

Ok, I did more work on it. How's it looking now?

http://www.3dfrog.com/wips/bootcamp/exercise1a2.mov

I made quite a bit of updates. A nice guy at #3d-char helped me.

http://www.3dfrog.com/wips/bootcamp/exercise1a6.mov

Very nice Dennis.
I could feel the difference.

Thanks Rod. This is pretty challenging. I have a lot of work to do. I really want to improve my animation.

Thanks for helping me Robcat, I really appreciate it. Are the bounces looking better now?

Here's my first stab at exercise 1b:

http://www.3dfrog.com/wips/bootcamp/exercise1b.mov

Dennis,

The heavy ball looks good to me. The rubber ball, on the initial impact it seems to squash too much. For the speed and distance its falling I think it might have a little less squash to it on the initial one anyhow. Glad to see you are doing the bootcamps. They can be a lot of fun. I myself am doing the Ultimate one( I am always looking for punishment). I think after that Hash Chat the other night, alot of people want to work on animation or improve their skills.

Keep going

Leo

Ok I cut down the exagerration on the squash, maybe it was too much.

http://www.3dfrog.com/wips/bootcamp/exercise1b2.mov

Do you have the Animator's Survival Kit book Dennis?

Try tilting the rubber ball's stretch in the direction of its path to make it look more convincing.

Ok. I put some tilt on it. I don't know if i exagerrated it enough, i didnt want to overdo it.

http://www.3dfrog.com/wips/bootcamp/exercise1b3.mov

I have the animator's survival kit. I forgot all about it. I bought it a long time ago and didnt really do anything with it. I guess now is the time. I will look through it.

Thanks

Those bounces are very much improved!

I do have some notes:

-the first fall on the left ball is very linear (evenly spaced).

-why is the ball on the left falling slower than the ball on the right? Gravity pulls all objects with the same force.

-the right ball is still easing in or out of the impacts sometimes. I marked those intervals in blue. for example the ball will bounce up just a bit then go much farther in the next frame. The first interval off the ground should be bigger than the ones tha come after it. The last interval into the ground should be bigger than the ones that preceded it.

I did some more work on 1a. I'm not sure if I'm getting everything. I guess I need a lot of work and practice.

http://www.3dfrog.com/wips/bootcamp/exercise1a7.mov

Hmm looks good overall, 1 thing i saw was that even though the rubber ball is so much more squishy and strethy it stops bouncing before the hard ne does....

Refer to your Survival Kit on page 94, you see in the second illustration how the ball touches the ground when stretched, then squahed while still on the ground and THEN stretched OFF the ground.

So basically you need one frame touching the ground stretched, 1 frame touching the ground squashed, and 1 frame leaveing the ground stretched.

[attachmentid=15657]

Ok Dhar, I took a look and tried that. I think it looks better. I made the bounce a little zippier. Man, I just looked at my first try, it looked terrible. I am really seeing the difference now. And that's only after a few days! Imagine what I will see after animation mentor. Thanks for the great help guys. I love a:m community!

Here is my attempt:

http://www.3dfrog.com/wips/bootcamp/exercise1a8.mov

Looks great Dennis! You nailed this one!

Ok, now I'm going to be really picky. For some reason the the way the purple 'sits' on the ground on the end makes it look like it's floating. Because of this the weight seems less believable. I think it's because of the shadow, maybe try to remove the shadow or reposition it.

Awesome Job!

did some more work on exercise b

http://www.3dfrog.com/wips/bootcamp/exercise1b4mov.mov

You are right pixar, i looked closer and the ball wasnt touching the ground in a few bounces, just a bit above it. I fixed it.


http://www.3dfrog.com/wips/bootcamp/exercise1a9.mov

Hi Dennis,

Sorry, I missed your last animation so I didn't comment on it.

The poses look fine, but there are a couple discrepancies with the spacing.

I can see one spot on each ball where it speeds up for no reason. With the purple ball it's right after the second contact, and with the black ball it's right before the second contact. Again, watch those contact poses, some of them look off the ground.

Nice Work!

Ok I think I fixed the spacing

http://www.3dfrog.com/wips/bootcamp/exercise1b5.mov

It still didn't look right. I did some more. I hope it looks better.

http://www.3dfrog.com/wips/bootcamp/exercise1b6.mov

Hey, we're getting some real bouncing ball guru's here!

I've been thinking about Richard Williams' formula of 1 stretched contact/1 squash/1 stretched off the ground.

I'm wondering if it might be a bit too fast for animation done on 1's.

traditional 2D animators like him might do that on 2's ... we'd see the squash on the ground for 2 frames.

But for CG animation where it's all on 1's... it might be too poppy. on the other hand, two squash frames starts to look sticky.

What do you guys think?

The first thing I notice is the horizontal motion of the ball is slower in the air than during the bounce frames. The horizontal progress of the ball really oughta be rather steady. Put another way... what is making it slow down when it leaves the ground and speed up when it touches again? Gravity only affects the vertical motion of the ball.

Here it is with the horizontal position marked out:
[attachmentid=15753]
(the lines don't show up well unless you click on it.)

I deleted the funky keyframes on the horizontal movement so it is even. I guess that's as even movement as I can get.

http://www.3dfrog.com/wips/bootcamp/exercise1b7.mov

I think I get what you are saying but not sure if I am putting it into practice right.

I started the third part of exercise 1. I spent like 5 hours on it. I hope it doesn't suck too bad.

http://www.3dfrog.com/wips/bootcamp/exercise1c.mp4

comments and citicisms welcome

whoa i get some wierd writing it doesent show me any movie at all.

hmmm, try saving it to disk then opening with quicktime i guess.

Ok I am having a problem with the opening bounces of both balls they both hit down then rotate then rotation stops then ball bounces accel then when it goes round it stops then accels into the stretch. try not rotating so much and look at the accel. Decell. carefully ball from hit stops then accells tell hits horizontally vertically gravity slows it down. gota go I well finish later

Which exercise do you mean? The only rotation i have is the angle of the ball, there is no full rotation on it. Do you mean it is angled too much? I tried to make the angle point at its target position.

Exercise1c is the one I am talking about sorry I had to leave quickly and I just hit submit without reading it throught.

First lets talk about the motion of the balls into the scene. Gravity slows balls down in vertical axis which you show but you are slowing down in the horizontal as well that makes the ball movement jerking. go into a front view and mark the center of the ball with tabs in the scale border and look at the movement. The smaller ball is better but still might have some slowing in vertical. The angle changing in mid air hurts the motion also IMHO. Keep in I am not expert so take everything with a grain of salt also if you want you can skype me my skype name is the same as forum name and we can comunicate better that way maybe.

I evened out the horizontal spacing and made some other tweaks. I hope it looks ok. I dont have skype. I have heard of skype but don't really know much about it.

http://www.3dfrog.com/wips/bootcamp/exercise1c2.mp4

Here is my attempt at the ball with tail exercise. Let me know what you think. Thanks.

Ok, I realized I was supposed to make the ball bounce on the exercise. This made the exercise 100 times harded. I spent hours and came up with this.

Good job, just my own personal thought, i would like to see the ball have decelaration when its moving from side to side, i see that it just sudenly stops.

Some decelleration might look nice, but that was the ball movement that came with the exercise so I'm gonna leave it at that.

I tried animating a ball with tail going up stairs. See attached. Comments and criticisms welcome

That's much better do you see what a little tweak does makes it flow so much nicer. I was reading some were in a Forum I will try and find it but it was a Animator Surperviser saying what he looks for in a demo reel. Anything that makes him look at it agian thinking something is not just right? he discards the demo reel.




Try to have the first link rotate slightly in one frame then the first then 2nd in the next then the 1,2,3 in the next. You need to control each link in the chain seperatly in the exe. THis is for arm swings later on first shoulder rotates then after that elbow then after that wrist. One motion creates another motion which creates another all seperate from eack other. I see the three parts moving together like a string the point is to animate a chain.




Same critic as before but also have the tail slape the floor on the first bounce and have each link hit ands stop seperatley one hte last. This makes it even a harder exe.

Nice work keep it up!





Try to make it look like the tail is moving the ball. exe after it stops at bottom of stairs wipe the tail to give ball power to start from a dead stop to jump up the first step. Then do that for all steps. In Jeff Lew DVD he has a creater jumping but before that he moves the characters head before the jump to do the jump. He says it has to look as the head movement is giving the energy to lift the character off the ground. I will try to find link to my exe. of this to show you what I mean.

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&sh...ndpost&p=151233

This is it wow my boot camp thread is long!

Thanks

I don't understand how to do the links in the 1,2,3 order. Should it occur near the beginning or end of a swing? I can visualize it in a ball throw, but on this ball with tail it is a large sweeping motion. I will mess around with it but let me know how you do it please.

I worked some more on the ball with tail on the stairs. I made him wip himself to the first step with his tail. I exagerrated the motion of the tail and tried to add more overlap while he went up the stairs so the tail looks more like it is propelling him. I did a bunch of little tweaks too.

Thanks

Looking better & better. I'd exaggerate the jump from the top of the stairs, make the ball almost go out of sight at the top of the screen and then a couple of bounces after it lands.

I made the jump much higher. It does look much better like that. Some bounces after it lands would look nice but I am just gonna move to the next exercise. I need a break from bouncing balls.

Better if you go back to this once the ball reaches the top of the stairs wip the tail to turn him 90 degrees right now there is now anticipaition for the turning at the top of the stairs.

I added some anticipation to the big jump.

Ok, what happened to everything you learned in the bouncing ball exercise? That stuff is good for the rest of your life, not just in bouncing balls.
[attachmentid=15930]
Good parabolic arcs... good spacing so we know this world has gravity... you still gotta do it.

The tail adds a complexity to this but does not change the physics of how that ball moves thru the air.

The best way to approach it is to hide the tail entirely and animate the ball alone; get it right first.

then unhide the first segment of the tail and make it flop appropriately behind the ball, then the next, then the next.

In CG animation they call this "layering"


The steps add another complication: because each landing point is higher than the take off point, our jumper can't possibly take more time going down from the peak of the arc than it took him to rise up to it. the distance down is shorter than the distance up.

His path will be like a regular arc that gets interrupted

Quick side view of situation:
[attachmentid=15933]

The extreme case of that would be if he jumped just high enough to slide onto that next step without overshooting it at all.

You are a good teacher robcat. You give me a lot to think about. I will try more of this. thanks!!

Holy Mackeral! I think I made it worse trying to make it better

I hid the tail and fixed the curves of my bounces and I made the ball get to the higher step faster. I adjusted all the sqaush and stretch. Then I redid one tail piece at a time, and not too well at that. Then I realized the ball wasnt tilting into the bounces. I realized the ball didnt have a seperate bone from the tail so I tilted it with the model bone, thinking I can just go in and adjust the first tail bone to match. Boy was I wrong. It became a mess. I did my best to clean it up. What I should have done was add an extra bone for the ball then tilt it, but it was too late. With all the respacing and what not I lost any fluidity the animation had. I should have just started from scratch, it would have been easier. Live and learn.

Will there ever be a day I will look back on this and laugh?

Here's my mess.

Edit: now that I look at it again a day later maybe its not too bad. what do you think?

Just glancing at it, the first two jumps definitely look better and I like the timing of the hops up the stairs.

You sure made it hard on yourself by having so many steps! I did something like that for a school assignment; I just made two steps up and two steps down.

I'd still like to see a contact before the squash, the frame before isn't quite touching the step yet.

You're close on the tail, but it's still ambiguous to me whether it's a "passive" tail or an "active" tail that is trying to help fling the body. It seems to be one or the other at different times. What is right for one is wrong for the other.

For an "overlapping motion" assignment I'd aim to make the tail all "passive".

I am sort of relying on the computers tweening betwwen the floor and the highest point of the ball. If I force the ball to the ground on the frame before squash wont it make an uneven motion? I know we are not supposed to totally trust the computer though.

I originally had the tail all passive. Then someone suggested whipping the tail into the motion and I thought that was a good idea so I did it when the ball is using itts own momentum to take off but left it passive when it was already on its way. I thought this was ok, I guess I should have choose one or the other to make it consistent though.

Yeah I think I should have made just a couple of steps. This exercise is a bear.