Week 10 - final week of springboard!

The final week! can't believe it has gone so quick - but have learned a lot in what seems a short time!

This week we learned about IK (Inverse Kinematics) and FK (Forward Kinematics)  setups for character limbs and the different uses for each.

Our assignment was to use 'one leg' who was set up with IK and create a simple step (or hop) animation!

This was the first time we used a proper character rig with controls for the foot, heel and ball roll.

Here's my attempt below! - changed it a few times as some of my fellow students left comments to help me tweak it!

As this was the last session, we all got put on cam to say goodbye!, Paul our mentor (who is an Alumni graduate) will see us around campus and possibly be a peer buddy to help us with our work through class 1!

Overall I would definitely recommend the Maya Springboard class, not only is it a good way to get used to how AM works and how to use the website and chat to classmates, its also given me a great basic understanding of the software so I feel prepared to start the main course and able to concentrate fully on the animation side without having to worry about the software, I already feel quite comfortable with Maya!

Plus the graph editor is actually making sense now!! :D

Week 9

Im a little late with this entry!!

In week 9 we had the task of cleaning up our robot arm animation that we blocked out the previous week, had a lot of fun tweaking all the graph editor curves to try and add some anticipation and ease-in and outs to make it as smooth and realistic as i could!

we also learned how to constrain the can to the arm so it followed it perfectly! see what you think!

Week 8 - basic animation

This week we learned some more advanced animation, the first assignment was to create a bouncing ball then import a copy of the ball and change its location an bounce height so you end up with two different bounces. I also added a rotation to the ball using the graph editor to make it bounce more realistically!

The second assignment was to use the robot arm model supplied, and create a 'blocking out' of the robot arm picking up the can. I tried adding a bit more character to the arm rather than just the basic motion. This was a good intro to setting keys on control curves and using linear/stepped splines for the blocking phase - thats why the animation appears jumpy! We will work on constraining the can and cleaning up the animation next week!

Week 7 - intro to animation!

This week we had two simple animations to complete, they sounded quite simple to start but were a great way to learn the basics of setting keyframes and editing the Graph Editor. The Graph Editor looks like it will be massively important when it comes to animation!! so we will need to become new best friends if i'm to become a successful animator! We learned how to edit the spline curves and tangents to make movement move fluid, its a great intro as when I have previously attempted to use this I found it extremely confusing!
This week we created an animation of a sphere moving through space to get us used to keyframes and also a sphere moving in a simple circle from a 2d viewpoint, but had to create a smooth circular motion rather than a diamond shaped motion through editing the spline curves!

weeks 1-6 - lighting and rendering

Finally, here is the scene with lights added to create the look of the sun casting down with shadows, also the images are rendered in higher resolution... next on to animation!

weeks 1-6 - texturing

Here is my scene with added colour and textures, I added some reflections on the surfaces such as the rails but these don't really show up until you add lights to the scene.

weeks 1-6

Just a recap of the first 6 weeks of the Animation Mentor Maya Springboard course!
So far we have learned the basics of creating and manipulating objects in Maya, created a simple character and a hierarchy so all the limbs move correctly and with eachother!, created a set and learned how to place cameras to create shots and finally learned the basics of lighting, texturing and rendering our scenes.

I will attach some pics in further posts so can can see the visual progress of my scene, the character I created had a 'surprised' expression so when it came to creating a scene to place him in I decided on a swimming pool and to have him being pushed of a diving board! ( I was probably thinking about holidays at the time also...) I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, but see what you think!

My character with hierarchy

My pool scene

Pool scene camera 1

Pool scene camera 2