ADVANCED ANIMATION ✿ FINAL COMPILATION & REFLECTION ✿

ADVANCED ANIMATION ✿ FINAL COMPILATION & REFLECTION ✿

24.09.24 - .0.24

week 1 - week 4

✿ TAN JIA JIA 0350577 ✿

Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media

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✿ INSTRUCTION ✿

Figure 1.1 MIB of Advanced Animation

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✿ EXERCISES ✿

Exercise 1

The first exercise required us to animate a 3D bouncing ball, including a soccer ball, ping pong ball, bowling ball, and beach ball. All the 3D models of the balls were provided by Mr. Kamal.

Find image/video reference for these bouncing ball:

1. Soccer ball - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01cm7H1QoJg
2. Ping Pong - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTsx5eW2eLU
3. Bowling ball - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTz_5quG_ig
4. Beach ball - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s74P1ejubEA

Before I started animating the 3D bouncing ball, I watched the reference videos provided by Mr. Kamal.

Figure 2.1 Soccer ball

Figure 2.2 Ping Pong

Figure 2.3 Bowling

Figure 2.4 Beach Ball

Exercise 2

In Exercise 2, I was tasked with animating a pendulum rig to demonstrate key animation principles like drag, overlapping, and follow-through. First, I downloaded the pendulum rig and familiarized myself with its controls. The main goal was to animate the pendulum’s movement from left to right, ensuring the tail reacted with flexibility to create a believable swinging motion. I focused on achieving the correct timing for drag, overlapping, and follow-through to enhance the realism of the animation. The project was set to an image size of 1280x720 (HD) with a 24fps frame rate. The challenge was to ensure the motion felt natural by considering the speed of the swing and how the tail followed the main action.

Figure 2.5 Pendulum 1

Exercise 3

For **Exercise 3: Emotion Pose**, you will start by downloading the character rig "Snow" from the provided link and exploring it to understand how to manipulate the character's body and facial expressions. Next, you need to find references for action poses that depict the emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. You can capture still images from video references or take reference photos of yourself using a smartphone camera. Once you have your references, observe the key or storytelling poses, focusing on the line of action, silhouette, and weight distribution, while also avoiding parallel and twinning poses. Pay attention to the balance and contrapposto of the character's posture to ensure the poses feel natural and dynamic. Using the Snow rig, pose the character’s body and facial expression to convey each emotion accurately. Finally, render the pose with simple lighting to showcase the emotion, ensuring the character’s expression and body language are clear and effective.

Figure 2.8 Happy Pose

Figure 2.9 Angry Pose

Figure 2.10 Sad Pose

Figure 2.11 Scared Pose

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✿ PROJECT 1: WALK CYCLE ANIMATION ✿

Figure 3.1 Final Outcome for Vanilla Walk

Figure 3.2 Final Outcome of Attitude Walk

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✿ PROJECT 2: JUMP ANIMATION ✿

Figure 4.1 Final Outcome

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✿ FINAL PROJECT: ACTION ANIMATION ✿

Figure 5.1 Final Outcome

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✿ REFLECTION ✿

In the Advanced Animation module, I gained a deeper understanding of both the technical and creative aspects of animation. The exercises pushed me to explore more complex animation principles, such as timing, exaggeration, and character emotion. I particularly enjoyed learning how to animate with a focus on physical actions like the **bouncing ball**, **pendulum**, and **emotion poses**, where I had to consider the fluidity of motion, exaggeration for appeal, and the subtleties of body language to convey emotions like happiness, sadness, anger, and fear.

The walk cycle and jump animation exercises helped me grasp the importance of keyframes and smooth transitions between poses, as well as the significance of reference materials to achieve more accurate and dynamic animations. Creating the final action sequence was particularly challenging but rewarding, as it required me to understand character movement in more complex scenarios like a fight or chase scene. The use of Blender in combination with staging and camera work added an extra layer of difficulty, but it also provided me with a more comprehensive skill set in animation production.

Overall, this module has sharpened my technical skills in Blender while also allowing me to express my creativity through character animation. The lessons learned here have provided me with a stronger foundation for tackling more advanced animation projects in the future.