in3dweeling

Final Video

Playblast

Rendering

Testing

Testing 2

Chosen Scenario 1

There is a long line of GREEN boxes, as if on a conveyor belt.
The robot lifts the box at the head of the queue and stacks it in a pile at its side.
Once the robot has finished stacking a box, the rest of the boxes move forward one place, and the process is repeated.
Suddenly, a RED box appears at the head of the queue.
The robot appears confused – all the boxes are supposed to be green!

1.     Character

Robot_Fi. Robot_Fi is your day to day worker who works tirelessly to earn his money. After been assign to load and off load cargo boxes for about 2 years now he came across something that he had never seen before. Usually the cargo boxes that he is assign to is green, but after one fine day something unusual happen, a red cargo box came through the converyor belt! Robot_Fi have never seen this before and was wondering what he should do about it .

2.     Storyboard

3.     Self-Critique

At first when I came across the assignment, I felt that this assignment was much difficult as compared to project 1. However I realise that we can use the mechanic arm we have gone through on WEEK 13 to help us. This makes the whole animation a lot easier, having said that I find that overall the animation was rather challenging. My greatest difficulty is the storyboarding component as I am never good in my drawing. Having to think of my idea at the same time draw it out was very difficult for me to do. In the end I manage to summarise my idea in the briefest way. After going through the tough storyboarding process, it comes to the actual animation. I find that for the first part of the animation was rather easy as I could use the files for WEEK 13 having that only helped in the first part. The second part is show the robot’s character when it encounter’s a problem. This took quite a while to finalise as the movement and timing of the animation must be the same and the way to bring out the character need to be refine time and again. Overall I’m satisfied with my animation as I felt that I made my robot come to live and tried to bring as much character to my robot as I can with my ability.

Moving the Mechanic Arm

Exercise 3 – Animate the box moving at a linear speed past the robot

Animate the crane lifting

1)  Apart from their different sizes, it is obvious from Luxo Jr. that the big lamp is “older” and that the small lamp is “younger”.
How is this communicated by the animation? Give at least THREE examples.

The movement for the big lamp is not as energetic as compared to the small lamp. The interaction between the ball for the small lamp greater than the big lamp which suggest that the small laptop is kiddish in a way.  When the small lamp burst the ball the emotion that the big lamp gave was how a parent would give his child and the small lamp’s reaction to what it have is a typical reaction for a child who loss it’s toy.

2)  Give an example from Luxo Jr of how timing is used for comic effect. Explain how the timing decisions contribute to the humour.

When the ball was burst and the small lamp left the scene, there was a few seconds of silents before the sudden shock expression from the big lamp and after a few seconds a huge ball went pass the scene. I believe that once the small lamp left the scene the timing of the big lamp getting shock and the ball passing through the scene was critical as it gives viewers an anticipation on what was the shock expression about.

3)   When you create a joint chain, these form a hierarchy, with the first joint at the top and the last joint at the bottom. Explain why this is necessary for the joints to work properly.

Joint chain is an example on how our own body’s joint work. In order to allow the joint to move we can use our own body as an illustration to show how the joint chain moves in animation. Without the first joint on top, the rest of the joint would not be able to move probably, if the joints are reversed and the last joint is at the top, it would not work.

Bouncing Ball

1)  Do you need to be able to draw well to create good 2D animation? Explain your view.

I believe that being able to draw well for 2d is essential as the details it gives in terms of staging a bouncing ball for example; the ball should look like a ball meaning to say it should look round instead of looking in a weird shape. How the drawing should turn out to look like  should be as similar to your original idea as possible.

2) Do you need to be able to draw well to create good 3D animation? Explain your view.

I believe you do not need to draw well to be able to create a good 3d animation. Firstly I believe if you could draw well for your 2d animation, 3d animation is just an additional feature where the image is shown in a 3 dimensional format. Mostly for 3d animation there will be software in the market to help develop the animation an example is 3D autodesk maya.

3) What do you think would separate a piece of poor animation from a piece of good animation? In other words, how would you go about deciding if a piece of animation is good or bad?

First I would look at whether the animation is pixelated and how close the animation is executed to deliver the animators message. Will the viewers be able to understand what the animation is about and whether they will remember the parts of the animation where there are humor or other memorable moments in the animation.

4) In 2D animation, you need to be very aware of timing at a frame by frame level, using timing charts and other techniques – but for 3D animation, this is handled using the graph editor, which is more concerned with manipulating rates of change over time. Does this affect how you approach your animation work? Explain.

Yes,there are difference in dealing with a 2d animation and a 3d animation. For 2d animation, it is more concern about how the movement of the object is placed using time framing which would take a while to finish while for 3d animation the use of graph editor allows the user to change the curve of the object without painstakingly changing every key frame and using the graph editor break the tangent to create different angle of curves.

5) Give a brief critique of Maya as an animation tool. Don’t just say Maya makes animation difficult, or easy, or that you need to learn a lot of stuff to use Maya – explain what Maya does well and not so well in terms of creating animation.

I believe that Maya does well in terms of creating animation as there are many features to help people create 3d objects. For example you can change between polygon, animation, rendering modes to allow better accessibility for the user to create a 3d object. There are different lighting modes that you can choose from to allow better quality of the animation. In conclusion I believe that Maya is a good animation tool for beginners like myself to understand how animation works.

Adding Squash and Stretch to a bouncing Ball

Exercise 1

Exercise 2

As of now I am trying to figure a way to convert the .swf file to other movie file as the convertor does not recognise the file type. 

Bouncing Ball Example:

First try:

Final attempt:

1) Squat down, jump as high as you can go, then land on the ground (it’s better if the person has long hair)

5)  Pretend to get really really really (!) angry, then pretend to punch your friend standing in front of you

6) Drop a ball and film it bouncing a few times

8 ) Stand with a partner about 3 metres apart and throw a ball to each other a few times

11) Random

6 animation principles

1) Anticipation

2)Squash and Stretch

3)Follow-Through

4)Ease in and Ease out

5)Arcs

6) Staging

Final Product

For my final model, I was not very happy about it. I realise that when a teacher say that something is challenging; it should be the first warning sign that it is very difficult. Yet I stubbornly think that I can do it so in the end the result was disappointing.

There are two challenges I had faced when I was modelling my Obi Wan; First it was the wire frame phrase, and Secondly the texturing phrase.

The wire frame phrase had been discussed on my previous post and I shall not say anything further. I will talk about the texturing phrase, at first I thought that I can take a picture of my Obi Wan’s head,body,hands and bottom and use the file tool to texture the Obi Wan. I was wrong, it isn’t that simple. So in the end I had to try to draw out my Obi Wan’s head using polygon which took me a long while to complete. I tried my best to make my model to look as similar to by original Obi Wan as I can which sadly failed terribly. The only consolation I had was that I manage to complete my wireframe and I am proud of it. So my advise to myself is try not to be too stubborn.