Animation Evaluation

Animation Evaluation

 

 

 

Brief:

In this module, I have learn the various skills and techniques of animation. With the knowledge of different animations, I will use and transfer these skills to create a 3D animation piece.

 

 

3D Animation Tutorials

 

Bouncing Ball Animation:

This was the first 3D model involving with animation for this module, this is perfect for me to get to know the 3DS Max software's capabilities. First I create a simple sphere polygon, then I change the shape of the sphere by squashing it to give it form of a squashed ball. This helps the ball to get a realistic image as if it was impacting on the ground.

 

Tail and Box Pivot:

The Tail and Box models were used to practice the pivot technique. The tail model was imported from the college's moodle, and then I animated the tail to swing and curl. This can be used make a tail, jungle vine, a snake and etc. The box was created from scratch by using a cube polygon and then used the extrude function to hollow out the box and add 3d depth. I also created two doors to be animated on a pivot, however, after animating the doors on the box, the texture that I applied to the box was also animated. This is might have been an error that I have forgotten to correct.

 

Bunny Space Hopper:

The model was a simple object to practice our own animations to give the character a unique personality and atmosphere. Just like the Bouncing Ball animations, I used the techniques of the squash and stretch to add life to the model.

 

Max Man:

This model was another practice of custom animations, I was able to animate this rigged man model with three different animated poses. 1 the gay hand flop, 2 the Kamehameha from Dragonball Z, 3 a tummy rub after felling hungry.

 

Beatrice:

I imported this model from the college's moodle, this was a practice to create a bipod rig, and then integrating it to the human model. This has also helped me to understand that bipod can be used to make unique and creative anatomy.

 

Animation Project:

Story/ My Story for my involves Sonic the Hedgehog and Shadow the Hedgehog having a race. In some scenes, they will fight each other tire out competitor before they reach goal ring.

 

 

Software and Tools/ For my 3D animation project, I used the Autodesk Maya software to create my animation piece. I also uploaded a folder of Sonic Generations models from Patrick Sweeting, plus that the models are already rigged. This has really helped me to save time to make my own animations at a early stage. Most of the animations that I have been practicing were created in the Autodesk 3DS Max software.  

 

Personal Strengths/

With my creative talents and well versed knowledge of 3D software, I believe that I will have no problem on creating a simple animation with my cartooning abilities.

 

 

Personal Weaknesses/

I need to know how to use 3DS Max more to fully understand and utilize, plus to understand the different types of rigging of how to animate them. I also had some difficulties of remembering some of the techniques that I've learn in Maya. But with a few trail and errors with the software, most of knowledge came flooding back in matter of minutes.

 

Problems and Errors:

I did try importing the models in 3DS Max, but they had a bone like rigging that I never used before. So decided to use the Autodesk Maya software to animate the two models. The models imported in Maya, had a different and simplistic rigging to control and animate.

 

Additional Animations:

During in this module, I have been practicing on various animations in 3D, Sprite and 2D illustration. I have created an eight frame animation of a classic style sonic running by the Adobe Photoshop software. Second and third is a sprite animation of Goku and Vegeta from DragonBall Z, performing the signature attacks and transformations. The sprites were very easy to create, but the animation took some time to edit to make the animations performed correctly.

 

Conclusion:

In this module, I have learned many different techniques and methods of animation, I also believe this has help me to develop myself to a new level. With these new founded skills, I can transfer these attributes to my artistic talents to bring my unique designs to life. However, I still think that I need to understand more of 3D animation. 3D Animation is a completely different world to 2D animation, I would like to learn more of how to animated 3D assets at a professional level, but I feel that 2D animation is my strongest subject in animation.