Tuesday, October 16, 2012

WEEK 7: Motion Studies - Anatomy of Movement 2: Muscles

Animation speed drill o' the day - new rig! Up on DropBox you should find "Krag" the awkwardly adorable dinosaur. Your mission is to create a little surprise 'take' for Krag. I will explain :o)
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Human Anatomy + Photoshop Basics, continued.  Once again we're in lab 520 continuing with part 2 of our Human Anatomy study: the muscular system.

Bring drawing materials, and a stylus.

Description:
Part 2: Muscles
Continuing working on the same file with the action photo as your base layer, and your skeleton in the middle, draw the major muscle groups that move the skeleton as a final overlay. Feature the most visible and important muscle groups for artists and animators. Show perspective in the shading as the muscles wrap around the body, the direction they lie and the deformations caused by the effort of the pose. Use colour variation to differentiate between the bellies of the muscles and the ligaments and tendons that attach them to the bones.

Aim to make your drawing a portfolio piece that shows both your knowledge and your artistic skill. The drawing can be very detailed or you may generalize forms as shown in the study above.

Looking for a good muscular system study reference? -- ok, maybe more 'memorable' than good? Click here!
No, seriously, these are better - Front, Back

WEEK 7: 2D Digital Art 1 - Sidescroller Level Design, continued

Picking up where we left off last week, we'll continue with level design adding a mid-ground layer, elements like platforms and door frames, and apply techniques such as shadows and filters to dress up the art style.

We'll discuss more esoteric concepts like continuity and atmosphere, create repeating elements and build depth by placing panning objects in the foreground and midground.

Check DropBox for the latest instructions.

WEEK 7: Character Acting 1: Walk Cycles using mocap data, continued

Click to enlarge
Please note: class will be starting at 12:45 and going straight through to 3:00 (no breaks) to accomodate those who want to go to the OCAD presentation of Chris Solarski -- see info:
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Animation speed drill o' the day: start your character lying on the ground and have him get up to a standing position. See "Turkish Get Up" exercise for further study.
Turkish Get Up - a few of these will give you a lot of information.
Don't drop the weight on your head!
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 Walk Cycles, continued:

We'll pick up where we left off last week with Dan showing you how to create cycling animation from live mocap data. Remember that this assignment requires more than just a 'generic', vanilla walk. It must have character.  So, once you're finished cleaning up the data and bringing it into Maya, your real animation work begins.

When analyzing mocap data for your walk cycles, you'll have to hunt for all the key positions that give the character weight, such as the ones pointed out in this Muybridge image on the left. Note that even video reference may be missing vitally important details.

All 3 of these walk cycles use the same base animation.
You can alter cycles to give them more attitude and character - some great tools to help you with this are the graph editor and animation layers. Having great control over your curves in the graph editor is great for editing cycles, in fact, I'd say it is essential. Remember from last year that precision is the key to a smooth cycle. The foot slide must be linear and cover exactly the same distance as the forward motion.  All the tangents must be working correctly and there must be no pops or sticky spots in your screen arcs. Animation layers are very powerful for non-destructively building more subtle motion on top of a basic piece of animation. In the Eleven rig examples pictured, the original 'vanilla' walk was turned into a snappy, happy walk and a more hesitant, scared walk using layers without altering the original base animation.




For more practice, Digital Tutors has a course on Creating Walk Cycles in MotionBuilder.


Monday, October 15, 2012

WEEK 7: Texturing & Shading 1 - unwrapping more complex models, continued

We'll pick up where we left off last week, finishing up the unwrapping of our fire hydrant model.

Always keep in mind the importance of grouping your objects to make them easier to paint. We'll (hopefully) get started with a little painting today.

I'll give you a little background about ye olde hydrant to get you thinking about how to make it look really nice and beat-up. Maybe we'll even pay our fire hydrant a little visit in RL. :o)

This assignment isn't due for a few weeks so you'll have lots to time to paint it and apply a couple of new kinds of maps.


TEXT2010 Assignment 5 & 6 
Assigned: Wed, Oct 17th 
Value: 30%: UV's 10%, Diffuse 10%, Normal 2.5%, Specular 2.5%, Final Look 5% 
Click here for the rubric for this assignment 
Due:  Wed, November 14th 
Hydrant, UV'd and textured: 3DSMax file, diffuse map, normal map, specular map, and a simple render
SAVE your work uncompressed (2048 x 2048 PSDs recommended)
SEND me only Targas (.tga), one for each of your maps.
Maximum resolution: 2048 x 2048 pixels, 8 bits per channel, no alpha
File naming convention example:
tdonovan_hydrant.max
tdonovan_hydrant_diff.tga 
tdonovan_hydrant_nrm.tga 
tdonovan_hydrant_spec.tga
tdonovan_render.jpg  (a screengrab or render of your final piece)

Save your Max file at a nice angle, maps applied and paths stripped. 
Please be very careful with your naming conventions.  All assignments are to be handed in via Dropbox.

Click here for a reminder on how to strip network paths in 3DSMax