End of Year Reflection

This year of animation has challenged me to create a variety of works. From a stop-motion collaboration to a series of 24-frame drawings done alone, all of these projects have helped me improve my animation skills greatly. This class has engendered my success in these areas:

Technology
I became much more familiar with Maya this year. I learned how to extrude along a CV Curve, how to create foliage with the brush tool, and many more useful tools that I now have at my disposal. The biggest technological takeaway from this year would be the importance of saving Maya files as .ma instead of .mb and having multiple saves of the same project, otherwise your entire project could be lost due to a single corrupted file. This happened to me early in the year. I was modeling a Tiger Tank. I had spent over 100 hours working on it, but one day, the file stopped opening. It's unfortunate, but at least I can try to avoid this event in the future.

Collaboration
As an animator, it is extremely important to work with others, because it would be overly difficult and would take forever for one person to complete a project that multiple people could easily finish together. I had the privilege of working with 5 other students on a stop-motion animation. Having 6 people in our group gave each of us more time and options to make the project better than if there were less of us.

Communication
Along with collaboration comes a need for communication. During the stop-motion project, every member had a certain role. These roles were all determined and agreed upon by everyone. This communication allowed our whole team to work on something different, making us more efficient overall.

Project Management
Without adequate project organization, it's difficult to keep track of every file used in every individual  assignment. In order to manage everything, I created folders and named them all so I could put files pertaining to a certain project together. This system allowed me to keep track of all my projects, work on them using the correct files, and turn them in on time.

Leadership
Throughout the year, I was able to take charge multiple times, helping other students and answering questions about Maya or After Effects. A few times, I was able to resolve some issues with other people's projects. These interactions allowed me to learn how to be a leader when needed, making sure the whole team is where they need to be in terms of information attainment or simple progress.

This class has been in my schedule for all 3 years of my high school experience, and will be in my upcoming 4th year at Northwest. I'm grateful for this program, because it allowed meet to meet amazing students and teachers, while improving my craft as an animator. I've put forth great effort to get to where I am now, and I'll be back doing exactly the same for next year.

The Principles of Animation

The article titled "The Principles of Animation" published by Annie Gray explains all 28 principles of animation; how they look and why they're important. They act as the basis for all kinds of animation.

Type of Character 

The type of principles used are dependent on the type of character involved in the scene. Living things need to "work and move in a plausible way". Every body part needs to be accounted for, and movements need to be exaggerated for an effective animation.

Primary/Secondary Action

When a character makes a movement, the animator has to take two things into account: primary and secondary movement. Primary movement is a major motion that the entire character's body reacts to, like a walking motion or a character absorbing a punch or catching a flying projectile. A secondary motion is a minor action that one body part or article of clothing that moves in reaction to the primary action. If someone hangs upside down, you would expect their hair to swing back and forth briefly below their head, a secondary action.

Arbitrary Realism

When animating, actions should be exaggerated, but still somewhat realistic and believable. To do this, the animator needs to understand the actual anatomy of whatever they're modeling. To animate a frog, one must know how a frog's bone structure is set up and how it moves around.

It's important to note that the character does not have to look like an animal, but it must move like an animal.

http://www.animationarena.com/principles-of-animation-2.html

Kubo and the Two Strings

Kubo and the Two Strings is a stop-motion picture made by the company LAIKA, who is known for creating the movies The Boxtrolls and Coraline. They use small figurines with modifiable faces and limbs for main characters.

Animation Analysis

The style of animation is unique—one I've never seen anywhere other than LAIKA's movies. Many of the characters' movements and their clothing is fluid and accurately simulate reality, but sometimes, because it's stop motion animation, the movements seem a little choppy. True, Kubo's animation is a lot smoother than Coraline's. This is a result of time and experience on the animators' side. I believe the material used for clothes and hair was chosen discerningly, because they seem to flow perfectly with character movements, and the characters' facial expressions coincide with the situation they are in or the emotion they are feeling.

Conclusion

I enjoyed the movie a lot. There was a nice mix of action and story telling, character development and interactions. The quality of stop-motion animation was extremely high, made by a group of animators who have mastered their art. I support all of the work LAIKA does, and I'm excited to see what they will produce in the future.

Raven Revival

Overview

Recently, I've gotten more involved in a group at ONW known as Raven Revival, a band of high school christians that are devoted to bible study and prayer. I haven't been a member for very long, only attending the past 3 meets, but I love what the group's leader Drew Bond is doing in terms of biblical study and fellowship, and shouldn't be single-handedly responsible to carry the entire group on his shoulders. He has talked about trying to get ONW Now to feature Raven Revival in a segment, but he hasn't made too much progress. I decided to take it upon myself to develop an animated logo for Raven Revival, which features the group's name with a cross and some minor smoke effects surrounding the name.

Evaluation

The logo featuring the name Raven Revival and the cross has a simple design, but is easy to read and is centered, directing people's attention to it. The smoke effects envelop the screen before the logo shows up, then within a second, the smoke disperses and the logo slowly becomes visible. The smoke then stays near the edges of the screen so it isn't much of a distraction while adding a ghostly atmosphere in the scene.

Possible Changes

I may go back and add more detail to the cross behind the italicized words, because as is the artistic schemes seem contrary to one another. I would also like to possibly add ambient music of some sort just to quickly compliment the scene I set up with all the other elements.

Product

Camera Point Tutorial

Overview

In one of my recent projects, I created a room with a ping pong table situated in the center, where two floating ping pong paddles are competing in a short back-and-forth volley. I wanted both paddles to be constantly moving a little, just to show that both paddles were reacting to the ball going from one side to the other, then back. I decided to attach the paddles to cameras that point towards the ball constantly, so the paddles would always face the ball.

1. Designate one object to be what is focused on (the ball) and another object to be what will focus on the first object (the paddle).










2. Create a "Camera and Aim"







3. Position the camera on the 2nd object, oriented the same way. Then, put the camera's aim on the first object.









4. Open Outliner, find the 2 objects, the camera, and the camera's aim. Using the command key on Mac or control key on PC, drag the 2nd object onto the camera, then drag the camera's aim onto the 1st object.







5. Now, whenever you move the first object, the second object, which is attached to the camera now, will always face the first object.

The Plausible Impossible

1. Gus Goose runs over to a chair and sits down very quickly and abruptly. He begins to shake back and forth, like his body has to take time to absorb the sudden change in motion. Logically, this does not occur, but due to Newton's 3rd law of motion, stating that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

2. Gus Goose begins to eat corn on the cob, which starts to sound like a typewriter machine. In real life, corn on the cob makes a completely different sound, but by the way he eats it, moving from left to right, then reseting and starting the process over again, it almost seems as though his mouth and the corn could sound like a typewriter.

3. While Gus eats the corn, the perspective shifts over to Donald Duck, whose head begins shaking in the same typewriter-simulating way as Gus eats the corn, almost in reaction to the consumption of the corn. This emulates Newton's 3rd law once again.

4. Gus still craves food, so he grabs a stack of bread and meat, and begins shuffling them like one would a deck of cards. The two stacks of food instantly take on the same structure and integrity as flimsy paper playing cards, respectively sounding like someone is shuffling a deck.

5. After he eats his shuffled deck of sandwiches, they stay in his throat temporarily, changing the shape of his neck to make it look like an accordion. His head then bobs up and down, mimicking what an accordion looks and sounds like when being played, which adds some sense of logic to this illogical instance.

Tiger Tank Model

Panzerkampfwagen Tiger Ausf. E

In animation, I modeled a German Tiger Tank, which was developed in 1941, and used in World War II. I worked tirelessly on it, and structurally and visually, it became a very accurate representation of the real monstrosity. When I was almost finished with the entire project, a node or piece of data became corrupted, keeping the file from opening. I tried everything I could think of and read possible solutions online about recovering a corrupted .mb file, but I could not bring it back. Here's what I accomplished before I lost everything:

Hull

I started by creating the basic body of the tank out of one shape. After I had sized and angled it correctly, I attached additional plates of armor onto the hull, and left space for the tracks. After adding further details like the frontal machine gun, the driver's viewport, and utility cables, I proceeded to the tracks.

Tracks

For the tracks, I noticed from blueprints of the tiger that there were 2 different types of wheels used, one like a car rim, the other a gear to propel the tracks. I modeled the two different wheels separately, lined them up,, and got ready to create the tracks to wrap around the wheels. To make the tracks, I created a pipe, extruded the faces on it to form it into tank tracks. Then, I generated a 2D circle, and positioned it around the pipe in the same configuration. Using the wire tool, I was able to attach the tracks to the circle, which made the tracks act in the same way real ones would. I positioned them under the tank, where I had left space for them, then I decided to move on to the turret and gun.

Turret and Gun

For the main turret piece, I started with a cylinder, cut it in half, and extruded the flat face created from the cut. In order to develop gun mantle that was elevated apart from the main turret, I had to do a series of extrusions, then use the wedge tool to make bends in the mantle so it would follow the shape of the turret. I lined up multiple pipes and beveled all of the edges, and created a specific piece on the end of the barrel with parts cut out of it to replicate the muzzle. I also placed the commander's hatch and the main crew hatch on the top of the turret, which provides the crew access to the tank. There are containers attached to the back of the turret for the crew to store items in, which I just extruded off from the main turret.

Rear Details

On the back of the tank I added exhaust pipes hanging off the back of the vehicle and a shelf attached to the hull, holding a hammer, which was a common utility item used on the tank. By extruding a shape along a CV curve, I was able to make a zig-zag shape and subtracted duplicates of it from the main hull, making vent slits.

References:

https://youtu.be/u5jQqsiUlHQ

https://www.the-blueprints.com/blueprints-depot/tanks/ww2-tanks-germany-2/sdkfz181-pakpfwvi-tiger-i.png