AN01 - Fourth Assignment

For this past week we were studying overlapping action, so we had to animate a pendulum doing an action.  For mine I wanted to pendulum to be sort of playing with a ball where it would bounce it once, toss it off screen, and go after it.  Here's my planning for the assignment...

I still can't quite get the hang of knowing what frame numbers actions will happen on before actually going into Maya though, because these frame numbers ended up being pretty wrong haha.  My mentor suggested for this kind of overlap to try using the idea of copying the rotate curve that I made for the top joint of the chain, and pasting it on all the other joints and then just offset it on the other joints by a frame or two.  This worked for the beginning part for the most part, but when the pendulum went into the loop, the joints ended up wrapping too much and then it just looked like it was stuck like that until the end, so I had to go back and do the overlap for the joints from right before the loop until the end by hand.  So here's what I turned in...

I'm still not completely happy with the overlapping action on the chain near the beginning just because it feel more like a tail and less like a chain being acted on by inertia, but we'll see what Anthony says!

Also, this week we had to pose out Stu in a pose conveying devastation.  Here are my sketches that I came up with, with the one I ended up submitting circled...

I actually posed out 3, 5, and 8 and ended up having difficulty deciding between 3 and 5...

(pose 5)

(pose 8)

(pose 3)

I liked pose 5 because it was dramatic, but from the critiques that I got from people 5 was more of a dramatic portrayal of devastation and took a minute for people to realize it was devastation, whereas pose 3 more immediately read as devastation.  So I ended up submitting pose 3.  I feel like something could still be refined on it though, the line of action feels a little off to me, but with the hectic week I had, staying up until 6am this morning to finish all of this and the revision of last week's assignment, it's turn-in-able haha.  Now I just have to wait and see what Anthony says!

*UPDATE* 

 Hey guys so this animation went through quite some revision.  Anthony suggested that the beginning would work better if there was less tilting of the base before it throws the ball, and that some parts of the chain motion were off.  I just kept not being totally satisfied with it, but I finally have the finished revised version of the pendulum for your viewing pleasure!