References

This is my Reference page. It represents the help I had from primary and secondary sources to mold the different animations for each task. There are books I read, as well as websites I visited in order to help me progress along with my animations as the projects came up.

BOUNCING BALL REFERENCES;

For help with animating the bouncing balls, I read through this online tutorial detailing how to manipulate splines and how I could make them create the effects that the eyes see when a ball bounces.

Here is also a video I found on youtube shortly after working on the Bouncing Ball animation that helped explain the concepts within a ball’s bounce. It talks about Animation Principles such as Motion Arcs and Elements of Squash/Stretch and gave me a rough idea on what I should be doing in Maya to reach the stage where the ball’s bounce looks realistic and follows the key principles.

 

PENDULUM REFERENCES;

Pendulum video I found on youtube when I began animating my pendulum rig.

Here is some footage of a weight swinging on a mechanism I found at a gallery visit I went to. It doesn’t directly relate to the type of pendulum I was looking to animate, however, the idea of a weight at the end of a mechanism which directly affected how the mechanism as a whole operated was both interesting and helpful.

 

BALL AND TAIL REFERENCES;

Here are the videos I looked closely at during the stages for my Ball and Tail Animation. I found it useful to observe an actual fox’s tail, so that I could make it look as close to the real thing as possible. The videos are of a fox doing various things whilst its tail accompanies it like Secondary Animation. (Jumping, moving, pausing etc.)

 

 

 

This is an image from the Disney Animated Film The Lion King 3: Hakuna Matata that I made reference to when creating the concept art for my Ball and Tail scene. It helped as in my head, the scene that the Ball and Tail interacts with is at night. As well as served as a guide for how I should use colour for trees and night time spaces.

 

The Cinematography in Maya lesson on Lynda.com taught me the basics of camera shots. How to set them up, the basics of rendering cameras, how to operate the Camera Sequencer found in the Animation Editors tab on Maya, some simple camera movements as well as some compound camera movements and special effects to help create a narrative within my animation through the storytelling of camera angles. I found it very useful and made the animating process more exciting for my Ball and Tail and will help develop the story for my Personality Walk Cycle.

 

 

WALK CYCLE REFERENCES;

For the Walk Cycle Animation, I was able to watch the animated version of Richard Williams’ book The Animator’s Survival Kit. He gave useful information and tips regarding walk cycles and their structures. It talked about contact positions where the foot makes contact with the ground, passing positions which comes in between the contact positions, and and up and down position, where the body is at its highest point as well as its lowest point in a walk. Different people will have different walks, and the timing and spacing between these walks will also differ as there is no walk that is exactly alike as another.  Williams also talked about how these positions can also be changed in a walk cycle. I feel that this gives the walk a different tone and portrays a different mood. It also says something about the personal walking. After watching these videos, there were some tutorials I did which ran through the method of creating a walk cycle in Maya. I also learnt newer techniques like using the Hypershade window in Maya to copy attributes from one spline to another in order to make one side of the rig identical to another, if this is desired. I found the Blue Rig more useful for my Walk Cycle idea as there were eyes that could be animated.

 

 

This is Force Dynamic Life Drawing For Animators. A book that has become a key tool in recent sessions of Life Drawing and an amazing source of information and teaching for newer techniques and helpful concepts to improve my drawing ability. The images below talk about rhythm, and how certain curves in the body are produced by other parts of the body also curving out. The force from one curves causes another body part to push out also, creating a rhythm within the body.