Unfortunately due to an electrical fault in Stockport I wasn’t able to get to this lecture in person, so I followed the recorded lecture at home.
Anticipation: The action that immediately precedes the expected action; the mechanical buildup for force. Anticipation is the most natural way to build up internal force in order to execute dynamic motion. “Any animation consists of Anticipation, Action, and Reaction.” (Bill Tytla)
An object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced force – this law applies to everything in the universe, including us. It’s precisely because of this law that anticipating left before walking right results in a conservation of energy.
Anticipation is the key to describing how much strength and force go into a movement, while squash and stretch ‘sell’ the action as realistic and believable.
(George Toombes (2024) ‘Friday Session 11/10/24:Â Critiquing Pendulum animations. Differentiating weights using spacing via Pendulum. Planning/animating Ball with Tail.’ [Recorded Lecture]. PU002332: 3D Computer Animation Fundamentals. University of the Arts London, London College of Communication. 11 October.)
For now, this assignment will be blocking only – fluidity of movement and spline will be added at a later stage. Settings: 100 Frames, 24fps, side view only. We are advised to push too far at first and then pull our animation back rather than starting with small movements and continuously adding to them bit by bit, this is often what makes animation more dynamic and interesting than real life.
Keep it Simple, Stupid.
In order to ‘block’ in the poses for this assignment, we had to set the Default in Tangent space to Linear, and the Default out Tangent to Stepped in the animation tab of the preferences window. This stops Maya from interpolating the in-between stages of our set keyframes, so instead of making the object float gradually between location changes, it will jump suddenly.
I posed the rig this way as the default starting position based on the video references of squirrels shown in the lecture (I also changed the root of the rigged model because I I like foxes).
This is what the keyframes looked like when blocked out – this was an interesting way to work and to see how cartoonish motion, more loosely based on reality is set out before being fully fleshed out and perfected. I like this way of working.
My fox-ball jumping. It’s obviously clunky and jumpy due to the way the movement was set out in the timeline, but I like the way this moves, at least at this early stage.