jump

Jumping

When jumping the human body appears to throw itself forward in order to push all of it weight to move the body in that direction  

faces

Facial expression  

Anger

When someone is experiencing anger they tend to clench they teeth and tense there jaw causing the muscles to tighten create a strain look around their mouth. Another tendency people have when their angry is their eyebrows lower and they squint their eyes; this is shown on the images. When people are anger a common thing is to raise their mouth exposing their lips.      

 The Image below me is a face of the humanoid called “Max for~ Maya” I have altered his facial expression in order to make him appear anger, by following what I have learned from my images. 

Happiness 

When a person is happy their always tend to smile (which actually is a learn response not a natural one). They also raise their eyebrows high up. Sometimes they show teeth or not, tend also tend to squint their eye slightly.

Here on “Max for Maya” I have changed him in order to make him look happy by playing with his eyes, eyebrows and jaw. The jaw is a bit overdone but that was to make it clear he was happy.  

Sadness

When someone is sad their face ends up dropping and hanging low in the opposite way to what a happy expression does. Their jaw drop down and their close their mouths this is known as frowning. Their eyebrow also down and hang low above their eyes.

Here is “Max for Maya” having been altered by me in order to appear sad.

Confusion

Confusion your eyebrows tend to hang down and your eyes squint.

This image the eyebrow and and mouth have been overdone to appear as if he is dumbfounded

Tired

When  tired  your eyes lids lay low because of the need to sleep and your face also seems to drop

Max here appears to be yawning to show he’s  tried.

Walk cycle

Creating a walk cycle 

In this section I am going to look at making a walk cycle.Walk cycle are very complicated because you are not always aware how many of your body parts are moving for example your arms and head are moving as well as your legs. 

By using the reference image above I am going to create a walk cycle frame by frame. 

Here is the first walk cycle I made:

Here is the second:

Learning out 

I learn that the body moves in many ways and that when using "Max for Maya" by changing one frame you can affect the whole animation making it go wrong. I plan to use what I have learn to help animated my characters later on in the course I'm doing. I learned it is better to use a photo reference than a drawing one, due to drawing ones being over exaggerated and photo ones from videos are always right.   

How to created a bouncing ball animation

In this section I am going to talk about animation with bouncing balls, every different type of ball has a different way of bouncing due to their weight, size and what material they are made of. I am going to start with a tennis ball.

Step 1: open “Maya 2012” production by “Autodesk”

Step 2:  open “YouTube” and type reference tennis ball animation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl-h-2LA3KA&feature=related this is so we get a basic Idea on the way it bouncing

Step 3: create a sphere and plane in “Maya 2012” using create surface tool

   

Step 4: click on box located next to the key, it is called animation preferences open it up.   Change the playback speed to real time, which is 24 frames a seconds (the more frames there are the smother the animation looks)

Step 5:  click on the first frame and then click on animation and set key frame. We do to create the first scene

   

Step 6: go to frame 7 and move the ball diagonally down and place it just above the plane but not on top of it, set a key frame. 

The frames before 7 will now be filled in with the ball in a different place thus creating the animation.

 Step 7: Go the frame 8 and continue to move the ball down so it touches the place and then squash it make it flatter and wider. This is because tennis balls are soft.

Step 8: Copy frame 7 and paste it into frame 9, after move the ball straight forward, the reason for frame 7 and 9 is so the ball doesn’t change before it hits the ground.  

Step 9: go to frame 14 and move the ball diagonally higher as show below. The reason for this is the ball loses power after each bounce. After this go to frame 17 and repeat what you did with frames 7, 8 and 9. Repeat the whole process until frame 26 when the bouncing has ended. Remember as the bounce gets lower the ball gets to the ground faster (note you may have to create more frames into order to make slight correction as the animation may go wrong. 

Your animation should look like this

Now I am going to create another bouncing ball, but instead of a tennis ball I will use a bowling ball.

Step 1: start like you did with the tennis ball but look at a bowling ball video instead http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eejc0p7nCM you can see that because of the size and material of a bowling ball, it is a lot heavy and doesn’t bounce as much, also it doesn’t squash because they made of a combination of plastic, reactive resin and urethane.

Step 2:  For this animation set the frame range to 70, on frame 1 place the sphere in the middle of the plane and create a key frame.

Step 3: go to frame 15 and place the ball just on top of the plane, and set a key frame because of the materials there is no squash.  

Step 4: go onto frame 22 and place the ball above the plane as shown below and set a key frame

Step 5: go to frame 35 and place the ball on top of the place and set a key frame, (notice how the frame distance get smaller)

Step 6: go to frame 40 and place the ball as shown below and set a key frame.

Step 7: go to frame 49 and place the ball on top of the plane and set a key frame.

Step 8: got to frame 70 and set a key frame and the animation is finished

It should look like this

Note you can correct your animation if it looks like it hovers a bit, going back onto graph editor (located in Window-animation editor) and modifying the lines in the different axis tabs.  

Learning out come

By doing this, I have learned that animation isn’t as easy as it looks, as I struggle making a ball bouncing animation which I imagined would be one of the basics. When I started the tennis ball animation I didn’t include a squash, so the animation didn’t look like a bouncing tennis ball, but looked like it was being controled after I put the squash in, because I didn’t include the key frames beside it, the ball ended up looking completely different at the end. I found the blowing ball animation a lot easier though as it wasn’t as complicated because it didn’t bounce a lot and it didn’t squash.