Final Animation

Below are three videos of my final 100m sprint off the blocks animation from 3 different angles three quatre view, side view, front view. I found the run animation particularly hard as I had minimal reference material and a friend James recently withdrew from the course who was in my group for a group project which means myself and my two other team mates had to pull his weight in the final few weeks and he was also my lift (ride) to university which didn't let me fully focus on my final projects. Overall I am not happy with my animation I should of done a lot better, as I made a fair few mistakes which if I had more time to focus on this module I could of tweaked and ironed them out.

Also I didn't animate Max on the spot which I think I should of done which led to a few mistakes because if I had animated him on the spot I would of probably spoted my mistakes more easily and fixed them. but if i was to redo this project i would definatly not choose a 100m sprint as I feel like there is too much going on too fast for me.

Tangents and Dope Sheet was really helpful in the final project tangents allowed me to try and smooth out the animation as it was really bad at first but i was mainly using the dope sheet to move keys around and speed up timing etc... I really liked the dope sheet.

Run Animation Three Quatre View

Run Animation Side View

Run Animation Front View

Trying to find refence material for olympic sprinting is hard as they are so fast so a lot of the so called refence material on the 100m sprint is just too far away or blurry which does not allow you to use it as a refence as you cannot see whats going on. but putting videos to one side there is hardly any good image sequences either and so I decided to create my own reference material but I came across a few problems one im not a trained runner two I was quickly running out of time.

Reference Material

How To Sprint Pt 1

Usain Bolt - 6 World Records

Slow Motion Block Start

Improve Sprint Start Technique

While doing my final animation I tried out norman and i found that i like normans model a lot better than Max's but but the Max rig is easier to use and less tedious for me personally.

Golf Swing Research

After collecting some reference material I tried to quickly create one myself combing the refence material I found on the internet.

Below I collected  an image off of google along with a few others I have on my harddrive I collected this gold sequence as i thought it would be usful for a task we had to carry out.

Poses

In the image below I tried out a series of poses relating to different emotions, from left to right the emotions are angry, depressed, show off, happy, shocked, scared, then I added silhouettes underneith to see whether you could tell what emotion it is without facial expression etc... which I think you can (mostly). Some of my poses are not as strong as I would like them to be but I think this is also because i put them all together in one render and I didnt want to change the angle on them that much as I wanted a head on shot to get the facial expressions in there.

Jump Animation

When trying the jump animation I looked for a few references on google but there was not much good material I eventually found some material which helped me create my jump animation how ever I can clearly see a few mistakes I made as in the animation I didnt exaggerate the poses enough for example when he's in mid air his legs do not come high enough (does not create a crouching pose in mid air) among other things which I think gives the impression of less momentum also I things like this and other little tweaks make my animation look a little stiff.

Jump Reference 1

Dope Sheet

After being introduced to the Dope Sheet I found it usful in some ways like checking if I had blocked everything out and moving keys how ever at this time it was not a big help to me as I didnt fully understand what to do with the dope sheet so I only used it when it was necessary, so at the moment i still prefer to use the timeline at the bottom of Maya and the tangents.

Walk Animation

While looking on UDO I found the walk animation task, which my group missed due to having no lecturer, so after finding the animation task I attempted to create a walk animation only animating the legs I found this ok bouncing a ball is much easier, I kept the walk cycle on one spot and did not go to into it as when I tried to animate his arms and walk around rather than staying on one spot I failed terribly arms kept twisting and flipping, one second he was moving fine then it seemed like he was going fast, i managed to alter / fix some of the problems but i decided to upload an earlier version below.

Also I didnt find tangents too useful here probably because I didnt fully understand what I was doing.

TangentTest_01

After the previous week of trying to bounce a tennis ball and phil mentioning tangent while he was walking round the class, Sam introduced tangents the following week going over it more thoroughly. Below is an image of two bounces one using keys and the other using tangents, I tried to make the bounces similar however for bouncing a ball i prefer using tangents over additional keys it makes the movement look smoother and not only that personally for me changing the tangent on a simple object like a ball was quicker than adding more keys.

Tennis Ball Test

After collecting some of my own refence material and searching though youtube for additional reference material I tried to replicate a bouncing tennis ball (bouncing on one spot) as best I could in Maya, while doing this phil cam round and told me about tangents which helped a fair bit allowing me to create a bouncing tennis ball more realisticly and giving an overall more realistic feel and allowing me to have more control over the speed and bounce.

Bouncing Balls (research)

To start of in small groups I did some tests by bouncing balls dropping them on the ground using different force's and different types of balls. I did this so I would have some reference material for future tasks especially ones in this module. While watching my reference material I noticed that the time off the ground, bounce height and number of bounces changes between different amounts of force and types of balls.