A Lion's Silhouette

I have attempted to give the lion a cut-out appearance in order to become suitable for our title sequence's art style. I decided to test the image against multiple backgrounds including white, tea-stained paper and a terracotta-like gradient. 

I have been working hard to animate the lion in Adobe Flash. He is required to roar whilst his mane blows in the wind. This has proven to be difficult thus far, but I shall persevere over the next few days.

Title Sequence: Animation Test

Although small tweaks are constantly being made to the order and timing of our animatic, it currently does not include any animation. 

The above animation test is just a small segment of our animatic, but will hopefully be useful to us as the art style and music pull together. I shall continue to experiment with animation techniques in Adobe Flash over the upcoming weeks.

Skipping in Celaction

For our motion studies module we were introduced to Celaction to use as an alternative to Adobe Flash. A coloured jpeg drawing of Remy was put into Photoshop so that his body could be broken down into layers, which were each named accordingly.

Elements of the body taken apart in Photoshop.

This Photoshop file could then be imported to the pool in Celaction so that a hierarchy could be created to link the joints, which were then anchored to move at their appropriate pivot points. As inverse kinematics don't work well in 2D animation, the root was based in the character's pelvis. These layers were also maneuvered in the Actor Display menu to ensure parts of the body were not hidden.

The components ordered in an accurate hierarchy.

Two different shapes have been used for the eyes, which can be easily flicked between when necessary. However, the pupils need to be invisible whilst the blink shape is selected.

The two eye shapes: open and blinking.

When imported, Remy was much larger that the designated stage, so the camera size was increased. The required key poses and breakdowns were positioned in the dope sheet and an ease in/out algoraithm inserted the inbetween frames.

Although it seems much quicker to animate in Celaction, the animation looks a lot stiffer than drawing frame-by-frame in Flash.

Moving Forward

Walk cycles look fairly complex to draw, so I decided to keep the character's design very simple. Although the drawing itself is very rough, the animation is looped on threes and works well, but it's easy to notice that the shoulder movement is very sharp.

How to do the juggles, man?

First things first; I can't juggle, so this task sounded extremely difficult. I found that the use of layers was especially helpful in this task to ensure that each ball landed in the hands at the desired timing. In the first attempt the ball wobbles midway through its cycle, which ruined its flowing arc of movement. However, when looping the animation the cycle works successfully.

In my second attempt I fixed the wobbling motion, although this also required all of the balls on each layer to be adjusted. 

Rock Lift

The objective was to animate a character lifting and dropping and dropping a heavy object. I decided to keep the character design fairly simple in this animation, so I could focus on his movement as opposed to maintaining the volume of small, artistic details. I feel that the animation works, although he could perhaps spend a few more frames struggling to hold up the rock before dropping it.

Bouncing with Squirrels

In this animation, the jelly bean-like shape is supposed to jump with arcs similar to the bouncing ball task, although this time a tail should follow through. I found this to be the most difficult task so far. I especially struggled with making the tail move naturally as opposed to looking stiff and robotic.

Tweening: Hand Turning

We were given the first and last frames of this animation and instructed to draw the relevant tweens using a light box. 

After combining the frames using Dragonframe, I found that the animation does not run as smoothly as it could. I much prefer animating in Adobe Flash as the frames can be played instantly, meaning that changes to the animation can be made sooner.

Squash and Stretch

The twelve principles of animation are essential techniques for animating in both 2D and 3D. The first principle, squash and stretch, involves the exaggeration of a character's body to create the illusion of weight and volume as it moves. Squash generally shows force, impact or anticipation, whilst stretch indicates acceleration or velocity.

To demonstrate, I was set the task of animating a bouncing ball. This required each frame to be individually drawn using a light box and animation pegs to assure that the animation flowed.

Throughout this process it was important to consider not only the volume of my ball, but that each drawing followed an arced motion path. It was somewhat difficult to judge the distance between each drawing as the velocity increased and decreased, however I upon watching the final video I feel that this is not too much of an issue.

I also attempted this exercise in Autodesk Maya using a polygon sphere with a rig that allowed the ball to move, squash and stretch.

I found this method to be much easier and quicker as the rig controlled the volume of the ball when squashing and stretching. The software also created the in-between frames, meaning that I avoided the earlier issue of judging distance. 

I also used Maya to complete a similar exercise where the ball needed to accelerate before coming to a sudden halt. This time the character has a tail, which follows through as the ball stops. This task was the easiest of the three, which is most probably due to the linear motion path. 

To further experiment with the principle of squash and stretch, I will later animate the same character to maneuver between various obstacles.