Today I had my first workshop of animation with Susannah Shaw and Campbell McAllister. They are here to teach us how to animate for 5 days (21st - 25th November).
We kick started the day at 10 AM in the student center room, where we were given a small introduction of their careers and what they both have worked on, there after we teamed up with a few people and performed a practical exercise. This involved following walking around in single file and attempting to copy the movement and walk cycle of the person in front, the aim of this exercise was to make ourselves aware of natural body movement and feel the motions, so this experience is transferable to the computer.
Then a few of us male and female, volunteered to walk in a straight line a few times and the rest of the class video recorded this for animation reference and compare the walk cycles between male and female and how they all differ.
After this we where then sent away to walk around uni and video record other people in their natural walking 'ways' ALSO making sure they are not aware of you and within reason of not looking like a weirdo at the same time. It wasn't so bad as I was in a group with 4 other people doing the same thing!
We then used our reference footage that we shot and went to the labs and began to animate a simple walk cycle in Maya with a fully rigged model that Campbell had kindly made for us. For the last 2 hours of the workshop and ending the day at 6PM.
During my first day of animation workshops i enjoyed the experiencing the process that Susannah and Campbell take to animate and their technique of getting into the feel of the motion that they intend to animate, for example the exercise i have mentioned above. In my opinion the exercise was something different and also its harder than it seems to actually copy the walk of the person in front...it really gets you thinking how another person moves in their natural ways is different to every other person. It enjoyable at the same time as well as valuable knowledge in a different was of thinking when you animate. The video referencing was another way of analysing people walk and this way is quicker to gather large amounts of information, when i was recording around uni one thing i would have done to help get more precise information would be to set up another video camera and position that in the z axis of the people walking and the other camera would be pointing on the x axis so i get a front and side view to see how the hips, legs, shoulders, and arms move.
When i came to animating a chosen walk that i had recorded, to begin with i found it hard as i couldn't get into the mind set of animating in steps. I made my first cycle but then it decided play up when i was adjusting the keys and the timing...so i thought it would be best to restart it. This happened 3 more times but every version i did i was getting more familiar and faster keying the frames, by my 4th attempt i was satisfied with the foundation of the walk cycle. I feel that restarting the animation several times helped me learn in small steps that i could build on in the next version across the whole process of animating.
Clearly from my 3 failed attempts of animating a walk cycle animating is not my strongest point neither an area i would develop or have a major interest in. It would longer than the average animator for me to get something looking decent and believable...
