Week 13 ex4

Exercise 4

1) Apart from their different sizes, it is obvious from Luxo Jr. that the big lamp is “older” and that the small lamp is “younger”. How is this communicated by the animation? Give at least THREE examples.

First example, when the ball rolled towards the big lamp. It doesn't seems to be excited. Where the younger lamp will hop around and chasing over it.

Second example, when the small lamp is chasing over the ball, the big lamp stay at its own position and look at the small lamp as it hop away. It did not follow and all this gave an impression to the audience that it belongs to the mature kind.

Thirdly, after the ball is being flattened, the small lamp look at the big lamp. The big lamp gave a reply by nodding his head, convincing the small lamp that the ball is flattened.

2) Give an example from Luxo Jr of how timing is used for comic effect. Explain how the timing decisions contribute to the humor.

At 0.58, the part where the small lamp jump on the ball and start bouncing on it. Out of a sudden, small lamp just stop his movement. This act make the audience anticipate about what is going to happen next. In a split second, the ball deflated.

3) When you create a joint chain, these form a hierarchy, with the first joint at the top and the last joint at the bottom. Explain why this is necessary for the joints to work properly.

When one wants to control the whole arm, he or she can just select the parent node and the child node will follow. Same goes for animation, if one were to animate the whole arm, be it retracting or turning, one can just select the parent node and shifting it to a desired position and then set key. It would be less hassle rather than selecting each and everything node.

Week13Lab

Week12

Finally Animation.....

Finally i get to try out some animations on maya. I find it very fun and challenging but i don't really like the part where i have to adjust the graphs and render settings, kinda confusing and hard to do.

Exercise 1-Bounce Ball

Exercise 2

1) Do you need to be able to draw well to create good 2D animation? Explain your view.
To me, one must be good at drawing if the person wants to create 2D animations, this is because the drawings are like the footages of an animation, it totally rely alot on it to produce good animations. It might not be hand-drawn, but sometimes may be created using graphical programs or edited.

2) Do you need to be able to draw well to create good 3D animation? Explain your view.

As for 3D, you need not be good in drawing as 3D objects can be create by using basic polygons and edited using vertices and other components.



3) What do you think would separate a piece of poor animation from a piece of good animation? In other words, how would you go about deciding if a piece of animation is good or bad?

A piece of bad animation is when the audience don't understand the story, doesn't look satisfying. And with all this weak point, it will sure affects the audience's impression on the animator.

A good piece of animation is when the whole animation look realistic. With good audio companion and animation principle added in it. A good story line plays a part too and that's when storyboarding comes in.

4) In 2D animation, you need to be very aware of timing at a frame by frame level, using timing charts and other techniques - but for 3D animation, this is handled using the graph editor, which is more concerned with manipulating rates of change over time.

Does this affect how you approach your animation work? Explain.

Personally, i felt that it's different. In 3D, yes we can adjust the speed of the whole animation by the frame. Using graph editor to edit the the flow of animation, but we still got other components we have to consider, like the camera angle, lightings, different views. But for 2D, we don't have to worry about that, it's all 2 dimensional based, very straight forward.

5) Give a brief critique of Maya as an animation tool. Don't just say Maya makes animation difficult, or easy, or that you need to learn a lot of stuff to use Maya - explain what Maya does well and not so well in terms of creating animation.

I Previously used Maya to model object, didn't get to use the animation part. My first assignment for using Maya to do animation is to create an animation of a ball bouncing over a fence. It was easy but kinda confusing. It was adding in squash and stretch. Here comes the tedious part, to get the flow of the whole animation of squash and stretch. 

To conclude it up, i felt that the placement of the animation tools is kind of messy. Instructions was not clear enough, too complicated. As a first timer, i find it rather confusing and hard to follow

Last Part of the Critique

Right now what is left is the texturing and some final adjustments.

Before Texturing

 After Textured

 Front

 Side

 Top

Problems faced when doing the texturing is the materials for the grip, i couldn't find a

suitable material for the rubber grip so i have no choice but to use normal black colour to replace it.

Other than that, overall is still ok.