Thursday, April 4, 2013

Project 1: Bounce Loops... plus the work of Jen Harlow and David O'Reilly!

Hey good people. We're back to the olde-fashioned blogue format. It's 2005 all over again!

Beware the Bear Owl...

But seriously, folks, thanks so much to Jennifer Harlow for her spectacular behind-the-scenes look at the life of a feature film animator. Keep track of Jen's current world at:
http://sketchyobservations.blogspot.com/

and re-live Jen's Cal Arts years at:
http://artofjen.blogspot.com/
Needless to say, there are tons of great resources, insights, and the like to be found therein. Also, make sure to check out The Croods and continually elbow your friend sitting next to you while pointing to the screen and saying, "I know who did that!"


On Tuesday, we looked at The External World by David O'Reilly. Check out his work early and often. His blog has still more fantastic things to see and ponder as animator types. He's making some great work, just wrote/directed his first episode of Adventure Time and... yes, put all of his rigs from The External World up for free on his blog. Git 'em while they're hot. As always, if you use them, include this fact in the credits of what you do!

Okay, here's PROJECT ONE: Create two loops of a bouncing ball.
  • Create Loop One using a basic Maya primitive sphere.
  • Create Loop Two using the Ball Rig.
  • To learn: Timeline, Graph Editor, Timing, Spacing/Easing, Squash and Stretch, loop/cycles.
  • Oh yes... change your Menu set to Animation via the pull-down menu in the top left corner of the Maya interface:

Here are the infamous Miles Maya intro videos that show you how to do the do. Work through these before Tuesday, and we'll pack our rags and go from there...

Loop One videos:
Loop Two videos:

And finally! Don't forget to get set up with yer free Maya download on your home computer. Since we are still using 2012 in the lab, you might want to install 2012 on yours as well. And better yet, don't forget to send me an email about being a volunteer lab aid, because you know you want to do it. And it will be awesome. Cheerio...

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