Monday, February 10th

Class hours: 10:05 – 2:45
Mr. Bohmann | wbohmann@ewsd.org

10:05 Today’s Notes & Attendance

Welcome to Week 22!

Two Weeks to vacation – what vacation? Winter vacation – February

NTHS – Meeting at 10:30am for newbies – Phoenix

Fire drill today at 2pm.

10:10 Monday Mail

10:15 Rigging – Round Three

Three’s a charm. The most important parts of rigging are:

Naming your bones (shoulder.L for example)
Adding IK controls to wrist and ankle
Adding IK Poles – elbows and knees
IK controls and bones do not deform and have no parents
Keep an eye on the geometry as you add your bones

The model we’ll be rigging today will be the humanbase.blend file found in the models folder. Make a copy for your desktop, then let’s rig.

10:50 Break

11:00 English with Mx. Yopp

11:50 – 12:25 Animation Principle #3 – Staging

The third principle of animation is Staging. Staging is the process of setting up a scene by carefully placing characters, objects, and the background elements within the camera frame to direct the viewer’s attention help explain the story’s mood, action, and character reactions through their positioning, poses, and camera angles. We practiced this concept when we created our bird swing (in a tree) and later on a playground.

When we were working with video this past Fall, staging was introduced as a form of visual literacy. Staging can also include props, etc… what we’ve referred to as Mise en Scene. Take a look at my character below – Sammy Swiss is on a Moon made of cheese.

Project – Principle #3 Staging

Objective: Understand and apply staging to a project to help convey your animation

Rendering and Exporting:

Render the animation as a video file (e.g., MP4). Use EEVEE
Duration: 5 seconds (24 frames per second)
Filename: staging_Lastname.mp4

Model:

Use the model that we rigged this morning for this week’s exercise

Assignment is due: Monday,February 17th

On February 17th we’ll look at your animation and evaluate.
We’ll also provide constructive feedback to each other

Once again – Your task is to “jump” your character. You can set up your mise en scene that befits your character. Don’t forget the value of lighting and cameras as those are also an essential part of the staging principle. With multiple cameras you can set up an establishing shot to set the scene, showcase your characters emotions with close up shots…. and so on.

For this assignment, your character must jump from one space to another. This is a good exercise to showcase weight, overlapping action (drag) squash and stretch and anticipation. During the jump, we want to be able to see the character and the key poses.

Last week you were focused on anticipation (Pose #2) in the jump. Let’s hit the rest of them too.

Blocking – is the concept of laying out the main extreme keyframes.

With a jump animation, there are 5 jump poses:
Anticipation, Jump, Mid Air, Fall and Recovery. On either end you will find a neutral pose.

Getting Started – Set the Extreme Poses

The first step is to block our your main poses. Starting with the neutral pose for you character. I’d suggest you save this pose in your pose library, along with your other poses.
Create neutral pose on Frame 1.
Move your timeline to Frame 9/10 and set up the Anticipation pose.
Set up all the other main poses every ten frames. ProTip, it’s a good idea to adjust your timing between poses after you have everything laid out. More time is generally given to anticipation and recovery poses while the jump and fall animations may be faster.
You then can go back and adjust the in betweens/breakdowns

Squash & Stretch, Anticipation, Overlapping Action (drag) all make for more fun and enjoyable animations to watch.

Think about your render settings, camera angles carefully.