Monday, February 3rd

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

february!

10:05 Today’s Notes & Attendance

Welcome to Week 21 – make those folders

Three weeks to vacation – keep an eye on deadlines and try to work towards the break fully complete.

Cameras: Gabi and Elle – please return the cameras to the classroom

Food Drive – box is in the room, let’s add some food

10:10 Let’s Rig

Let’s tackle armatures and put together a basic rig. We’ll start with the character above which should be a simple character we can deform with an armature. This model is in the T-Pose position. This is a classic standard model pose. When modeling your own character, your standard starting point and vanilla pose should be the T-Pose position.

To make our work “workable” let’s practice as if Pixar execs were watching us work. We’ll use good naming practices and keep our collections clean. Using a special naming convention in Blender will allow us to use Symmetrize to quickly build out the entire rig.

We’ll add Inverse Kinematics to our model to improve our rig too.

Pose Mode is Blender’s special mode for animation. You can enable it by adding an armature. Pose Mode unlocks a host of tools for animation.

Weight Painting is used for rigging meshes, where the vertex groups are used to
define the relative bone influences on the mesh. When we turn on weight painting we can see the influence per bone and paint on or off influence

Forward Kinematics – is the concept of manipulating each bone individually
Inverse Kinematics – the last bone controls the ones above in hierarchy. We’ll tackle this part today. Setting up various controls and looking at how to use the controls to move and animate your project.

Let’s all start with the same file together. You can download it here

Things to remember:

Naming bones is important – for example (shoulder.L)
Bone Constraints limit what bones are influenced
IK bones are not going to be deforming bones
Alt + R will clear all rotations in pose mode
Alt + G will reset all locations of bones

Save your rig as TposePractice_Lastname

You do not need to turn in but you do need a properly executed rig!

10:50 Break

11:00 English with Mx. Yopp

11:50 – 12:25 Principle #2 Anticipation

Anticipation is the preparation for the main action. Remember our bird from last week. Just before the bird jumped, the bird squashed down and to build up energy.

Anticipation is the crouch before the big jump. You see this in video games all the time – just look for it. Squash, Stretch, rotate, twist are all forms of anticipation – and in the example above, it is rotation and deformation!

Principle #2 Anticipation

Objective: Understand and apply the Anticipation principle of animation using Blender.

Rendering and Exporting:

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

Ideas:

Using the rig we did this morning, have your character make a jump between two objects. Use the rig to assist you to showcase anticipation before the big jump!
Build out the rest of your scene – so there is some context… have fun, be creative

Assignment is due: Monday,February 10th

On February 10th we’ll look at your animation and evaluate considering factors such as timing, smoothness, and creativity
We’ll also provide constructive feedback to each other