Wednesday, February 5th

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

10:05 Today’s Notes & Attendance

Food Drive – raid the cabinet (but ask permission)

Call Backs:

VSAC Scholarships / Grants – Vermont Student Assistance Corporation has an extensive list of scholarships and grants that you should apply for. For example – most of your towns have a Rotary Club (Business Club) – they give out money to college bound seniors every year. (Each of my daughters won the Williston one a couple years ago). It’s free money, you just have to put in a little work with an application. Deadlines for the VSAC Scholarship Applications are February 12th.

CTE Open House is this Saturday from 9:30 – 1pm in the cafeteria for prospective students. Know any? Have them stop by and learn about CTE.

10:10 Rigging and Character Animation Continued…..

A quick review from yesterday…

Keyframing is a fundamental skill in animation. To make a sequence have motion, objects move through frames – 24 frames by traditional animation standards all the way up to 60 fps (frames per second) for multimedia presentations. Most modern animations are 60 FPS.

Points of action, rise, fall, speed, direction all happen between the keyframes. A keyframe is a location on a timeline which marks the beginning or end of a transition.

Walking: Yesterday we did a nice confident walk on the 3s. If you want to slow your character down, consider changing to 4s or 6s. You might have to adjust your poses accordingly.

Running: animated on the 1s at 24 fps for a fast run cycle that cycled twice. If you want to slow your runner down, animated your keyframes on the 2’s and you will get one complete cycle (right and left)

Want to see the difference between 15fps and 60fps – Check this out

Let’s go for a run….

Just like the walk cycle we’ll start and end our animation with the contact pose.

We’ll only need six frames and we’ll animate on the 1’s! Our runner will be fast!

Moods Project – Due February 12th (next Wednesday)

Now that we’ve got a walk and run cycle in our Asset Browser, it’s time to add some other actions.

Pick Three

Mopey & Sad
Limp
Sneaky
Strut
Waddle
Prowl
Other

Set Up lighting, camera and some simple staging. Each pose should animate for 5 seconds.
Render to a final .mp4 for a total of 15 seconds.
Filename: Moods_Demonstration.mp4
Tip, save each as a new scene. Then use the video editor to pull your scenes together.
Due: Wednesday, February 12th.

10:50 Breaks

11:00 Cameras – Multiple Cameras / Camera Rigs and Markers with Cameras

The Camera after-all is the viewport to any model, render and animation you create. Over the next couple of weeks, we wil explore more features of the camera and many of the settings you can configure.

One skill set you should really have is setting up a basic camera rig. Here is a basic and versatile way to set up a camera rig for tracking shots in Blender. We will be using an empty and parenting the camera to an empty and then having that empty follow a path using object constraints.

We’ll Need:

Path (we can use a circle)
Mesh (we can use a cube or Suzanne or anything really)
Camera
Empty

For our second camera activity let’s consider how we might handle multiple cameras. You could set up 2, 3 or 4 cameras and render each animation from each camera, or you can step up your camera game and use the Bind to Camera by creating Markers in your timeline. The keystroke you’ll need to remember is CTRL+B. We’ll tackle this together with some simple animations.